I have only had a computer 10 years and have been making a full time living for 5 of those years. I have looked at a million and one sales letters, seen more “the death of….” than I care to remember and have become more than a little cynical in that time.

I do not get inspired when I see a post or sales letter about how someone did $100k in 3 hours after buying a product at 2am.. You know what does inspire me..

Heather, George and Jamie

Chances are you wouldnt know them if you fell over them but the fact of it is they inspire me. Not because they make millions (they don’t), but because they are doing it!

They are working every day towards making more money online than they did yesterday. Not a thousand dollars in 3 minutes, but just any sort of increase. They are all people I know from the Wordpress Goldmine Forum and they inspire me.

I know that it may sound silly to be inspired by people who aren’t making “real” money yet. But I find the people who understand there is no such thing as overnight riches, no quick fix, no instant income inspiring.

Because they are dealing with reality and the reality of making money online is that it is hard work. It is a marathon not a sprint, it can be boring, lonely, frustrating and really really annoying!

It is hard to stick to a plan, there are new shiny things coming through your email box every day. Most of the sales letters promise instant riches, none of them talk about the grind. There is a good reason why they don’t ever tell you the truth, which we will discuss at a later date..

So todays Friday Thought is -Stick to the plan, even when it is boring, tedious and driving you nuts.

Once you have some income in place then feel free to diversify but until then pick a plan and stick to it.

We are in a recession/depression/deep crap (depending on which TV station you watch) and far too many people really need to make some cash to pay the bills.

Let me tell you about the worst performing site I ever built, I know most people tell you about the stuff that makes them money but I want to be a bit different and tell you about a flop so you don’t repeat it.

The niche was great, there was plenty of money being spent on ads for adsense, there was a product or two on Amazon that I could sell and yet the site made me $0

Why did it fail?

One simple reason

I never built it..

• I found a domain name, but didn’t buy it there and then.
• I thought that the niche was competitive, so surely little old me couldn’t really get anywhere in it.
• I went to a forum and asked “what do you think?”
• I thought about it overnight

These four things are the kiss of death!

One of the few things I can guarantee online is that if you don’t build a site it will NEVER earn you any money. I produce products and while I want a higher CTR, I am happy that I am selling. If I wait till I have the sales letter perfect it will never get done.

I see it all too often, “I was going to build a site but…”

If you don’t build it you will never know how it will perform.

The great enemies of newbies (and not so newbies)

• Procrastination -find a niche-buy the domain-build it. Don’t spend hours or days trying to decide.
• Over Analyze – Don’t spend days collecting the same info from different places just to try and prove to yourself a niche is a good/bad idea
• Over reach – You need to walk before you run, your first site is not going to make a million. Aim for some adsense income to start with and expand from there.
• Continual Education-Don’t try and learn everything there is to know in the first week. Learn what you need to know then take action
• Forums – Some (not all) forums are like pits of despair, there is always some trog who will kick you when you are down. Find a good one and go there to learn, but ignore any trogs.

I am sure there are more things I could list but these are the ones that come to mind.

I hope my first Friday Thought post helps some of you see that you can make it if you use your time well. I am no smarter than 99% of you and I have no magic skills, If I can do it so can you.

Do or Do Not There Is No Try (name that film)

I have just had an email from them about an update and I think this is quite an interesting one. I understand not everyone wanted to dip straight in and pay out a couple of hundred bucks for the lifetime membership. They are now offering memberships for $29 a month (currently).

The price goes up the more who join, but even if you arent sure about paying a fee I would say you should join at the silver level which is free.

Here is a copy of their email and my thoughts are below that..

——————————————————————————

For Gold Members

From now on, if you set up more than 20 websites with article directory, your Postonly Limit will be exempted. This means if you maintain at least 20 Standard Domains (domains with article directory) in your account, you can add your other domains as either a Standard Domain or Postonly Domain, with no restriction.

For those of you who are thinking of using the system to provide link building services for your clients, this change will be a great news to you!

For details, login to your account and click the ? icon next to the Postonly Domain stats.

For Silver Members

From now on, you are entitled to Postonly Domain too! This means you too can set up domains for posting articles only, without the need to add an article directory to it.

