The old ways of monetising blogs and websites have gone forever.  You can no longer hope to make money if your site has second class content and a set of Adsense ads.  Readers will just click off your page unless you give them a reason to stay.  But writing good content takes time, and one blog is very unlikely to make you enough money to live on. So, unless you can invent a 28 hour day, you need to find a smart way of producing content – and monetizing it – faster.

That was the dilemma that I have been facing, and as you can see I had not been finding time to write much new content on  this blog.  My other blogs were making more affiliate sales for a while, so I was concentrating a lot of effort on writing new articles for them.  This year I have resolved to update all my content regularly, and assess progress after three months.  I have other sites in addition to this one, for example I write articles about celebrities’ designer handbags, a subject which always seems to have plenty of fans.  I also have a site on finding a rescue dog, where I share the ups and downs of dog ownership.  One important element of success with websites is longevity, and I have been writing content for those sites over five years.  Now they have solid page rank and hopefully are no longer adversely affected by Google’s search engine updates.

Although I feel I know a fair amount about search engine optimisation, It is a time consuming process and sometimes you need to choose whether to spend hours at something which is not your main job, or look for a professional SEO consultancy to manage the process for you. These days, there are so many different and varied elements involved in getting your site to the first page of the search engine results. Take Pay Per Click – PPC – for example. Using the right keywords will make a big difference to the quality of your click throughs. Use the wrong ones and your budget could be exhausted in a couple of days without reaching your target market. I am sure that a lot of the companies in this field are using similar SEO Software to the type that I have used.  But the difference is, they are probably more experienced in its use and therefore able to interpret its results faster that I can.  They can also put them into practice more effectively, I suspect.  I have frequently sat in a bemused state before my screen, wondering about the significance of all the clever graphs and comparison that the software produces.  In the wrong hands, these tools can be timewaster, so you need to think about seeking professional help if you’re serious about making your site a success.

I know there are plenty of people around who would like to raise certain outstanding issues with Roger Hamilton.  Well, here is some good news – he is speaking at a conference in London on 6 September at the Connaught Rooms, 61-65 Great Queen Street London WC2B 5DA. Promising delegates a day where “you will find Out How to Make Your JOB Easier, Have People Working More Effective For You and Generate More Profit and Earn More Income for Yourself … In Absolutely Any Business or Role!” Not bad for a six-hour seminar which includes a leisurely sit-down lunch ….

And don’t worry if you are not in the UK – the event is going to be repeated in Cape Town on 12th September and Johannesburg on 15th September. For just £39 you can gain access to the great man, and for £139 you can even have lunch together! I received my invitation today, at a special ‘Earlybird price’. With just eight days to go, I think tickets have not proved very popular so far.

There are plenty of scams out there, promising to show you how to make money online, but this is not one of them. Blogging Espionage is a new system for generating an online income that has been developed by Rob Benwell – famous for his ‘Blogging to the Bank’ system. You could say that Blogging Espionage is the credit crunch version. Instead of Blogging to the Bank you will probably choose to blog to the vault and stash your earnings somewhere a little safer than a bank!

Rob is only selling 300 copies of his system, so that answers the sceptics’ questions.  Meaning that this system will not be duplicated so widely that it loses its value.  My opinion – it could work for you, maybe not to a dramatic extent but you will still be a more effective (higher earning) blogger.  Do not wait to long to find out more about Blogging Espionage, and rember you are  covered by a no-quibble money back guarantee.

What the f*** has happened with Adsense clicks over the past week?

I usually have no problem in generating enough clicks to make the minimum S100 income every month – usually by the middle of the month.  So far in December my Adsense earnings are less than one third of the amount for the same period in November. And, compared to last December, the rates are pitiful.  Page eCPM is down: the only thing that is not down is my site traffic, so that is not the reason for this massive fall.  At least I have other sources of income, and good job – if I was relying on Google for my Christmas spending money, it would be a bleak celebration around here.

I am not alone – this problem is affecting thousands of Adsense publishers, this thread on Webmaster World shows the misery is being shared around the world at present.

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One affiliate program that makes steady money is Amazon. If you thought Amazon was just a place to buy books and CDs, think again. You can serve up affiliate links to a massive range of products and your readers will be able to buy them at a better price than eBay. The links and widgets are not easy to build, but if you take some time to explore them and place them in the right web page they can really take off for you. I must say that i was not making enough use of Amazon until recently as I did not realise how many merchants were selling through them. If you search on some fairly basic household items you will find that Amazon links rank highly. But a lot of affiliates do not bother with Amazon because it pays a lower commission than other affiliate or CPA networks.

Your task then is to make your links effective enough so that they rank on the front page for your chosen search term. And that is a little trick which is the reaosn to continue using Amazon links. Suppose you have a product page comparing MPs players. Place your usual lick direct to the merchant pages and other price comparison affiliate programs, then add an Amazon link on the same page. It does not matter to you where the traffic comes from, as long as it comes to YOUR page. If the Amazon link brings the visitors, they can then look around at all the deals on your page and choose the one they like best. If you have done the work right, that is going to be the link that pays you the highest affiliate commission.

