A case in point: My blog’s 3 month ranking had been 70,655  (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)  – it’s now 157,638.

How an update can revise your website position by 80,000 positions is beyond me.

But that’s not the end of the goodness in store.

Mark’s 45n5 website has gone from 27,961 to  89,002 (a difference of 61,000 places)

The blogosphere’s most recognized ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s rating has been revised from 3,797  to 12,917 .

Which makes you wonder if these numbers are being pulled out of a hat…Given that a number of advertising-related monetization strategies use (in my opinion, outdated) metrics like Alexa – somebody out there is going to be hurting from this latest change.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t suffer from web stats/analytics OCD, though I like to look at these numbers to get a rough gauge of a site’s credibility. So what happens if a metric like Alexa is shot to pieces?

I suspect this move only speeds the migration of people to alternative metric services like Quantcast and Compete which seem to give more accurate traffic snapshots.

My advice all this time, that monetization is a better metric than traffic or page rank or (fill in your favorite) rank still holds true.

Now if 45n5’s Mark will remove Alexa from his ranking criteria and replace it with something else…

On a conservative basis, I’d say that monetization from my blogging alone amounts to somewhere in the mid to higher 4 figure range per month.

Which is a pittance compared to some of the “Super Bloggers” out there.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how much the top bloggers make, especially in the light of Business Week’s “Bloggers Bring In The Big Bucks” story.

Although I know Darren Rowse and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and visit Mario Lavandeira’s PerezHilton and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable, the names on the list were alien to me.

It’s a testament that blogging is an open field and you pick your niche and can do well with it.

But if you’re clued in to the power of blogging, you’d realize that the payoff from blogging comes outside of blogging.

If you listened in to the episode of the Net Income radio show where Shoemoney had Matt Mullenweg, part of the team which developed the WordPress blogging platform, the real money comes as a result of having blogged, rather than because of blogging.

If you missed that episode of Net Income, you can check it out:

As an example, Darren Rowse is a founder of the B5Media blog network, which receive venture funding earlier this year and Shoemoney’s income also comes from promoting CPA offers and developing AuctionAds with partner-in-crime Dave Dellanave AKA Dillsmack. AuctionAds was recently acquired by Media Whiz for an undisclosed sum.

Personally, blogging is a platform to network and form joint ventures, it’s given me the opportunity to “meet up” with several influential super affiliates and information marketers and importantly, clients. Meeting up at events in a face-to-face context is just a way of cementing the relationship.

If you want to exploit blogging to its fullest potential, you need to look at it as more than just a website to pimp adsense or affiliate offers, it’s value as a branding platform is infinitely greater.

I’ve always enjoyed the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, and his works are still enjoyed nearly a century later. It’s likely they’ll continue to be enjoyed for generations to come. All accomplished with a paintbrush and paint.

Similarly, a blog is just that, a tool, just like Monet’s humble paintbrush.

In the hands of an individual with extraordinary vision, you can do much more than what you thought was possible.

So here comes the Blogger’s Choice Awards.

By a process of peer voting, bloggers stand to receive recognition by their peers and display badges on their blogs.

And yes, expect to see bloggers nominate themselves (and likely that will be the only vote many of them will get.)

Still, any exposure is better than none.

Looking at the current rankings is quite revealing:

Leading the “Best Blogs About Blogging” category, we have:

Notables like ProBlogger Darren Rowse, Lorelle, and I’m not familiar with bloggingbasics101.com (PR5, Alexa 821,000), so I’ll be check it out.

Leaping ahead of the “Best Blog About Blogging” bloggers, we have the celebrity bloggers:

With 4,865 votes, Rosie O’Donnell is clearly ahead of mainstream bloggers and other celebrity bloggers.

The fact is that if you want to do well in blogging (or in any area of Internet Marketing for that matter), you will need to differentiate yourself and pull away from the crowd. So the next best thing to being “Rosie” is to get one of these plum awards:

My gut feel is that PerezHilton is headed for at least landing a few awards.

In any competitive field, people are going to love you and some will hate you.

You want either type of audience. What you don’t want are apathetic audiences.

—

Who do you think about the Blogger’s Choice awards?

Who do you think will win each category?

Does post quantity lead to a better reader experience?