To add a Postonly Domain, you’ll have to add 1 Standard Domain to the system first, i.e. set up an article directory in that domain. When the domain is approved, you will get one Postonly credit.

Every domain you set up with article directory will earn you 1 Postonly Domain credit. You can keep the credit for future use or use it for your next domain.

———————————————————–

I think these changes are pretty smart and are great for all levels of member.

Business idea waiting to be made!

Gold members
Buy a baby account at hostgator

Buy 20 .info domains ($3 each or less)

Join Now for $29 a month (I think the next level is $35 a month)

You add them into the system and then you have unlimited post only domains. That means for $60 one off (or less) $9.95 a month for the hosting, and your membership you can promote as many of your other sites as you want..

Or someone elses sites–

Charge the local florists $50/$100/$150 a month to do some seo magic for them.
Offer to promote other Im’ers sites for them, we all love article networks (UAW is one of my favorites) and anyone who has been around knows they work. Everyone loves a service, most of us are too busy (or too lazy) to do this stuff ourselves.

Offer it as a one off or a monthly arrangement, do a WSO, get some affiliates, rule the world..

You still own those 20 sites, you still get the adsense income (or cpa or affiliate income) and you can always sell them on if you want to.

Silver Members

You can now have sites that are promote only, bargain!

If you want to you can get some new domains and add them to the system then use the postonly credits to promote your money sites.

I really don’t see how we can lose with this system, subject to 2 things

1-You Join

2-You use it

As with many things it is a case of making it a habit, and spending some time getting to know their system will help.

You could of course outsource it all and they have that option built into their system as well.

While I don’t know the guy who is setting this up I think he has done it very well from what I can tell and I expect it will be around for a long while.

Paul Forcey

While I am working on new plugins and am working on ideas to revamp old ones it can be easy to make videos going in depth into things without ever covering the basics.

So here is a 2 minute video showing how to upload a plugin using Wordpress own built in zip uploader.

I do mention in the video that if you get a “invalid header” error when uploading a plugin or theme, it means there is something else inside the zip.

So instead of zipping up the folder which contains the plugin they have put that folder into another folder and then added a manual. This is the way it was usually done before Wordpress made this update. It allowed us to keep everything nice and neat so you could find the plugin and the manual all in one place.

If you get that error, dont panic, just unzip the plugin/theme  and either use filezilla (or your favorite ftp program) or just create a new zip that only has the plugin/theme folder rather than all the other bits and pieces.

ezArticle Links

It is a service that isn’t even fully launched yet, the official launch date is the 22nd of Feb, but you can get in early. I think I had 94 people sign up for the free version and a few signed up for the paid version (thanks) over the last few days.

I also had some questions sent to me, enough people were asking the same questions that I decided to do a very quick and very rough video to try and answer the questions.

I hope the video answers some (maybe all) your questions and remember that the JV invite finishes today at midnight (17th Feb) but you will still be able to join. The information in it is from the best of my knowledge, any inconsistencies or stuff that I misspoke is due to me being a dingbat and no other reason.

http://www.thenewbiehelper.com/eza

If you join today or you are already a member be sure to put your aff link in forum signatures, or maybe tweet about it. The more people sign up under you the better and it is a 2 layer thingy so if you get lucky and sign up someone who then signs up a gazillion others you gain.

As with all things though, it will only help if you USE IT!

As always if you have any questions or comments let me know using the comments.

Search engine spiders visit your sites and send back the info they find to headquarters where it is used to compile the index that is used to display pages when any anyone types in a query.

As a general rule it is accepted that having search engine spiders visiting you site a lot is a good thing. The more often they come round the more likely it is that your site will be displayed in the search results.

There has been talk around whether high spider activity will result in a higher PR in the next update, or whether it means a higher placing in the search engines. I can’t promise either but I do know that when I send out a flurry of new articles or links I see increased spider activity and that is a good thing.

If the spiders aren’t coming to your pages then they can’t find the links in the content and they can’t list pages they don’t know about.

Get The Plugin I Mention From Here
Indexing Tool – Coming Soon

What is Google Alerts?

Came the response..When you are talking to people about wordpress, social bookmarking, article marketing or Internet Marketing in general it is easy to assume they know the basics of what you are talking about.

