With my new custom blog design due to be launched in the next couple of days, I thought I woul discuss the 5 things that made me decide it was time to make the switch. 

1. To Stand Out
   If you started an offline business would you want your store to look like 100 others stores? For me it is the same with blogging - I treat it as a business which means I want to create a way for people to remember me. With so many bloggers - especially in my niche, it is important to me that I stand out.
   
   
2. To Create Buzz
   Have you ever noticed that whenever someone gets a new design (and it is good) there is always a lot of attention given to it?It happened with:
   * Tyler Cruz
   * John Cow
   * ProBlogger
   
   I can vividly remember when each of these blogs launched their new theme and they were the talk of the town.
   
   
3. To Brand Myself
   Think of all the big name bloggers, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of them?Here is what I think:
   
   John Chow - Fast Car, and That Massive Header
   ProBlogger - His logo, and then his nice clean layout
   Zac Johnson - His cartoon of himself
   John Cow - The guy and his cap, pretty much his whole header
   
   What I realised was that the way I remember each blogger was by their layout, or part of it. So what have I done to brand myself with my new layout? You will have to wait and see, but I will say that I do have a ‘cartoon’ of myself - just a fair bit different to everyone else!What I want is for people to hear my name and automatically associate with who I am - and this is always done by visualisation.
   
   
4. Customised To My Needs
   My current design has served me well for the short while that I have had it, but it just didn’t have the features that I was looking for. With a custom blog design I knew that I could pick and choose the features that I did and didn’t want.Some Features I Have Included In My New Layout:
   
   * Featured Post - Great for Annoucements
   * Most Popular & Most Recent Post - Excellent for new visitors
   * Got Banners Plugin - Allows me to rotate the positions of my ads
   * Live Comment Preview
   * Two Column Layout - Keeps it clutter free leaving heaps of room for content.You will have to wait until I launch it to find out the rest
5. Shows I Am Serious
   I have thrown a fair bit of money into, not only the layout but also the coding because I wanted to make sure it was the best, and I think that visitors will see that is my way of saying that I am here to stay.

Do you see the benefit of a custom blog design? Why do you have one, or why are you considering getting one?

 

There are over 100,000,000 blogs in the world. That’s right over 100 million! That is a lot of bloggers and I bet less than .001 percent of them are making over $100 a month from their blog. And here is 5 reasons why you are one of the 99.99%.

1. You ‘re A Quitter!
It will all get to hard for you. When your traffic doesn’t grow as fast as you want and your subscriber count drops, when you get tired of making $0.10 a day of from your adsense ads (if you even make that much), you will chuck in the towel and quit thinking that there is no way you can make good money from blogging.

2. You’re a Copycat!
You are to lazy to spend even 15 minutes thinking up a creative blog post that will actually give your visitors a reason to stay and your subscribers a reason not to leave that you just join with the 100’s of other lazy bloggers and just post about whatever John Chow or Darren Rowse post about. Why? Cause it is easy and doesn’t take effort, and making money online is supposed to be easy right?

3. You are Just Plain Greedy!
I bet you are one of those bloggers that started the blogging journey by installing wordpress and then adding adsense and a plethera of other advertising widgets and affiliate links - before you even changed from the standard theme. You don’t care about providing quality content for your visitors and subscribers because it is all about making a quick buck.

4. Your Content Sucks!
Finally you have written a unique post. You are getting all excited because of all the traffic you are going to get from it - but you get one visitor from your signature link in a forum and even your 2 subscribers don’t even bother reading. Why? Because your post was boring. Ever thought that people subscribe to your blog because they want your opinion  not a review that looks at things from boths sides and is just a wishy washy piece of trash?

5. You Are Too Cool For School!
You don’t need to network, right? You can be a success on your own so why waste time getting to know your fellow bloggers and building relationships? I mean you are much to busy filling your posts with affiliate links to bother about building relationships that could open up opportunies. You are too busy tweaking your adsense so people accidently click it instead of reading other blogs and learning more about your niche - from someone who may actually know more about it than you.

If you liked this post then please subscribe to my full rss feed. You can also subscribe via email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

How often do you check the stats of your blog?

do you know:

• how many visitors a day you are getting?
• How long they stay?
• What they look at?
• Or where they come from?

It has only been over the last week or so that I have actually started really looking, AND ANALYSING my stats.

Before that I would just randomly check how many visitors I was getting every couple of weeks, notice there was no improvement and feel a bit dejected.
The biggest thing that I got from analysing my traffic is finding out that I get a very substancial chunk of my traffic (almost 50%) from one source - Digital Point Forum.

Why was I getting That Much Traffic From A Forum

The next thing I needed to do was figure out why I was getting all this traffic from Digital Point, because it wasn’t like I was posting like crazy, and the link in my signature just says ‘Entrepreneur Blog’ and links to here.

What I worked out was the key was the rss feed that showed my latest blog post with every comment that I made on the forum, and the more intriguing the post title the more visitors I got.

Now What Do I Do?

Make the most of it of course. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to go and spam the forum just so people read my post title and want to click through and visit my blog.