It would, especially if you’re giving your readers more choice, and they’re likely to find something that interests them.

At the same time though, we have a finite amount of time, and the analogy I’d use is, if I had $300 and were about to go to war, I’d rather pick up an M-16, rather than buy 1,000 water pistols.

Besides post quantity, I think post quality is more important.

Having one highly targeted post, which meets your readers needs and interests, is much better than having three average posts.

Granted the blog indexing sites will have a field day if you’re posting multiple posts a day, it would likely generate a huge amount of (short term) traffic too.

My philosophy is to shoot for traffic mass (quantity), sustainability (keeping the traffic numbers between a certain range) and more importantly, focused and relevant to your niche/focus.

A well-researched and well thought out post gives readers choices in applying your ideas to their own site. It might take longer to put a quality post together (and consequently reduce your ability to churn out multiple posts), but you’ll build stronger readership loyalty that way.

Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.

But what does it all mean?

And is it a new technology.

Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.

RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.

While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.

The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.

Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.

Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.

My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.

Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.

If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining Blog Explosion’s free traffic program can give you a head start in generating traffic. It will also give you explosure to other great blogs out there.

What I especially like about Blog Explosion is that besides the traffic that it generates, listing your blog in the Blog Explosion directory creates a Google PageRank backlink to your blog. My particular backlink is rated a PR3.

If you’re prefer an online RSS reader accessible via your web browser:

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo!

The direct benefit of setting up these two services and subscribing to your own feed means that your blog will be spidered by Google and Yahoo regularly and be indexed on these search engines much more easily.

With all that laid out, here’s my biggest peeve about RSS.

Actually it’s more to do with RSS publishers.

Bigger is not always better.

A lot are under the illusion that the bigger, the better.

As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back “Size matters not”

I don’t specifically see myself as a designer.

In fact, I’m pretty horrible when it comes to design sometimes.

But take a look at some of the RSS icons I’ve seen on some blogs:

Let’s start with the ones that aren’t effective:

Found in the right sidebar of a blog. The orange, when blown up, looks ghastly. The 3-D effect doesn’t help either.

Still hurts my eyes. Found in the left sidebar of a blog.

Really, it’s too over-the-top.

Do you find it crass?

Perhaps you might agree with:

Taken from the 10 Ways to a Killer Blog series I worked on earlier, originally by Robert Scoble.

Here’re some better implementations of RSS publicity:

Shoemoney‘s a big blogger. You’ll need to hunt to pick up his RSS feed. It’s located in the bottom left corner of his blog.

Pepperjam has a slew of RSS options in their right sidebar. For aesthetic reasons, I’d probably recommend keep it to 3 options, or a maximum of 5. Too many options creates clutter on your blog real estate.

I like Todd Malicoat‘s presentation of his RSS feed. It appears in his right sidebar, above the fold. The orange contrast against the black background is pretty pleasant. As is the handwritten font for “Subscribe”

ProBlogger Darren Rowse has the above information appearing in his left sidebar. The RSS feed is accessible via the XML or feedburner button. Nice, clean, compact design.

BlueHatSEO Eli has a nice presentation of his RSS feed too, appearing just below the header graphic in the right sidebar.

—

If you’re planning to publish a blog and offer your RSS feeds for subscription, the orange icon with the three slanted lines (which originated in the Mozilla Firefox browser) would be most easily recognizable, than the “XML” or “RSS” icons.

As adoption of Windows Vista ramps up, you can be sure that RSS will become a more important technology for content publishers.

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that paying $4,950 which works out to $2,500 per day over the 2 day workshop is too much.

I think there’s a major problem here.

And the problem is with the person asking the question.

See, I have been doing business consulting and training and managing start-ups for the better part of 10 years.

I’ve almost never looked just at how much something costs, because that’s only half the equation.

What’s more, ok, I understate it here, what’s of the utmost importance whether you should invest in the opportunity is your return on your investment (ROI if you want the jargon).

If you spend $1,000 on an investment, what would you like to get out of it? $1,050? $2,000? $10,000?

My personal benchmark has always been to get a minimum 10 times return on my investment.

If I were to spend $5,000 on an opportunity, I’d expect to get at least $50,000 back in net profits.

So the question is whether Elite Retreat is overpriced?

Looking at this issue rationally, value is a function of your return over your investment (Return / Investment).

