Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

One of the top make money online blogs was deep sixed by Google just a few days ago.

www.moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com is no more, and it really has to make you wonder if anybody who hosts a blog on Blogspot, at least in the make money niche, is safe.

I admittedly have quite a few blogs hosted with Blogspot, but most of them are actually outside of the make money online niche.

Thank God I don’t rely on much income from them.

But this recent canning really has to make one wonder and maybe even reevaluate their business model. Certainly nobody can really feel secure having Google in control of their hard work.

So, here is what I suggest if you can afford it.

1. Get your own hosting and a domain in your niche.

2. Setup a WordPress blog. This way, you don’t have to worry about some third party pulling the rug out from under you on a whim.

3. Start a campaign warning people about using Blogspot as their platform. If the word gets around enough, and Google loses enough income from it (I am sure Adwords revenue will drop like a stone in a dead lake) they might start to reconsider their position on legit blogs.

Honestly, I have no idea what’s up Google’s behind when they pull a boneheaded move like this on one of the most popular blogs over the past 4 years. But somebody, somewhere, screwed the pooch on this one.

Thank God these guys don’t have their fingers over the nuke button.

Personally, I’m done with putting up anymore Blogspot blogs. If the money I’m going to make from my niche can’t even pay the hosting and domain fees for a year, then I’m no marketer.

I honestly feel for the guy who just saw 4 years of hard work go down the tubes. If it were me, I’d be on the phone with a lawyer. At the very least, I’d make the biggest public stink about it since fans were up in arms about Star Trek being canceled.

Some final words. And take these for what they’re worth to you. If you think you are above this happening to you, think again. That was one heavy duty blog that just got sent to the IM graveyard.

No doubt, this is going to be big news for a while and then it will die down…people will forget…and they’ll go back to trusting the company whose motto is “do no evil.”

Do no evil my ass.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!

Everybody is talking about RSS and how important it is to getting traffic to your site. While that may be true in itself, does RSS actually help with SEO? This is a question that has been debated by a number of people. I have listened to the debates and to some of the experts and what follows is kind of a summary of all sides. I am not personally going to take a side because, quite honestly, the jury, in my case, is still out on this topic. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

First off, we should probably start by explaining just what RSS is. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a way for a publisher of some work, whether it be a blog, article or some other web content, to get that content to a subscriber quickly through a feed. This way, as soon as something is published, the person on the other end receives this info and can then proceed to the site in question and read whatever content is there. Simple, right? But what good is this to SEO?

Well, most people say it doesn’t help at all. The primary thinking to this is that the search engines, especially Google, know that your RSS feed is nothing more than a duplication of the content on your site, whether it’s a blog, article at a directory or a static web page, and therefore, they will not give it any weight as far as rankings of your site go. On the surface, this seems like a very logical argument, and one might be tempted to take it at face value. But then there is another camp.

That other camp says that, IF used properly (and that is a big IF) RSS can actually help with your SEO rankings. These people suggest the following plan of action. According to them, what you need to do is the following. First, you need to write summaries of your content and use different wording than the summaries on your site. Then what you do is go out and find related web sites in your niche with RSS feeds of their own. Ask the web masters to include your feed in theirs. If it’s quality content, they just might. Of course, they will probably ask you to return the favor.

How does this help the SEO of your site? Well, if you do this long enough, eventually, over time, you will find quite a few inbound links to your site from all these other sites. Yes, it’s an involved process and doesn’t happen automatically just by having an RSS feed. And quite honestly, if you want my opinion, the same results can be achieved just by going to similar blogs in your niche and posting relevant comments to them.

Anyway, there you have both camps on the RSS deal. I’m still torn on the whole thing, but may decide to give it a whack in addition to the things I am already doing to improve the rankings of my sites. You may or may not want to include this in your arsenal, but I felt you should at least know the two theories on using RSS as far as improving your SEO.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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Article marketing is a fine art and can’t be perfected overnight. One of the things that new article marketers struggle with is knowing what to do after they’ve written their first article and want to get people to their blog, through their resource box, to read more articles on the subject. Where do you go? What’s next? Well, this article is going to give you some suggestions that I am sure will help a lot.