What I have been doing for the last couple of days is:

• posting questions that I would usually just ask a friend, or search the internet for - ones that start a discussion.
• posting a replying more frequently than usual
• Making sure I have interesting post titles to capture their interests

So What Happened?

In the last two days I not only see my daily unique traffic double, with 92 unique views from DigitalPoint yesterday alone, but my rss count has also doubled as well. And if you look at the picture above that is my alexa ranking over the last
It was just one simple thing that has improved the traffic to my blog so much, it makes me think what other little things I could be doing to improve my blog.

If you liked this post, I would appreciate it if you subscribed to my rss feed!

I hear so many people that I meet on a day to day basis say things like:

‘I don’t Need to Be rich’

‘Money Isn’t everything’

‘I’m happy just working my 9-5′

‘More Money just causes more problems’

And each time I hear something to this affect, I just want to slap them!

These people think that they aren’t being greedy and just taking their place in life, but what they are really doing is just being selfish and lazy.

Lets take a look at these statements one by one, and find out whats wrong with them and what they are really saying.

1. I Don’t Need To Be Rich

What they are really saying:

I only care about myself
As long as I have enough, thats all that matters.

This statement is such a selfish one. It makes the person the center of their own universe - as long as they are comfortable that is all that matters.

Think about it for a second. If you are able to create an excess that means you will have more than you need - and allows you to be generous, and give to others who may need help at the moment.

I love reading articles about successful people giving large portions of their money to charities. So many people think:

‘Thats ok for them, $1million is nothing when you have $1billion’

But is it? Is it any easier for them to give their money away? I think it is only easier for them because they have been doing it the whole time - they gave when they had little and now there are just a couple more zeros on the end.
2. Money Isn’t Everything

Another variations: Money doesn’t bring happiness

What they are really saying:

I’m just jealous because I don’t have any money, so I’ll pretend it doesn’t matter

I’ll be the first to admit that I agree with this statement - money is not everything, but it sure can do a whole lot of good. There are so many people who are less fortunate than we are, usually of no fault of their own. What does being comforatable do to help them?

I think there is a lot of growth in the awareness of social justice in the younger generation, with young people getting behind projects like ‘Make Poverty History’ and ‘Live8′ but the thing we need to look as is are these young people going to be able to have the money and the time to actually make a difference?

3. I am Happy Working My 9-5

What they are really saying:

I am too scared to give up my job

I must make a point here. Some people do actually love their job, and are making a difference by the work that they do. But coming off the last point - a lot of people are not able to help others in the way that they want because they are too busy.

Personally I know for myself at the moment, I am working 8:30am - 5pm then I go home and have things on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday Nights most are to do with my involvement in my Church - but it is very hard to juggle my online marketing, my job, and my other commitments.

How much more time would we have to help others if we were able to remove the 9-5 of our job?

4. ‘More Money just causes more problems’

I think this is a big misconception.

People see the celebrities in the media wasting their lives away, and blame it on the fact that they have too much money. I don’t think that is the case at all. I think that the reason some (cause there are a lot of great celebrity role models - they just dont get the publicity) celebrities gain their money to easily, and there for have no respect for the power that it holds, so they get greedy and just spend, spend, spend - on them selves of course.

These people are just selfish. but think of good that you can do if you use your wealth wisely, and the satisfaction that you would receive from knowing that your money is being used for good, to help improved someone elses way of life.

Money isn’t the problem, love of money is the problem.

I have just gone through the process of chosing the niche for my next BANS store, and I thought I would share with you my process of choosing a niche to help others. (feel free to critique my process)

1. Go to Ebay and find an interesting category.

I like to look for ones that have expensive products, that people would be interested in checking out even if they are not interested in buying. So I went straight for the collectables section.

2. Choose a Category You Like

After looking through the collectables, one kind of jumped out at me.

Fossils - I thought this was an interesting topic so I clicked on it to view the products and sorted it by most expensive first, and found out there are a couple of fossils for in the low $XX,XXX.

So I had found a niche of interest, but was there enough people interested in the topic?

3. Check Search Engine Stats

I like to use the SEO Book Tool because it gives indepth info on both google and yahoo search results.

What I did was type “Fossils” into the search box, and see what came up. there are a few key phrases that are getting a lot of traffic, but they would also probably have a lot of competition for keyword results. Plus I needed just the right keyword.

A little way down the page I noticed “Fossils For Sale”

It was getting about 3,500 searches a month, which is quite good, and fitted my future BANS store perfectly.

4. Check Your Competition

Do a google search for your chosen key phrase, try with and with out paranthesis. If your search results in over a couple of 1,000,000 results you know that your niche is to broad, so go back to step 3 and look for a less competitive keyword (but make sure it is still getting traffic).

“Fossils for Sale” has 1,420,000

This is still a fair bit of competition, but I am willing to give this a shot, but only if I can get the right domain.

5. Buy Your Key Phrase As Your Domain

Go to your preferred domain registrar, and type your keyword into their search box. Don’t fret if the .com is taken, it doesn’t make too much of a difference, and the .info is much cheaper anyway ($2.99 with Godaddy).

www.fossilsforsale.com was taken, but www.fossilsforsale.info was available - so I snapped it up.