This are the two constraints on the issue:

1. The investment is fixed ($4,950)
2. The return is not fixed.

The return is determined by what you want to get out of the event.

Speaking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) on the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West, he mentioned that one of the ER participants from the first workshop was now generating $2,000 a day.

Ok, I’d admit that I didn’t nail Shoemoney on whether it was gross or net profit. But even assuming a worst case scenario that it was ‘only’ a 50% net profit, that’s a cool $1,000 a day, or $365,000 a year.

On a $4,000 investment.

So the issue now is whether the ER trainers will be able to deliver on their objectives to bring you to the next level.

This time around, they’ve assembled a cast of trainers comprising:

• Shoemoney (Search Engine Marketing, Branding, PPC, and Arbitrage)
• Kris Jones (Affiliate Marketing and Search Arbitrage)
• Lee Dodd (Community Building and Web Real Estate)
• Aaron Wall (Search Engine Optimization)
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse (Blogging and Monetization)
• Neil Patel (Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management, and Viral Marketing)

So between them, I believe they have most of the bases covered. I’d think that if you were more concerned about topics like domaining, copywriting, product creation, which aren’t specifically covered in the presentations (although some of the speakers have experience in these areas), what you can do to ensure your own success is:

1. Do your preliminary research beforehand
2. Do the necessary testing
3. Compile all the questions you have and bring them to ER.

Talk to the panel of trainers and fellow participants and do whatever it takes to get the necessary knowledge to get yourself to the next level.

I’m sure that even if they aren’t able to directly address your query, one of them will be able to direct you to resources to get the information you need.

Will going to ER provide the magic antidote to all your burning questions and make you an overnight millionaire?

Not likely.

Neither will signing up for a myriad of courses, or buying a million dollars worth of ebooks.

What will bring you the success you desire is the determination, perserverance and most importantly, effort, to move yourself one step closer to success.

Obviously, Shoemoney and his team have planned a roadmap for Elite Retreat to make it a major initiative this year with sessions planned in Orlando (May), Chicago (July), Phoenix (Sept), Dallas (Nov).

Should you consider investing the $4,950 for the event?

Only if you see yourself investing the effort necessary to bring yourself $50,000.

You can also read some of the related posts by:

• Kris Jones
• Neil Patel
• Shoemoney
• Lee Dodd
• Aaron Wall
• Darren Rowse

For more details, you can visit the Elite Retreat website or call PlanetAndrea at 1(800) 888-8151.

Far from dying, there’s a resurgence in blogging, judging by the flow of private equity and growth of blog networks.

Just look at the nearly 1,200 submissions for the Round 5 submissions for the 9rules Blog Network or check the stats at the Blog Network List. Darren Rowse’s b5media blog network got a nice chunk of capital funding too.

2007 will see a further evolution of blogging as we know it.

Perhaps ‘blogging’ (a truncation of weblog) may evolve as a term to fully encompass what it represents.

Here’re 4 trends I see this year.

• Offline to Online Content Migration

Even without Amazon and Google’s efforts to digitize content for the Internet, a multitude of content publishers are bringing more content online every day.

Besides info portals, such as About.com and Wikipedia, individuals bloggers are blogging about their pet topics.

Aside from quoting online news sources, bloggers often cite print media, cable television, movies and other old line media (I guess this year someone will start call it media 1.0?). During this process, it’s inevitable that more content will migrate from a paper-based medium to an electronic one.

It only means that the online will will only continue to get more info-rich.

At the same time, it also means that third world countries where dial-up Internet connections (remember those?) at speeds of 28.8 kbps (that’s kilobits, not megabits) will only get further stratified by the digital divide.
Beyond food, water and shelter, the info-rich online environment will provide an opportunity to accelerate progress in the developing world.

• Blog Income Monetization Opportunities Increase

Bloggers increasingly have a number of options to generate income from their blogs.

Options like Google Adsense publishing, paid content posting (from the likes of PayPerPost), banners and text links, affiliate marketing and CPA networks, provide options for bloggers to go beyond just posting on a ‘passion’ (ie unpaid) basis to considering blogging as an alternative to a 9-to-5 job.

For newer bloggers however, it will take some time before they get their rhythmn going.

