Online Marketing Newsletter For June, 2007

In This Issue:
Is A Lack Of Action Killing Your Online Business
Guest Article; 10 Ways to Take Back Your Time
Free Online Marketing Resource

Take Action To Keep Your Business Growing

Many people get into online businesses because they want the freedom of working from home instead of the grind of working in an office. Plus no more commuting, no more boss to worry about, and no more deadlines. But having no boss or deadlines can actually be detrimental to you.

Because you have started up your own business you are now the boss. And the only way you can get anything accomplished is to set goals for yourself. And you need to set up a schedule and stick to it. If you don't schedule your time you will find you won't get anything accomplished.

You should set two types of goals, long term and short term. A long term goal could be something like I want to be making x bucks per month in y years. Short term goals could be, I want to sponsor x number of people in y number of weeks. Keep them realistic, but set the bar fairly high so you have something to strive for.

Equally important is setting your schedule. If you don't set a schedule and stick to it you will be hard pressed to make a success of any venture. It doesn't matter if you have one hour or ten per day to apply to your business, schedule it, and stick to it. And set tasks to accomplish each day. As in, I will post to forums from 9:00 till 9:30. From 9:30 to 10:30 write articles for my web site and article directories. 10:30 to 10:45 coffee and emails. 10:45 to 11:15 submit website to directories. 11:15 to 11:45 submit to article directories. You get the idea.

If you do this and keep at it, in a month you will find it is second nature and you will be amazed at how much you are getting accomplished each day.

Guest Article

I found this article and it has some great tips on using your time more efficiently. I especially like points 4 and 5 in the first section.

10 Ways to Take Back Your Time By Linda Dessau

I've divided my tips into two sections - 5 ways to manage your time and 5 ways to take back your time. Both offer daily or regular practices to try out in your life right now.

The first section focuses more on easing the time pressures in your life, to deal with all of the things you've gotten yourself into ;)

The second section focuses on making overall changes to your life. When you take back your time you also take back your CHOICE. When we're feeling time pressured and stressed out it's easy to forget that we have any say in the matter. And we do!

5 WAYS TO MANAGE YOUR TIME

1. Choose specific times to look at email during the day - seeing emails as they come in can really distract you from what you're trying to accomplish and you'll end up losing time as you go back and forth between activities.

2. The 15-minute strategy. This not only helps motivate you by breaking down large jobs into smaller pieces, it also makes good use of your time. The strategy is to spend 15-minutes on a task and then move on the next. You can come back to the first one as many times as you need to until it's done.

3. Find a system that works for you for making and meeting deadlines and appointments - a calendar or day-timer. I use a Palm Pilot and have been really happy with it.

4. Plan and cook meals ahead of time. A huge time-saver and also makes it much easier to eat healthier. It could be as simple as cooking an extra portion of dinner and having it for lunch the next day, or you could plan out seven days at a time (which is what I do).

5. Keep up with things - whether it's tidying up your papers, doing the dishes or working on a report, doing things a bit at a time (see tip #2) instead of letting them pile up to the point of taking you all day, is much more manageable.

5 WAYS TO TAKE BACK YOUR TIME

1. Set and keep your boundaries - if you work for someone else, be clear about over-time and taking work home with you. If you work for yourself, establish the times of day that are no-work zones; good places to start are breaks for meals and deciding when you will start and stop work for the day.

2. Make one day a week "timeless" – rise and shine when you feel like it, eat when you're hungry and let your inner child (or your actual child!) plan your day's activities. Warning: This may conflict with the tip below ;)

3. Cut your t.v. time - try limiting it to one hour per day. Or try cutting it out completely for one week.

4. Buddy up and find someone to take back time with. Whether it's your spouse, best friend, family member or work colleague, if you're both committed you won't let each other bow out.

5. Take your holidays! Whether you're self-employed or work for someone else it's important to take time off to rejuvenate. You will be more productive for it in the long run.
Where do you need to take back time in your life? Where do you need to manage your time better?

(c) Copyright 2005, Genuine Coaching Services.

Linda Dessau, the Self-Care Coach, is the author of “The Everyday Self-Care Workbook”. To receive one of her free monthly newsletters, subscribe at http://www.genuinecoaching.com/newsletter.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Linda_Dessauhttp://EzineArticles.com/?10-Ways-to-Take-Back-Your-Time&id=19325

Take a look again at step four on managing your meals. Doing this could really help you keep on your time schedule. And it would mean one less distraction for you in your online business life.

And step 5 is absolutely right on the money in more ways than one. Letting the household chores build up will absolutely be a time killer. And the same goes for your business tasks. If you keep putting them off, soon you will have so many things to do you won't be able to choose where to start. Bad news all around.