When you’ve written an article, on any subject, there are several directions you can go with the followup. The first direction, and probably the easiest, is to follow it with a similar article. For example, let’s say you wrote an article called “3 Causes Of Allergies.” What you can do is, in your resource box, say something like, “Want to find out more causes of allergies? Visit my blog…” and so on. Then, when readers get to your blog, they are greeted with more articles going over the causes of allergies. You’ve remained consistent with your though and writing process.

Another direction you can take is one that I call the “solution model” where you write an article on the causes of the problem and then in the resource box, you say something like, “Want to find out some killer cures for allergies? Visit my blog…” and so on. In this model, you transition from talking about the causes of the problem to talking about the cures for the problem. This is very effective for targeting prospects who are specifically looking for those cures.

Finally, there is what I call the “offshoot model.” In this model, you take the conversation in a totally different direction. Instead of following the article on allergy causes with an article on either more causes or cures, you go in a totally different direction and maybe talk about allergy statistics. Show people how prevalent allergies are. Show the different allergies that normally occur during different times of the year. This way, you can very subtly lead somebody to a cure for their problem without them even realizing they’re being sold to.

Each model can be effective depending on how well written the next articles in the series are. So the next time you do an article marketing series, think about using a model that you don’t normally use.

You might be surprised by the results.

To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim

Want to discover the secrets of article marketing, pay per click, forum participation and a lot more? Check out My Secret Articles at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/ and turn yourself into a marketing expert.

An interesting discussion came up on the Warrior Forum today. Somebody was looking at how many articles I had written for EzineArticles and were wondering how I was able to make so much money off of so relatively few articles. Well, the answer to that question is quite complex but I’ll try to simplify it somewhat. So, just how many articles IS enough to begin to make a nice income online?

Probably the biggest factor to this answer is the niche that you’re writing for. Some niches don’t have a very big demand, so the number of actual views that you get from your articles is going to be limited right from the start. Then you have some niches where the demand is there but the competition is so overwhelming that getting a fair share of the pie is going to be hard to do. I try to look for niches that have a high demand and not so much competition, or as I call it, good Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI). Anything over 100 is considered a good KEI.

Another factor is the quality of the article itself. If an author is writing good quality articles, more people will ultimately check out his web page, as opposed to a writer who just throws a lot of junk together and calls it an article. What they don’t realize is that after the first paragraph, most readers will be gone. So if you write mostly good quality articles, those articles are going to make you more money. It’s that simple.

And then there’s your resource box. If your resource box does its job and gets people to your site, provided that the article itself gets them that far, then you don’t need as many articles as somebody who writes resource boxes that don’t do the job. Think about it. If you have 1,000 articles out there and your CTR is 30%, that means you get 300 visitors for every 1,000 article views. But what if your CTR is only 10%? You’d need to write 3,000 articles to get the same number of visitors to your site.

So as you can see, there is no easy answer to this question. The above factors, niche, quality of article and resource box, all contribute to how many articles you need to write to start seeing some decent money coming in.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to discover the secrets of article marketing, pay per click, forum participation and a lot more? Check out My Secret Articles at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/ and turn yourself into a marketing expert.

I admit it. As much as I try to help home business owners, I may be doing them a disservice at times. Why? Well, if you read through my many articles on this subject, you’ll find that I’ve shared quite a few tips on running an Internet business. The problem is, there is only so much information that one person can cram into their head. After a while, you get all tipped out. It’s also known as information overload. Perhaps you’re there right now. Well, if you are, this article is going to give you some great tips on how to weed through all that info and make the most of it. Yeah, more tips. Isn’t it kind of ironic?

Okay, the first thing you have to do is organize all your information into categories. For example, you may have tips on doing just that, organizing your business. You may have tips on how to advertise, create products and so on. Make sure that each topic is in its own folder. This way, you can easily find something if you need it. Now, if you haven’t done this at all, it’s going to take some time, especially if you’ve been at this for a while. But eventually, you’ll get everything in order and adding new info will be a snap.

Next on the list is to do just that…make a list. This list is going to consist of the things that you want to learn in order. In other words, you’re going to have the most critical items at the top of the list so that you can go over them first. This will make it so that you don’t waste a lot of time going over items that aren’t very helpful to you. This will also make it so that you can focus on items that relate to each other. For example, let’s say you want to go over advertising for a week. You can organize AdWords on day one, article marketing on day two and so on.