And I’d still advice newer bloggers to build up good content and develop a following before cramming as much adsense and banners on your blogs.

These monetization strategies generally require planning to create quality content, effectively publicize your blog, generate sufficient viewership and readership numbers, to successfully create a decent income from your blogging efforts.

Most bloggers will be able to generable a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of blogging-related income once they learn the ropes. But to step up to the next level of a professional blogger, it’ll require effective blogging strategies. (For which I’m currently developing products to address those needs).

• Blogging Goes The Rich Media Route

Perhaps it’s due to it’s traditional association with maintaining an online diary, but blogging still remains very text-based. You might sometimes get the occassional graphic or photo accompanying the posts.

To date, the number of blogs with audio or video still remains quite low. In fact, a number of blog directories have dropped the vlog (or video blog) category altogether this year, due to underwhelming demand.

Attaching a video from YouTube can sometimes be a bugbear (even if it’s as simple as pasting HTML code into your blog).

Plus, you’ve probably encountered the ‘bandwidth traffic jam’ which hits many of these video hosting sites at peak hours.
In the coming year, we might see more Internet bandwidth expanding as Internet Service Providers buy bigger chunks of bandwidth, and increase bandwidth to the video service providers.

We might even see new video caching services available which will help ease the video bandwidth bottleneck.

As for the immediate future, podcasting looks like it has the next lowest barrier of entry, especially as bloggers become more adept at audio applications like Audacity.

Looking for inspiration? Check out Webmaster Radio

• RSS Goes Mainstream

Email went mainstream approximately in the mid 1990s, when email addresses started appearing on business cards, despite the fact that email has been around since the 1960s.

The predecessors to RSS (really simple syndication) were developed in the mid-1990s. And although push-type services like BackWeb and Pointcast were a little ahead of the curve, bloggers are among the early adopters of RSS services.

To date most casual Internet surfers have no idea what RSS is, much less how to subscribe to a RSS feed. (You could’ve included me in that category about half a year ago).

Added to that is the fact that RSS readers tended to be web-based or required third party applications to access. Which makes RSS a mess for most net surfers to get into.

Will 2007 be the year that RSS readers become more user friendly? (I still have problems successfully subscribing to Atom and RSS feeds sometimes)

Here’s a thought, if all email clients supported RSS feeds and even better, RSS appeared as almost indistinguishable from email, wouldn’t we see widespread adoption of RSS?

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The Blogging Predictions 2007 meme

Those were my blogging predictions for 2007 and I intended to launch an Internet meme off this post.

(check out the classic Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft Internet meme. Avoid if you’re offended by gamer vulgarity)

Here’s the meme topic: What’re your Blogging Predictions in 2007? (Include your top prediction or a selection of your expected trends)

How to play:

1. Blog about the meme topic
2. Include a trackback to this post at: –> Blog Predictions 2007 Meme Trackback
3. Pass it on to another 5 bloggers.

Come back here and check out the trackbacks for the link madness. What better way to start out 2007, eh?
To kick things off, I’ll send this to a selection of 20 blogs:

1. 9rules Network Official Blog
2. Darren Rowse AKA Problogger
3. Yaro Starak – Entrepreneur’s Journey
4. Apogee Weblog
5. Rachit Dayal
6. Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney
7. Andrea Schoemaker AKA PlanetAndrea
8. Neil Patel
9. RumblePup
10. Robyn Tippins AKA Sleepyblogger
11. Chris Hooley – ThinkBait
12. Michael Gray – Graywolf
13. Andy Beard
14. Scott Jangro
15. Kevin Nair
16. Shawn Collins
17. Steven Wong
18. Gobala Krishnan
19. Rashenbo
20. Dazzling Girl

And lest I forget, the TickMe bloggers crew:

which includes fellow 9ruler Cameron Olthuis

hmm…this is almost too much work for the new year…

PS: If you’d like to play, do your own meme post and trackback to: Internet meme trackback

PPS: Meme project updates can be found at: Blogging Meme Reloaded

As Darren mentioned, whether anything you write actually gets read, depends on your title. Whether it’s a website, a blog entry, the name of a blog, the title of an ebook, everything depends on:

• Keywords in the Title: Examples include monetary amounts: “$100,000”, names of prominent individuals “Britney Spears”, “Matt Cutts”, “Shoemoney”, “Yanik Silver”
• Eyecatching Phrases: “Blog in Your Sleep”, “Autopilot Income”, “Floods of Traffic”
• Scarcity: “Christmas Promotion”, “Limited Edition”, “Next 5 Readers only”

I’m looking through the titles and there’s a very obvious contrast between a generic title like “Looking Back at 2006” and “My Predictions for 2007” which are all-encompassing, while laser-targeted titles which are loaded with specific keywords will draw in traffic like bees to honey.