This is the process I go through to pick a quality niche, I hope it is a help to you.

I know I have been plugging the benefits of report writing for a while now, but I have never actually done it before - so to be honest I have no credibility on the subject!

But that is about to change, I am currently about to go into lock down to write a small 15-20 page report for my acne blog. The report will be free - I know I talked about selling them for $7-10 each, but this is about list building and brand awareness, not money at this point in time.

So Here Is My Strategy:

1. I Focused On My Strengths - I havn’t cured my acne so I cannot promote a so called miracle cure. What I have focused on is what I know that doesn’t work - some of the myths.

2. Topic Sure To Attract Attention - I will keep this under wraps until I launch it (you never know who is reading this blog :P)

3. Written In A Conversational Tone - There is nothing worse than a ebook report that is written like a text book. This will be very easy to read, and only take 10-20min to read.
The Free report will be targetted at long term acne sufferers. This is my main target market, because :

1. They will be long term readers

2. They are the most desperate to try new products as they just want to get rid of their acne.
Will be interesting to see how it turns out, I will be getting a professionally designed ebook cover done - and hopefully I can build a decent opt-in list, and traffic to my new blog.

Over the last couple of days my work future has become a little uncertain.

My boss is looking at selling his current franchise to more onto something else, and to be quite honest if he does, then I won’t want to stay - and if he asks me to go with him, I don’t think I will.

I feel like a change, but I am not sure how to handle it.

In all honestly I would love to focus on internet marketing full time. But at the moment I don’t have the results to back myself up when it comes to explaining to my parents that I want to be a full-time internet marketer.

So over the next couple of months I really need to bump up my online workload to build my online ventures to a level that I can live off.

I don’t need anything flash, I live at home and am pretty frugal when it comes to spending money, but I want to be making some money before I finish up my current job.

And in all honestly, I really don’t want another job. I hate the idea of working for someone else, and will ever be truly happy while I am.

So keep watching this space as I use this as a motivation to take things up a notch. And if you havn’t already subscribed to my rss feed than now is the time - you will not want to miss the next couple of months of my online journey.

I know I havn’t been blogging here as recent as I would like to, but as you know I have just launched my latest blog, and to be honest - It just seems so much easier to write about acne.

I know it is said a lot, probably even too much, but my tip for you is:

Blog about what you are passionate about!
Im not saying I am not passionate about making money online, cause I am. But the thing with the topic my new blog is that:

1. I live with it
2. It is something I think about constantly
3. I am constantly researching it
4. It is a part of me

Can you say that about the subject of your blog?

If you can, then you will have no problems coming up with the next post, how to attract more visitors. You just you - because you are passionate about the subject and it drives you.

“Wow… thats a bold statment to be throwing around” you may say.

True, but let me explain.
I logged onto DealDotCom today, and noticed the product was Keyword Elite. Keyword Elite is a product that I have been looking at purchasing for a while to use with my PPC campaigns, but at $176.00 I just wasn’t ready to purchase.

So when I saw it today, I thought “you beauty” I mean at $129.00 it is still expensive, but it saves me $50 (any kind of saving is good right?)

But then a thought hit me.

What is the affiliate payout on clickbank for the product?

So I went on over to the Clickbank market place and found Keyword Elite, and do you know what the pay out was?

50% per affiliate sale!

That means that DealDotCom in theory could just be using a clickbank affilate link, to purchase Keyword Elite through and reselling it at a $30 profit! It makes me wonder whether they are even cutting deals with the product owners.

I might just have to purchase the product through my own Clickbank hoplink, and keep the $30 for myself.

I woke up this morning expect my five latest articles to be accepted and taking me one step closer to an upgraded account. I have already had 14 articles accepted by EzA and was expecting to see the number jump to 19 when I logged in.

But what I found was a totally different story.

I got one email saying that one of my articles had been rejected due to an affiliate link. Which is just stupid as I have used one of my own domains in all my articles which is then forwarded to an affiliate link, in accordance to their terms and conditions.

I don’t understand how 14 articles with a link to the same domain get accepted and 1 doesn’t? How does this work?

So I logged onto my EzA account, hoping it would be an easy fix and got another shock.

My account had been suspended because of “An invalid email address on file”

Obviously my hosting provider was down for the couple of minutes that they checked two of my articles, because they reported invalid links, and then they tried to email me and my email bounced.

I mean apply some logic, I have received 28 emails to that email, 1 each time it write the article and 1 each time it is accepted. None of them bounced back! Wouldn’t you first check back at how the submitter had 14 articles accepted and no emails bounced back - promoting the same domain, and think “maybe they are having some hosting problems”. I mean this is the first thing I would think of.

Why suspend an account, when you can just put the articles on hold, and ask for an explanation? I think there are some EzA reviewers that are picking at little things to the “Nth” degree.

Sorry about the rant, but it has really got me frustrated, I have just started to get something happening, with:
125 Views
2 Affiliate Sales
$56.56 Profit
in just 4 days

And now I have to wait at least a day for my account to get reinstated.