Finally, you want to make an actual schedule for all this information that fits in with your daily routine. You don’t want to spend too much time learning unless you’re really just starting out and can’t do anything else. However, if you’re in the middle of your business, you want to make sure that you spend the majority of your time actually working on your business and taking action. So maybe just spend an hour or so a day on learning. Once that hour is up, you put the tips away and start being productive.

If you can follow these three simple steps, you’ll find that your business will run a lot smoother and you’ll learn a lot more in the process.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!

Well, it’s rant time again. So if you don’t want to hear it, you know where the big X is on the top right hand corner of your browser. This is something that burns me up to no end and the bottom line to it is people not taking responsibility for their own business. Well, you’re going to get an earful in this article and a true story. Hopefully, you will learn something about it.

I was scanning through one of the forums I belong to and I saw a topic that read “Major Registrar Blunder”. Well, I was curious as to what it was. I won’t mention any names, but it seems that this domain registration service didn’t send a reminder to the customer that his domain was about to expire. Well, the domain lapsed and right now it’s sitting there with a good old parked page while this guy is losing thousands of dollars in sales each day.

Well, serves him right. Who in their right mind leaves something as important as renewing their domain in the hands of the registrar? I don’t. The second thing I open up everyday, after my ISP program, is my spreadsheet program. The first thing I look at when I go there is my to do list for the day. Know what the second thing is that I look at? You got it. My list of domains and when they’re set to expire. I then make sure that I begin the necessary procedure for renewing at least two months in advance, if I can.

Fanatic? Maybe. But you won’t find me losing a domain because I forgot to renew it. And thus comes the point of my article. You MUST take responsibility for YOUR business. That means not depending on a registrar to send you a reminder that your business is about to go down the tubes if you don’t pay your $8 or whatever it costs per year. I’m sorry, but there is NO excuse for letting this happen. And not only with your domains, but with every part of your business. You are ultimately responsible for everything. Leaving it in the hands of others is suicide.

I hope you will take this as a friendly warning because if what happened to this person happens to you, don’t expect to get my sympathy. If you can’t behave responsibly and take care of your own affairs then maybe you don’t belong in business to begin with.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Looking for a solid 4 step plan to building your own business…FREE? Pick up my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/4steps.html and get started TODAY!

If you’re going to launch a new product, at least do it right. I have seen so many botched product launches that I sometimes wonder if these “gurus” really know what the heck they’re doing. No more than 60 seconds after the site goes live and the server crashes or some other unforeseen thing goes down. It’s almost like you’d think this was all planned. Ironically, some people think it is. Well, in a way it is…due to poor planning.

See, mega product launches product mega traffic. And there is only so much traffic you’re going to be able to fit into one server with limited bandwidth. Eventually, something has to give. And trust me, it’s not going to be your prospects backing off. They’re in such a frenzy to get your product that they’d stomp over their own grandmothers to do so. Therefore, proper planning is in order if you’re going to have a product launch go off without a hitch, or at least with as few hitches as possible.

In order to prevent disaster, the first thing you really should do…and this has nothing to do with your launch partners…is get together with your hosting company and make sure that everything is being done to minimize the chances of something going wrong. This will require you to let them know how much traffic you expect to get and how quickly. See, it’s the mad rush at one time that actually brings things to a screeching halt. I don’t want to turn this into a technical brief so let’s just say you can’t stuff 10 pounds of pastrami into a 5 pound bag. Eventually, the bag bursts and the server goes down.

The reality is, you may need to spread your launch out over several servers. Have your sales page on one, your order page on another and maybe put your videos on yet another server or two. It’s the videos that really bring things to a halt because they’re what takes up most of the bandwidth. Unfortunately, video is a big thing today and not using it is going to leave money on the table.

Naturally, in addition to all this, you want to make sure that your launch partners are all on the same page with you, meaning that emails go out when they’re supposed to and everything is in sync. The greatest hardware setup in the world is meaningless without the marketing that goes with it.

Concentrate on the above items and you should have a product that launch that doesn’t end up on the front page of “Biggest Failures Magazine” and your face covered with egg.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html

So, you’re building your list and you’re wondering if you’re treating them right. Well, quite honestly, if you have to ask, you probably aren’t. Let me tell you from experience, with all the competition out there today, it is very hard to get people to stay on your list unless you treat them right. Having said that, I am going to give you a few tips that will have your list thanking you every single day. You might want to make a note of these.