• Reviews and Predictions from a Canadian Problogger

Presents us with an intriguing title. Just imagine if you’d included a title like the “Californian ProBlogger” or the “Jamaican ProBlogger”, you’re bound to have a decent number of hits.David Peralty gives us an personal insight into his year. Besides developments over at BloggingPro, he talks about starting his new personal at Starting A Blog Over and you might find yourself heading over to Digital Life News to check out his other projects too.

If you’ve planned the layout and flow for your blog post, the transition from blog to another blog or website will be very smooth.

Especially if you’ve using multi-tabbed browsing in FireFox, Flock or IE7, you’d be able to traverse through the various sites easily.

• 2007 Prediction: Blogs will be replaced

Josh Maher’s entry is an interesting read, because it’s very self-reflexive. (Imagine submitting an entry like The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star” for a radio station’s songwriting contest).

As you read further, Josh’s bottomline “This is all strong evidence that the essence of the blog is dead” which is always a great conversation starter, especially if you have a battalion of blog commenters waiting in the wings.

This is a really great piece, especially if you’re reading Josh’s post back-to-back with David’s post about venture capital dollars going into blog networks.

Are the 2 perspectives in opposition? Or do they dovetail somewhere in the center?

I suspect with the coporatization of blogs and the buying into blogs (with likely stronger profit motives), blogs could become a little less personal and less hobbyist and more mainstream (does anyone remember when personal computers were used mainly for databases, spreadsheets and wordprocessing? And before that hobbyist programming?) The field will merely evolve.

The death of blogging? Maybe in it’s current form, but maybe more like the ‘death’ of a larvae and the emergence of a butterfly?

PS: inevitably readers are likely to click on Josh’s About Me link.

• New Year’s Resolutions for Bloggers

Dom Tan’s blog is an interesting one, especially since it’s targeted towards the writing project’s core audience.

Dom seems to be a newer blogger and he goes into what he should do to be a better blogger.

Which shows you that blogging can give you multiple perspectives, as I’d probably focus on why I’d want to improve and take it from there.

Comment Roadblocks: I discovered this the hard way when I’d started, that requiring your blog readers to register to post comments like Dom’s got his blog set up, will usually result in fewer comments. (I sometimes give up, because the process of getting the password sent to my email is a little too much effort).

Build Your “Me” Brand: Including an “about me” page makes big strides for your ‘me’ brand and it’s something I recommend all bloggers, whether blogging in a personal or corporate capacity to do. (Because the blog is all about you…)

—

My ProBlogger Writing Project entry:

Kickstart Your Blogging Business and Make Big Money: 7 Reality Checks

2006 was an interesting time for me as I plunged into Internet Marketing.

Although I didn’t have a clear idea in the beginning, it was very clear that the path of least resistance would be to go with blogging.

In the course of the last 5 months, I’ve had a series of interesting experiences and the questions I’ve dealt with appear to be common with all new bloggers, whether the questions originate from a blog, a forum, a blog network or a social networking site.

Here’s 2006 in retrospective in a FAQ format with money making tips and 7 Reality Checks for bloggers and internet marketers.

• Blogging Reality Check 1: Making Money from Blogging is Evil

I’m not sure of the intent of this often heard objection.

I guess some might have ‘pure/purist intentions’ and expect that blogging is some form of ‘cathartic release’ for heavy/philosophical/ponderous thinking.

I see blogging as a form of personal journalism. And journalists have to eat.

Like it or not, the reason why your newspaper or magazine doesn’t cost $100 a copy is because it’s sponsored by advertisements and the classifieds. Likewise, blogs can be financially self-sustaining through adsense, affiliate marketing and other monetization strategies.

Expecting bloggers to provide free content is akin to expecting musicians to provide music free of charge.

