A few hours ago I presented a webinar class on affiliate marketing. It was a lot of fun ( at least for me. ) I hope the people in the class thought so to.

One of the things that I said is that to make things happen online, you have to DO. It is not enough to learn, study, read, etc. You have to make things happen. Spend at least 50% of your online time writing or creating.

I realized that in life, the same thing applies. To make things happen, (Like for example, Going to Costa Rica) you have to DO to make things happen.

Well, currently I am resetting up a corner of a room that used to contain my computer and workspace. I let it fill up with boxes of junk when I bought a laptop and started working with the laptop more than my desktop.

But I realized something - when I had that corner setup I was making over 10k a month on the internet, from adsense, affiliate sales, and sales of my own products. When I let it lapse, my online income dropped substantially (I obviously did not have a Freedom Business System setup.)

I was also having lots more fun online than I have been lately.

And today when I went to make some “how to” videos for my NicheCreator software, I realized that I was being blocked by not having that space setup.

So for me, “Doing” at the moment means cleaning out, reorginizing and setting back up my corner.

I also plan to setup a Media Center Server for the other 4 computers in our house. I have been planning on doing that for a while and gotten blocked by the same pile.

So, I am listening to some good rocking music and cleaning and organizing! I hope you are being as productive.

An interesting thing has been happening between James Brausch and CD Baby.

CDBaby has been running a contest for the top selling CD, and James Brausch has been promoting his CDBaby CD’s from his blog. He has achieved top spot, but it seems that CDBaby is trying to cheat him out of it.

James has the option of suing CDBaby, or ignoring their behaviour. He has asked his blog readers what they would do. I would ignore them and take my business elsewhere. Here is why:

The amount of money gained suing CDBaby would be miniscule compared to the amount that could be gained putting that same time, effort, and energy into creating and promoting - two things that James does very well.

Also, while I do believe in justice, I don’t believe in vengence, and often lawsuits end up being more about vengeance then justice. It is just bad energy that hurts all parties involved.

In my opinion, the bottom line would be better served by forgiving, and moving your business elsewhere. As for justice, why worry about giving CDBaby what they deserve? They haven’t worried about giving James what he deserves, so what should it matter if CDBaby gets their punishment/reward now or later? CDBaby is being short sighted and losing valuable online goodwill. A lawsuit might even help CDBaby fix their actions and profit them more in the future. If this is the case, and the lawsuit is done at the expense of James Brausch’s emotional energy and time (much more valuable then any money involved,) then is that justice? I don’t think so.

-Steve

What if you hate your life? Or maybe you don’t quite hate it, but you’re just not happy with your current situation? Perhaps you’re depressed, bored, or apathetic. Or maybe you just don’t see the point in living at all.

If you don’t see the point in living, then you’re missing the point of life entirely. The point of life is to enjoy it.
Read More . . .

I have too many clothes in my closets and drawers. I think I will use
this method to get rid of them.

I need to get more organized. When I google’d around for ideas, I came across this post:

read the 27 tips to getting and staying organized

So, now that I have knowledge on how to get organized I just need to figure out how to stop procrastinating . . .

One of the easiest ways to get traffic and make money is to give people what they are looking for. How do you find out what people are looking for? Well, here are some resources in no particular order:

http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/ - top 20 searches at yahoo.com

http://50.lycos.com/ - top 50 searches at lycos.com

http://hotsearches.aol.com/

http://www.foia.cia.gov/Top25PhrasesMonthly.asp

http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

http://technorati.com/pop/

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/searchspy/

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://pulse.ebay.com/

http://buy.ebay.com/

There are plenty more - I found most of these by googling “top searches”

I have known about this place for years:
CafePress - there you can upload your graphic (even if it is just text) and they will sell verything from t-shirts to coffee cups with your image on it, and give you a piece of the sale. I had my hosting company logo on some stuff at http://cafrepress.com/crecon years ago!

There are a surprising amount of websites that will pay you to write for them. You don’t have to be an accomplished writer or famous personality to do this.

The first place I became aware of is Associated Content. Billing themselves as “The People’s Media Company” they will pay you for your original written content, video content, and slide shows. I have written several articles for them and they seem to be pretty good. How much will you get paid? They pay from $3-$20 per submission and also give you a performance bonus if your content gets a lot of traffic. This is a site that you can definately make more than minimum wage on.

Another site that I found is ReviewStream.com. They pay for reviews of pretty much anything. To quote their website:

You could review anything around you including: any products, hi-end technics, companies, hotels, politics, cities, stores on your street, or even your neighbors pets! We’ll pay you for all of the reviews. Did you visit a barbershop today? Review it and get paid! What about your shopping today? Review the shops you visited and get some money back in your pocket! Did you return from a vacation? Review the hotel and its staff, the car you rented, cities you visited, restaurants (including McDonald’s), fashion stores and street markets … everything!

They are currently paying $1.50 per review and 10 cents everytime your review gets a vote. I haven’t written for them but they seem worth checking out. (Caveat: They have some bad press online. See This article for example.)

Another way to make money is to focus your articles or reviews on a product that will pay you whenever someone buys through your link. This is often called Article Marketing and the easiest way is to look at Clickbank.com and PayDotCom.com for products to promote. Then write a review or article about that product, and submit it to one of the following locations with your affilite link or hoplink.

Places to submit articles and reviews that seem to get indexed by google quickly:
http://www.usfreeads.com/ - classified ads - have to pay a minimal fee to include a url
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
http://www.searchwarp.com/
http://www.wordpress.com/
http://www.squidoo.com/

If you don’t have a blog yet - get one! It is a very easy way to publish online - in a future post I will tell you how to use your blog to sell your own products - and there are many places like PayPerPost that will pay you to make blog entries in your own blog!

If you have or like to make videos Scott Kirsner has a list of places that you can get paid to submit your video. You can make videos from something as simple as CamStudio(free). CamStudio does have some quirks - the settings it comes with by default do not work. But with a few setting changes (I will address them in a later post) it works as well as software costing $600.00.

I am trying out YouTube as a traffic generator for some of my products. Check out http://youtube.com/profile?user=isuccess to see what I am doing.