At the top of the list, no pun intended, is to not constantly hound them with sales pitches. People are sick of being sold to. They get it on the TV with all the infomercials and they get it in their email box with all the spam they get, not to mention the lists that they’re on that do nothing BUT send them sales pitches. It’s okay to sell. That’s what we’re about. But we don’t have to do it every single day of the week. So please, ease off just a little bit. Your list will thank you for it.

In addition to not selling them the farm every second of the day, you want to provide them with quality content. I’m not talking about some dribble that you can get off of a cocktail napkin either. I’m talking about giving them something that will really help them with their problem…whatever it is. So let’s say you have a product that has 10 ways to do something, whatever that something is. Why not give them two or three of those ways in your newsletter as a show of good faith? Trust me, they’ll thank you for it.

Finally, you want to make it as easy for them to unsubscribe as possible. That means not putting the link to opt out 10 inches below your signature. Oh yes, there are marketers who do this and it drives me crazy. The only thing you’re going to do to your list is tick them off. If you treat them with respect, they just might opt into your list again some day.

Take the above tips to heart. They just may save your list AND your business.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.

I already have my fatigues on and I’m prepared to duck into my foxhole from the aftermath of this article. A lot of people think that they need to have a number one PPC position in order to succeed with AdWords or any PPC site for that matter. Well, that is just not true. You don’t need a top position and I’m going to explain to you why. All you PPC experts can begin throwing hand grenades.

Okay, so why don’t you need a number one position? Actually, not only don’t you need one, you don’t want one. You’re probably wondering why. Well, it comes down to a lot of psychology on the part of your prospects. See, when your typical prospect goes to the search engines and sees those paid ads, the very first ad they rush to is the top ad. But at this point in time, they’ve done no research at all. They’re essentially just tire kickers. So for the most part, they’re not ready to buy yet, and thus…you end up with a wasted click. Plus, a lot of top position clicks are from freebie seekers.

Now, let’s combine that with the cost factor. A top ad is going to cost more than any other position. So in addition to throwing away clicks on freebies seekers and those who are not quite ready to buy, you’re throwing away more money than everybody else. This is why so many people lose tons with PPC campaigns, because they think they have to have a top position ad.

Okay, so what position do you want? My experience tells me that positions three through seven are the best spots to occupy. You avoid the freebies seekers and for the most part, the people clicking on your ads are ready to buy. This lowers your costs and increases your conversions. No, you won’t get as many clicks, but most of those are wasted anyway.

So do yourself a favor. Stop fighting for the top spot for a PPC ad. It’s not going to get you the results that you’re looking for.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to discover the secrets of pay per click and a lot more? Check out My Secret Articles at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/ and turn yourself into a marketing expert.

We can get so wrapped up in the minutia of marketing that we sometimes forget about what’s really important. We worry about how our sales page looks or how good our ecovers are and at times completely ignore what really matters when it comes to marketing your products…the actual marketing. In this article, I am going to go over what I feel is the core of your business. If you concentrate on these three things, you’ll find that the money will come, even if everything else isn’t perfect.

The first thing is the actual advertising itself. People seem to think that by just putting up a web site, the masses will come. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are millions of web sites out there and unless you actually promote them, prospects aren’t going to find you. There are many ways to promote your site, from article marketing to pay per click to simply participating in forums. Point is, you have to actively get out there and make yourself known.

Next on the list is just that…your list. They say that the money is in the list. It is one of the oldest and most worn out cliches in the business. But it’s true. The question is, why is the money in the list, especially a list of people who have already purchased from you? Well, think of it this way. Who is more likely to purchase one of your products? Is it somebody who doesn’t know you from Adam, or somebody who has already bought something from you and is pleased with the product? Do I even have to answer the question?

Finally, there is communication. This is where so many people fall short. I don’t care what it is you’re doing or how you’re doing it. The key to success with any business is communication. Think about it. Almost everything you do in your business comes down to some form of communication. You have your sales pages, squeeze pages, articles, ads, autoresponders and even the emails that you send to prospects in response to questions that they have. Without mastering the written word in all these forms, you have very little chance of succeeding. That is a fact.

If you concentrate on the core of your business, or these three areas, it doesn’t matter what your business is about. If it’s a product or service that people have a need for, they’ll spend money.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of busting your behind for peanuts online? Go to my web site and find out how I earn a monthly income that exceeds 5 figures and how I can help YOU do the same. Get your free report at http://www.mysecretarticles.com/report.html