It takes time and resources to produce blog content and there is a measurable value to it.

In a utopian society, writers, artists, musicians would be able to freely practise their craft without fear of finding their next meal. We don’t live in that world yet.

• Blogging Reality Check 2: I Will Make Millions Overnight

On the other extreme, I have spoken to bloggers who expect to make huge sums of money overnight.

It’s unlikely to happen unless you are some sort of celebrity, likely a mega celebrity if you’re planning to bring in the megabucks.

If you are not however, it’s time to face a reality check.

We’ve also heard about products or software that can automatically build blogs by the hundreds every hour, and we’ve also heard about how if each blog earns a dollar each day, you’d be earning thousands of dollars in your sleep.

While you might have some degree of success using these blogging-related “quick buck” schemes, it might not necessarily be sustainable (ie you are ‘de-indexed’ and disappear from the search engine results, or your ‘innovative’ monetization exploit is soon negated.) It then becomes a mad rush for the next “black hat template” or the next automated, broadband-enabled, stealth, power-enhanced, web2.0-enabled, ajax-enhanced, php-powered widget.

Rinse and repeat until it gets disabled by one of the higher power. (see above paragraph)
If you are a serious blogger for which blogging is a long term strategy to help you achieve your goals, here’s what I would advise you to do.

Think of your blog as a business tool. Consider:

• How does it fit in with your adsense or affiliate marketing plan?
• How would you go about establish trust and credibility for your business.
• Who would your strategic partners be.
• How are you building your “me” brand?

• Blogging Reality Check 3: Free Tools and Services

New Internet Marketers ask me this all the time: “What are the free tools we can use besides blogger/blogspot to growing our blogging efforts.”

I’d add to the list of useful tools such as GIMP, PingOat, Squidoo.

What troubles me however, is that some who aspire to earn online income aim to do it only using free tools.

I think you could probably earn $50-$100 per month using free tools, and if you’re good earn maybe $500.

Beyond that could be highly challenging. I guess if you put your mind to it, you could come up with very interesting business models.

For the vast majority of us however, I’d advise counting the value of your time.

Sure you could surf 1,000 websites and gather the same information, or as one participant at the World Internet Summit said to me, I can just google for everything, I don’t need to buy anything (which was weird because he invested in a World Internet Summit ticket…)

To build a sustainable business, you need to value your time.

Is your time worth $5 an hour? $10? $50? $500? $5,000?

If your time is worth more than the cost of the product or service, you’d be foolish not to subscribe or invest in the product.

Even if your time was worth $1 per hour, I couldn’t see how it’d make sense to manually maintain a mailing list of 1,000 and send them emails on a bi-weekly basis.

I use a combination of free and paid tools and you’d generally be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you have the mindset of starting and operating a business, your tools will generate many times their investment for you.

Some of the useful tools which outweigh their investment include:

• Secret Blog Weapon (Blog Optimization)
• Ultimate Affiliate Weapon (Affiliate Marketing)
• Bluehost web hosting
• Autoresponder: Aweber / GetResponse

Once you have these fundamentals in place, you’d find that building your business is much easier.

• Blogging Reality Check 4: It Takes Tough Times

It’s taken 4 months to get to the stage I’m currently at.

Although I’d have preferred to get here within a week of starting up, building a business, blogging-based or otherwise is as much about the process of getting to your goal, as much as merely achieving it.

As you’re building your blogging business you will encounter setbacks, perhaps days in which your visitor numbers or income drop drastically.

Here’s something that people don’t often talk about.

The measure of a mature blogger is not what happens when good times are rolling, but what you do when things go south.

Do you merely throw in the towel? Do you kick your efforts up a notch?

Often the most spectacular successes are built on the backs of the most dismal circumstances.

Look at the rise of Japan after the Second World War, or Apple after an ousted Steve Jobs rejoined and the company’s fortunes turned not once, but numerous times with the launch of the MacIntosh, the iMac and the iPod.

If you’ve watched real life events unfold during 9-11, you’d know that true heroes are forged in the moments of greatest adversity.

A couple of months ago, I blogged about: Are you ready to give up on Internet Marketing?

It’s still relevant now. Perhaps more so.

Some people seek to avoid difficulty and challenges, others actively seek it.

Which are you?