Free Online Marketing Resource

If you use traffic exchange programs here is a free url rotator you can use. Using this you can advertize 5 different websites using just one url. Click below to learn more:PageSwirl: Page Swirl

Blogging to the Bank Ebook

I have read and am implementing the system called Blogging to the Bank by, Rob Benwell. Although some of the information I already know, I am working with his system as if I were an absolute beginer. There are a few techniques he suggests, especially in the traffic generation part which I don't agree with so won't use, but I plan on using it as close to word for word as I can.

When I have completed one set-up and let it run for a week or two, I will post my findings and results here. If you are interested in learning more about this book you can read more here: Blogging To The Bank.

Seasons Greetings

All Online Marketing wishes the best in the Holiday Season to one and all. Let's all hope for peace and prosperity in the New Year.

News from the Free Ad Guru!

It looks like the Free Ad Guru (Stephan Ducharme) is back again. I don't know if you have read his Ebook "How to get 1 million visitors on your website without paying a dime in advertisement" but I forked out $97.00, a long time ago, for it and I must say I was not impressed.

Not that the contents weren't good, there is a lot of good information. It is just information that is readily available for a lot lower cost or for free from many other sources all over the internet. I did read the book cover to cover and I can state very confidently that I personally did not learn anything new.

Of course not all people know how to generate traffic. But I know where you can get more information for free. Click the link below and it is all yours:

How To Get Over One Million Site Visitors To Any Website

You can read more views on Mr. Ducharme at the "How To" Internet Marketing Forum.

Read this thread For more on the free add guru.

(note: the views stated in the forum are not neccesarily my own)

Converting RSS to PDF

I just found this on PDF Zone. It could be of interest to all you bloggers.

Seems there are some new web sites where you can convert you RSS feeds into PDF format. This would allow archiving, redistribution via email, ability to read offline, and more.

They note the site: rss2pdf.org as one source for this conversion. You can also use Adobe Acrobat 7 for these conversions.

To read more go to: PDF Zone

The also have an article on converting PDF to audio formats, interesting reading.

The Boubon Update

I don't know if any of you where affected by the latest google update, but I sure was. One of my sites, which used to rank first page on a number of phrases and on different pages, suddenly nearly dropped right out of site. But now, it seems to be slowly working it's way back up in the serp's.

I am almost 100% sure I don't do anything that is considered bad to the engines, but none the less I got hammered (from number 4 to >400 on one term). At least I have come back to #12 for that particular phrase and others are coming back as well. And I haven't changed anything?

Odd, but at least it is recovering. The tough thing is though that site happens to be a pretty decent money maker for me and it basically spent 3 weeks in nowhere land. But as I say it at least seems to be recovering. So I will just keep on adding content and hope for the best.

Cheers,
Carl

New Online Classifieds From Adlandpro

I don't know if you have heard of Adlandpro Free Classifieds, but I have used them succesfully for many years now. It has served over 27,000 paying customers to date and processed more than 150,000 credit card transactions for our products. They have paid close to $1 million in affiliate commissions checks and have been in the classified ad business for nearly 7 years.

They have started a new online classified ad site called Pressmania.com. This new site is designed to offer localization for ads, divided as deeply as by city. It is also country specific, with 5 countries so far, US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, so if you have local goods or services to sell, this is perfect for you. For instance if you want to post a classified ad in New York click here.

And that's not all. You can earn an excellent income here as well. You can earn 40 cents for sending visitors to the site to place free ads. But only for the next 2 weeks. Then it drops to 30 cents per week, then 20 cents, then 10 cents. So if you want to take advantage of this opportunity you should act now.

Simply go here to post your free ad then when you are done click here to create your affiliate account it couldn't be easier.

Make Your Thoughts Known

The NetMarketingForum wants your opinion.

If you use, have ever used or are interested in hit exchanges you should go and read this thread.
You can even add your 2 cents, and there is a poll on what you think needs to be changed.

You can see it here: What is neede to make the hit exchange industry better

Interesting stuff, with some really interesting posts.

Getting Good Results in Google

I don't know exactly what I have done right, but after a few tweaks to some of the pages on one of my sites, I have gone up in ranking in Google, and am receiving a lot of visitors as well.

I am going to finish working on some more of them now, and see if the results are the same. I also built some new pages for the same site, and was getting traffic from google within days. When I give this a bit more time to play out I will post what I did (and where I learned about it), here.

Other than that, my regular consulting job is really burning up the time, but at least it is an interesting project.

Take care, and have fun.

