Article provided by Ishta Roth

My grandmother is an internet success, and spends her free time enjoying the pleasures of working to her own schedule. She loves the laid back attitude she can finally take advantage of after over 20 years in the public sector.

Being at home and starting her own internet business has improved her temperament immensely, and her inner and outer wellbeing and health have increased. She now sparkles with a relaxed energy and beauty.

My mom is a work from home mom as well. She enjoys working from home for the simple benefits of the wellbeing of her family. She is home to greet my sibling’s everyday, and she takes a keen interest in their lives and personalities that other mothers might miss.

My mother can tell by looking at her little people if they have had a good or bad day – whether they ate all their lunch, got detention or an award. She knows when they are tired and hungry, or overactive and hungry, but most of the time she knows when they are happy and hungry.

Every night my mom makes a healthy home made dinner, and every morning after breakfast she sends the little ones to school with a smile and a packed lunch full of home made goodies.

During daylight hours my mother is an internet fiend. She blogs and complete surveys, she writes internet articles and sends email like there is no tomorrow. When she completes her daily techno “job” she attends to her other areas of expertise. She cleans her house, bakes yummy food (which she almost always lets me try first) and she still has time to call me, spend time with me and show the same amount of love and care with me, an adult, as she does with her smaller children.

The women in my family are smart and strong and independent. In my spare time I read their blogs and do my best not to be lazy and do nothing during the day while I am at home, and go to work at night.

I love to see pictures on their blogs and I remember the stories and anecdotes they post with humour and widescreen colour and surround sound memories. Working from home has improved the lives of my mother and her mother. Everyone should enjoy the freedoms these women enjoy because once in while all women need a good massage and brilliant manicure.

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The other day I met a young mother who is home schooling her two young boys.  

While we were talking I introduced her to the world of blogging and making money from home.  She had never heard of blogging and she is not alone in this.  Hardly anyone I meet, including family on my recent trip to NZ, know about blogging and when you consider that there are around 98 million blogs on the internet and the number is growing daily, I find it incredible that people haven’t stumbled upon the term somewhere.

But then when I mentioned it to my husband he pointed out that he and our immediate family only know about blogging because I am so involved in it along with the affiliate marketing side of having an online work from home business.

Paula and I have been working with our various blogs for a little while now and realised the potential for making money from this medium in the early days. 

Of all the people that I have told about blogging, and I mention to anyone willing to listen, only one has taken up the challenge and that is my daughter Varinina.  My granddaughter Demelza started a blog but teenage angst has gotten in the way of her progression with it. 

Now we all know that it takes time to build up a blog that people want to read and keep coming back to, so it has to have something to offer that is interesting and/or informative.  The content needs to be well written and easy to read. 

If the blog is about a product such as our area rugs  or lingerie blogs then you are able to add Google and merchant ads that relate to your product and this will generate an income for you.  It won’t make you an overnight millionaire but as your online traffic increases you should be able to make a nice little income.

The next biggest single thing you need to do is get traffic into your site, so you will need to promote your blog to sites like www.spicypage.com, www.mybloglog.com, and any other number of blog directories and communities that can easily be found on the web by typing ‘blog directories’ or ‘blog communities’ into the search engine.

So we now know that:

• the content needs to be well written
• place Google ads on the page
• place merchant ads on the page
• actively promote your blog to get traffic

Blogging is not only a way to produce an income, it is fun especially when you are writing about things that interest you. Once you join a blog community and start to read other peoples blogs you will find some are personal diaries, some are humourous, some topic specific and most make great reading.  Sometimes you will come across something that clashes with your beliefs, simply move on, do not get involved in silly name calling or online arguments, remember to respect other peoples point of view, they have a right to their opinions as much as you do.

Not too long ago I received an email from a reader wanting to know whether to sign up with Wealthy Affiliate University or go with the James Martell Super Bootcamp instead. My advice was to try both. The reason I said this was that they are so totally different that it is really too difficult to compare them side by side. Plus you can try both programs for a month for a minimal amount to see which one suits. In fact, to try the James Martell Bootcamp for a month costs absolutely nothing….and Wealthy Affiliate costs just $39 – that’s only $1.25 a day – less than a cup of coffee.

We are members of both simply because they both provide excellent value, provide huge amounts of info to help you progress towards your goal of making money online and are professional in their approach. We have been members of the James Martell Bootcamp for a few years now and Wealthy Affiliate for close to a year so we have long term experience with each.

Even though they are vastly different in their approach they do have a few things in common – they both provide tons of information – tutorials, videos and forums.

So how do they work?

James Martell Bootcamp

The James Martell Bootcamp is more of a system that takes you by the hand step-by-step with James himself giving the instructions. You meet once a week in an online conference room where James gives a 1 1/2 to 2 hour lesson that also includes a Q&A at the end. This is where you can ask James questions either by typing it in to the text box on the screen or by using head phones and actually speaking to James direct.

The basic goal is to learn how to create a website using Drupal (a content management system) (although you have the option of using any type of system including WordPress or XSitePro for instance) and driving traffic through natural search. It goes through choosing a topic, building the website, adding content, video and audio as well creating a newsletter and forum. It concentrates on developing just one website and focusing everything on that. And of course it goes into adding affiliate products and making money through Adsense.