Are you struggling to write articles, even though every Internet Guru tells you they are an easy way to get traffic to your website, and make money online? Make no mistake, article writing is still an amazingly effective way to get highly targeted visitors to your website without paying for traffic. This week I came across a software package that can help you produce unlimited well written articles that you can publish on sites like eZine Articles. It uses brand new technology to help you create hundreds or even thousands of unique, readable articles from your single original article. It is so simple – just a few clicks of your mouse button and you will have new original material to submit to the top article directories on autopilot.

The authors of these two powerful software programs have spent almost $50,000 to develop them into state of the art article solutions and now the product can help you skyrocket your income by producing high quality articles and using  article marketing to generate online income. By using Mass Article Creator and Mass Article Submitter you need have no fears of duplicate content penalties, and your backlinks will increase exponentially. I have tried dozens of packages that promised to help me create new versions of my articles but the results were pathetic. I do not want articles submitted in my name that do not make sense and risk the Duplicate Content penalty. Rest assured, this Mass Article Package protects you from these dangers and allows you to use your imagination to ratchet up your online income. Buy the Mass Article Package today with a cast iron guarantee from Clickbank – the world’s leading software vendor. And the real bonus is that the price of this life changing package has been cut in half for a limited period. To find out more and get your personal Mass Control Article Package, just visit the website for more information.

When you set up an online business alone it is easy to forget that you need to get out into the offline world as well, if your business is going to succeed in the long term. Do not be deceived by early successes into thinking that promotion is not necessary. Almost every business on the planet needs to get involved in trade show dislays at some point in its life cycle.  Taking part in  exhibitions is a feat of logistics and planning, and if you get it right this can give your company a huge boost and gain valuable orders and kudos.  But what do you do if you are new to organising trade show displays? Go to the people who have done it before, of course.  Without the help of experienced contractors you could take your eye off the ball by spending every waking hour preparing for the big day.  Nobody says it is easy, but you would be well advised to go to a set of experts to book your exhibition space, design the look of the stand and make sure it comes together as you envisaged it.  All your telecoms and lighting need to be there on time, plus your stock and hospitality supplies.  Then you can dedicate your efforts to schmoozing the visitors and securing those valuable orders.

After hearing great things about ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Tools, I  signed up for an account of my own.

While using them I just kept thinking to myself how much other affiliate marketers could benefit from them. Whether you are looking for tools to help you build links and rank better in search engines or want to get more into advanced forms of making money on the internet through pay per click and affiliate marketing, ShoeMoney Tools has something for everyone. ShoeMoney Tools have become the industry must-have for internet marketers and this is a perfect chance for you to test them out.

ShoeMoney Tools normally cost $79 a month and that price can be a little intimidating to someone who just wants to test  it. So I reached out to Jeremy to see if there was a way I could get a special price for my readers.

I was able to negotiate a special rate of ONLY $3.95 for the first month! There is no long term commitment and you can cancel at anytime.

What’s the catch?  It’s only available to the first 50 people who sign up. You can try out Shoemoney’s Internet Marketing Tools for the special price of $3.95.

Good news for all affiliates who want to make money online with Clickbank.  The marketplace for electronic products, Clickbank, can make some serious affiliate earnings for you and now they have improved their services for publishers to make more money for you.  If you have not used Clickbank to make money from affiliate programs, you should check it out.  Clickbank is different from mainstream affiliate networks because it allows individual merchants to market their products through the website, and any affiliate member can promote those products and earn commissions of up to 75 per cent.  Products include ebooks and software and you put your personal Clickbank hoplink into the product page URL to earn your share.

But that system has been open to scammers who actually hijacked other people’s legitimate affiliate links to steal the commission.  Most publishers did their best to stop this by using TinyURL, but it is time consuming to convert every affiliate link individually.  There is an easy way to protect all your affiliate links with a clever software package and I advise anybody who want to keep their affiliate earnings to get this now.

Clickbank have taken a lot of steps to improve their affiliate links, by encrypting them all, automatically.  But other affiliate programs do not encrypt, so you still need an Affiliate Link Cloak to protect your online income. The other new product from Clickbank is the HopAd Builder, a fully customised text ad box to display on your website or blog.  By inserting keywords related to your website, you can create relevant text ads that have the potential to make much more than your latest pathetic Adsense earnings.

If the whole idea of affiliate marketing with Clickbank is new to you, you can get help from The Clickbank Code – this is a fantastic five hour video guide to some real top shelf affiliate techniques. Michael Jones, who devised the system, will hold your hands every step of the way and get you into profit.

And I mean big profits… Michael made $48,506.66 his first month using the system – And that was his first month in Clickbank!