So rather than trying to explain, I did a video which is below.. I use Google alerts for keeping track of my author names and my own name. I also use it for being alerted to any new sites/posts that Google considers to be relevant to the keywords I am targeting.

In the video I also mention using igoogle, that is just a home page you set up. So when I start up firefox in the morning I see a list of all my sites, my helpdesk url, my software and anything else I want to remember. I also have customer sites that I am doing stuff for in a separate list

The last thing I mention is google reader – this is a place you can add the rss feeds from sites you follow. It is a quick way to catch up on your fave sites. I explain why I add my sites to my rss reader in the video..

While I have your attention and before you look at the video, here is a new tool I am releasing - LSI Content Creator – I have been using it myself for a while now and so far everyone who has it really likes it.

As always feel free to leave a comment below

View the video in a bigger size

Let me explain, you produce articles to get links and traffic. What if the article doesn’t get indexed by Google? Then you don’t really get as much value from the article ,the link in it, as you should be. Sure you will still get traffic and I have sites that earn money every month even though they are nowhere near the top 50 for their keywords.

But getting the maximum leverage you can from every article you have out there makes sense doesn’t it?

I had a reasonably in depth conversation with a mate of mine about this idea the other day, which I will try and paraphrase here.

Say you want to get your site 10 extra links isn’t it easier to find 10 articles you have out there which aren’t indexed and get them indexed rather than producing 10 new articles?

Sure if you only have one or two articles out there it’s not a problem but if you have various pen names on ezine articles with 50+ articles in each then it can become a bit more of a pain. Checking the articles for indexing is one of those jobs that you mean to do but you know it will take ages so you never get it done.

It is all about maximizing the value you get from the time you took to write the article or the money you spent for someone else to write it for you.

I felt that this was so important that I was going to get a tool made to go find the non indexed articles and someone beat me to it so rather than reinvent the wheel I thought I would let you know about his tool.

Until I know which ones are indexed there is nothing I can do about it, so step one is finding the unindexed pages!

I do not know the guy who made this tool, I actually spent my own money on this tool and I am using it to improve my business.I do feel it is good enough and important enough that I am promoting it to you. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t recommend things easily.

If you would rather go straight to the page then here is the link. Oh and yes that is an affiliate link! But you can watch a video of it in action here and I throw out a few idea on things to do to fix the problems with your articles.

View the video in a larger size

Buy The Index Checker (yes this is an aff link)

Make A RSS Feed Tool

Crawlrate Plugin

Rssbot

I think I have covered everything in the video but as always please do feel free to post a comment. I hope you find this little tool as useful as I do and use it to help power up those links.

Building more links is great but make sure that they are getting noticed!

A 404 error is what happens when someone comes to a page that isn’t there, maybe you renamed the page, maybe you deleted it, maybe when you were building links to your site you made a spelling mistake and the link goes to a page that isn’t there.

Don’t sit there shaking your head saying it can’t happen to you, I have seen more sites than you would ever believe that have 404 errors being returned. 404’s are bad as it is a waste of traffic, if people don’t find the page they want and are just taken to a blank page (the usual scenario) they can’t buy anything from you!

Luckily enough there are a couple of plugins available that make this all very easy. One will email you everytime there is a 404 problem on your site and the other allows you to do the redirect.

I have done a short video showing you just how easy they are to use and below the video I have put the links to the 2 plugins I use. I am sure there are others that do the same but these are the two I use.

Remember these two plugins are not mine so I can not offer support for them, I do use both of them though.

404 plugin

Redirect plugin

I hope you like the video, please do leave comments below so I can know someone other than my mum reads my stuff, Hi Mum!

Well search engines and site visitors are no different, they want to see a map on your site so they can get around it. Search engines in particular want to find all the little nooks and crannies that make up your site.

Sitemaps are often ignored or treated as the least important thing on the site and yet Google think they are reasonably important.

So who am I to argue with him?

Because I know that you are going to be wondering how to make the Google gods happy I decided to help you.

Wordpress Sitemap Plugin

You get sitemap plugins to cover both parts of the Google equation all in one package. Take a look at it and if you don’t already have it then look at my Wp Easy Ads plugin as well