Still Working With Traffic Hurricane

I am still in the proccess of working on the page creation with traffic hurricane. Been so busy on this new project, I just haven't been able to set-aside the time to do it. Hopefully tonight and tommorrow.

I sure like the directory I built, I have been very happy with the results. Still haven't transferred the links I already have. I will work on that next week. Nice thing is, all the robots have now visited, so they should be listed soon. If you haven't visited the All Online Marketing Directory please do so now. And if you have a resource you would like listed, add it.

Sorry For The Lack Of Recent Posts...

But I have been busy with my offline work as a communications consultant. I have been settling in Italy, and getting up to speed on a new contract in Italy.

The really good news is, 2 of my websites have been getting a lot more search engine traffic in the last few days. Both have nothing tricky or special done to them, just good old fashioned natural SEO.

I will update you soon on what I did.

A Test I'm About To Make

Have any of you heard of Traffic Hurricane? It is supposed to make keyword rich pages for your website. It sounds like it just makes spammy pages to me, so I have decided to do an experiment.

I am going to install it on a throw-away domain, build a few thousand pages, then trak the results, plus see if the site gets banned. I am voting for banned. It doesn't seem to be a very nice way to build pages but testing is everything right.

I will give it a few months (site is already indexed and has some pagerank) so it shouldn't take long to give a thumbs up or down.

My guess is thumbs down.

New Directory is Finished

Well, I finished building my new Online Marketing Directory. I have the emails all done, the directory categories all set up, database built, and templates customized.

The template customization was a little tougher on this site than on my last one because of how I originally designed the site but all is well now. Only thing left to do is put a link to the directory on the rest of my pages and let the robots do their thing.

Great little script.

If you would like to see it go here: Online Marketing Directory

Now I have to start transferring all the links over, maybe tommorrow.

A New Online Marketing Directory in the Works

Everyone and their dog have created links pages. They are good for you to get reciprocal link partners, but they don't really enhance your own site, and aren't a help to your visitors. Well I got tired of that and decided to do something about it.

I downloaded a free script with which you can design a nice, structured directory on your site. You can customize the templates to fit your sites theme, plus it has a search feature built in so your visitors can actually look for what they need right on your pages. Now that may seem counter productive to you, but just remember, if you offer a good service to people who visit your webpage, they are very likely to return, and you WANT return visitors.

Plus you can do further customization to add relevant contect to your directory, so the search engines will like you as well. Happy search engines equals more visitors equals more sales.

I am in the midst of implementing the script on this site, but I have already got one up and running on my telecom website.

Telecommunications And Phone Service Directory

Now I just have to finish transfering all my link partners over to the new directory. It also takes care of emailing your partners, automatically checks for reciprocal links, and more. And because it's free, the price is right.

If you would like a copy go here: Link Management Assistant

See you later

Conigen Drops PNG and Changes to Talk America

Well I've had a busy evening. If you are a Conigen agent, you should check the changes which have taken place.

Because the agreements the competitive LEC's had with the Baby Bells has expired, they need to renegotiate. Power Net Global may be going right out of the local business, and Talk America is only offering service in Michigan for now.

What a hassle for me. I was having good success with PNG, and I have spent the whole afternoon adjusting my website. Oh well, I'm still making good money with the affiliate program, and I will just promote the heck out of Z-tel and the VOIP products.

If you have ever considered a telecom home business I can still highly recommend the Conigen affiliate program. It is free to join and has products people actually use at a good price.

If you're interested click here: Conigen home business opportunity

Discussion About The Future of Hit Exchanges

If you are a user of hit or click exchanges you will be interested in this.

I don't know if you have heard of the Net Marketing Forum, but it is run by Jon Olson the owner of Ilovehits. There is a discussion going on there right now among the program owners about the state of traffic exchanges and what changes need to be implemented. If you use click exchanges or are curious about them I suggest you go take a look at the thread.

The State of the Click Exchange

As a long time user of traffic exchanges to build my online businesses, I found the discussions here, enlightening, hopeful, and disheartening. Good read.

I'm Back

I haven't been updating this blog for a long time now. Been busy with my other sites, other blog, plus a year long contract in Nigeria.

But I will be keeping up here from now on, no excuses.

Cheers.

Welcome. This is my first entry into my blog. I will be posting info on any free internet advertising resources that I find and test. Also some personal rants and raves along the way. A bit of personal info. My name is Carl Gilbertson. I have been a telecom technical consultant for over 20 years. I have been marketing online for 2+ years now. If you would like to see some of my sites the links are below.
All Online Marketing: (just republished last week)

and

Gil-Net Communications: (older site)

Hasta mañana