• Blogging Reality Check 5: I Will Make Millions Overnight

Are you an ‘everything under the sun’ blogger?

If you are one of the myriad of blogger who blogs about “internet marketing”, “health and fitness” or “women’s issues”, you could be biting off more than you can chew.

Catchall blogs work best if they’re run by a panel of bloggers (sometimes as many as 10), or by especially prolific bloggers.

If you’re specializing in everything, you’re specializing in nothing.

Finding your niche and entrenching yourself deeply in it means that your position is virtually unassailable.

If you do choose to tackle “internet marketing”, maybe you want to niche it by focusing on “internet marketing for high school students”, “internet marketing for midcareer professionals” or “internet marketing for single mothers”.

The brick and mortar businesses have moved towards speciality stores, rather than general concept stores (with Wal Mart being one of the few exceptions). Likewise, becoming a niche specialist helps you expand from a position of power.

Blogging Reality Check 6: Build A Community

When you’re starting out, you might be working in isolation.

If you’re fortunate, you might be able to tap into a community. By tapping into these resources, you gain significant leverage as you’re expanding your efforts.

“Leverage”, comes in a few flavors. There’s technological leverage that a software or tool can help by automating your efforts. But far more powerful is social leverage or people-oriented leverage.

And social leverage can easily move mountains.

During the launch of Russell Brunson’s Conquer Your Niche Internet Marketing forum, the site’s traffic went off the charts.

Other sites I frequently visit include:

Forums such as:

• Warrior Forum
• Digital Point
• Digital Keiretsu

Blogs such as:

• Shoemoney
• ProBlogger
• PlanetAndrea
• 9rules Blog Network (of which I am a member)

At it’s simplest, I believe build a community is nothing more than making friends, and I appreciate the opportunities to interact with the likes of Ewen Chia, Jo Han Mok, Social Media specialist Michelle MacPhearson, and my buddies Ryan Chua and Rachit Dayal.

Blogging Reality Check 7: Change the World

This is probably the most important step.

Have a focus bigger than yourself.

You don’t necessarily need to choose ‘world peace’, but you want your blogging efforts to mean more than pounding out 300-700 words every 24 hours, inserting a few photos and hitting the publish button.

We need meaning to keep going.

Meaning is the glue that creates our motivation.

We all have 24 hours a day, and we can choose to spend that time focusing on big project, or on small projects.

When you embrace something huge, something weird happens to your thinking too, it expands.

Your world view blows up and suddenly your universe is not just your neighbourhood, or the people in your village, city, state or country.

If you’re seeing and blogging through the eyes of a world citizen, life (business or personal) can only continue to be a rich canvas to blog about.

And found this cool “What is” tool.

IT consultant Arttu Ylärakkola’s Solvalou.com site scrapes content off the search engine and provides a snapshot about a certain topic.

I did a search for my buddy Rachit Dayal and came up with the following:

• Rachit dayal is a Singapore-based Entrepreneur who founded Rachit Dayal Communications in January 2005 – An Internet Marketing Strategy Consulting Firm for.
• Rachit dayal is a Singapore based Entrepreneur who graduated from NUS in 2005.
• Rachit dayal is a Singapore-based Internet Marketing Specialist.

As you can tell, Rachit is a very exciting guy. (NOT…).

On the other hand, a search for “George Bush” shows up the intriguing…

findings of which I paste a selection here:

• George bush is the Antichrist.
• George bush is stubborn and incompetent.
• George bush is a reincarnation of Judas Iscariot.
• George bush is the leader of the most powerful nation in the world with an.
• George bush is invited to tea with the Queen.
• George bush is flying half way around the world.
• and a number of other descriptions too colorful to include on this blog.

See the search on George Bush: here

And in case you’re wondering what a search for “Andrew Wee” throws up:

• Andrew wee is still tops in September.
• Andrew wee is in your extended network.
• Andrew wee is a Blogging Affiliate in the WickedFire – Internet Marketing Affiliate Webmaster Forum.
• Andrew wee is offline.
• Andrew wee is on a distinguished road.
• Andrew wee is the Centre’’s Global Partner in Singapore. (Not me)
• Andrew wee is a certified trainer in delivering John Maxwell’s programme on “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. (Not me either)
• Andrew wee is a master at networking.
• Andrew wee is interested in the forma-.

You don’t get the specific links, but you can enter the keywords into google and find the references yourself.

Considering that Darren posted this in May 2005, it’s amazing how something old can appear to be something new, isn’t it?

Take the test, post your results in my comments.

As I have a broad spectrum of readers, please edit out any severely colorful language.

Here’s the link: What Is

I’d been asking him about the Writing Project when we were talking in October (as he was msging from a beach cafe while on vacation) (see: Talking with Darren Rowse – ProBlogger.net).

The project is finally here and participating in the last project brought a massive traffic spike to this blog, plus a number of the visitors have gone on to be regular readers too.

Besides the traffic, Darren’s also doing a random drawing of winners to receive prizes.

Prizes? Are they decent? Some might ask.

How does a week’s stay at a villa in Costa Del Sol, Spain (valued at 1,000 Euros) sound?

Ok, I’m showing my techie tendencies by hankering after the $200 Amazon voucher instead.

Nonetheless, Darren’s opening slots for the 10 sponsored prizes and if you’re a sponsor you can expect a number of hits on your page too.

In case you’re wondering about Writing Project sponsor benefits and Darren’s blog stats, he states:

• Sponsors will receive links in every post on the project during the week that it runs (last time I think this was on about 7 posts).
• Last project just under 350 bloggers participated and many more read the pages associated with the project.
• Most participants linked to pages with the sponsors listed. Some of these bloggers linked not only to the project but to the sponsors of it directly.
• ProBlogger is read by 5000 daily readers via the blog and another 8000 via it’s feeds.

For more info, visit: Get Exposure by Sponsoring ProBlogger’s Next Group Writing Project

Adam’s known for helping my buddy, millionaire entrepreneur Adam Khoo, launch his Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires product.

Take a look at this:

Adam Wong clocked $9,000 in 2 weeks through his internet marketing efforts. Although I believe it’s a revenue figure, the net profit would be close to that because it’s Adam Khoo’s digital product at: Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.

I was talking to Adam Wong the other night and he was asking about traffic generation strategies.

I believe traffic hasn’t been difficult to generate provided you have a traffic plan.

Jo Han and Ewen gave a great presentation at their Unstoppable Traffic workshop a couple of weeks ago and will be releasing a DVD set soon, but in the meantime, I’ll be doing a short series.

Traffic generation is, unfortunately, related to Search Engine Optimization. I don’t particularly like spending inordinate amounts of time figure out the optimal keywords, staring at keyword lists and spending all day insert meta and other HTML tags into my blog post. So I’ll cover the organic aspects of traffic generation.

• Onsite Traffic Generation:

Blogging, hands down, is a great platform to begin with, compared to creating a static website.

Between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress, I hear that Google just loves Blogspot and gives preferential positioning to blogger blogs in the SERPs (search engine results pages) (Though no one has exactly come out to say this publicly.). It probably helps that Google owns Blogspot.

I like WordPress though, because the plugins such as Popularity Contest, help level the playing field and give your blog a level of functionality and benefits that Blogspot blogs lack.

I plan to author a series on essential WordPress plugins that I’m using that should be in every WordPress bloggers arsenal.

If you are looking at profit-oriented blogging, be sure to check out SecretBlogWeapon.com for this amazing tool by blogger Gobala Krishnan. It incorporates a niche research guide, SEO optimization specifically for blogs and traffic generators.

• Offsite Traffic Generation:

By targeting blogs and forums in your target niche (such Internet Marketing, golf, dog grooming, wedding planning), you can go outside of your blog and prospect for high targeted and relevant prospects.

For the Internet Marketing niche, I head to:

Blogs:

• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (Shoemoney.com)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
• Derek Gehl (Internet Marketing Center)
• Super Affiliate Ewen Chia (SecretAffiliateWeapon is a great resource)

Forums:

• DigitalPoint (forums.digitalpoint.com)
• Internet Marketing Singapore
• Conquer Your Niche
• And my own DigitalKeiretsu forum

My belief is that if you provide original content (even in a blog comment!) which:

• provides value to the reader
• deepens the conversation
• provides resources to relevant posts or websites

You will be viewed as a good contributor.

As you demonstrate your knowledge and competence, you can expect visitors to your site.

Traffic generation is simple, isn’t it?