The lessons are all recorded and you are given ‘homework’ for the week although it’s up to you whether you do it or not.

Also included are:

• regular Coffee Talks with well known internet marketing gurus and celebrities. You can attend these live via phone or listen to them later as a recording…or both.
• transcripts of the weeks lessons.
• fortnightly Q&A sessions in the conference room – these allow you to ask James questions that you might have about anything.
• Affiliate Buzz – this is a fortnightly recorded chat James has with a friend to discuss affiliate news, events, how his business is going, how some of his students businesses are going, events he has attended recently and so on.
• acesss to the member forum – this is where students get together to ask questions and discuss their progress.

Wealthy Affiliate University

The Wealthy Affiilate University works a little differently. It provides an eight week course but it is available only as text. In other words, Kyle and Carson (the owners of WA) don’t run a live weekly lesson so it’s up to you to read the lesson and go from there. You don’t get to ask questions as you go through the lesson – well you can, but it involves sending an email to Kyle or Carson. With the James Martell Bootcamp on the other hand you can ask James a question live as you go through the weekly lesson so everything can be clarified there and then. You don’t have to wait for a response.

Wealthy Affiliate also focuses more on bum marketing techniques – in other words, ways to make money online without having to spend a cent. They also include tutorials relating to Pay Per Click.

They don’t focus as much on setting up a website and driving traffic through natural search like the James Martell Bootcamp does. Instead their approach is more about picking out a product and then creating a review type site. So your site is pretty much a few pages with reviews and you drive traffic via PPC. They also go into driving traffic through natural search but not to the degree that the James Martell Bootcamp does. The James Martell Bootcamp is all about natural search.

Wealthy Affiliate also focus heavily on article marketing and using sites such as Squidoo and UsFreeads to make money.

Also included are:

• free web templates
• keyword tools
• access to the member forum
• Clickbank search tools
• an amazing number of tutorials on all sorts of subjects
• free hosting
• Rapid Writer

Our Recommendations

• If you are new to affiliate marketing and need someone to hold your hand then we recommend the James Martell Super Bootcamp.
• If you want to learn how to make money using natural search then we recommend the James Martell Super Bootcamp.

• If you want to build a website and become an authority on your subject then we recommend the James Martell Bootcamp.
• If you want to learn how to make money using actual products rather than ebooks then we recommend the James Martell Bootcamp.

• If you are looking at ways to make money online without having to spend a cent or very little then we recommend Wealthy Affiliate.
• If you are looking to make money using Pay Per Click methods then we recommend Wealthy Affiliate.
• If you want to make money using Clickbank products then we recommend Wealthy Affiliate.

And finally…

Neither method is going to make you money overnight – it just isn’t possible with legitimate methods. However, with either method you will see money start to trickle in after a couple of months and then it builds from there.

We recommend you trial both methods for a month or two to see which one suits you.

Well there has been another pagerank update for this year and this time on April 1… yes April Fools Day!

I’ve only just noticed it today as one of my sites – yes this one – lost it’s pagerank completely. Not that there was much of a pagerank on here anyway at just 2 but still a pagerank is better than no pagerank at all.

I know that you get those out there who go on about how pagerank is overrated and you shouldn’t pay any attention to it and I agree to a point. Pagerank is definitely not what it used to be but really it’s all we’ve got. Well maybe it’s not the only thing but it is a quick and easy way to gauge the value of a website. It may not be perfect but it does the job.

I don’t actively promote this site in a big way – in fact, I hardly do anything with it at all except write blog posts. I really put most of my efforts into my product niche sites so I can’t expect to get much of a pagerank.

So although my pagerank has disappeared from this site and it is a bit disappointing I haven’t actually noticed any change in traffic.

But I have my theories about why the pagerank disappeared. I use a Recent Comments plugin. This displays visitors who leave the most comments and includes a link to their website. This encourages people to leave a comment. My theory is that some of these sites may be considered ‘bad neighbourhood’ type sites and Google doesn’t like it when you link to spammy type websites. I am going to remove that plugin and see if it makes a difference for the next Google pagerank update.

As for my other websites, one of them as gone from a pagerank 3 to a 4 and the rest have remained static. Interestingly, that site that has gone to a pagerank 4 has one page on it that has a pagerank of 5. It is not the homepage as would be expected but an internal page. It was just an article I uploaded about a month ago and linked to it from the hompage. Not sure why that is the only page with a pagerank of 5. Maybe Google are still in the processing of updating so it may change but I will keep an eye on it and post the results here.

How did you go in the latest Google pagerank update?

Well it’s been a busy few weeks. For most of that time we have been transferring most of our websites to WordPress. The websites in question are very niche product sites but they have been languishing in the doldrums for quite some time now due to neglect on our part. We had been concentrating most of our time on just a couple of sites which has seemed to work but at the expense of the rest. We just felt it was time to upgrade them and bring some new life into them.

They were all websites we had created using Frontpage which is a great website editor but we really wanted to have our websites accessible online so we could access them from anywhere in the world. We both love travel and we don’t want to rely on always having to lug along a laptop with us to work on our websites. Having said that however, neither of us has ever gone travelling without our laptops but at least if our laptop goes missing with WordPress we can easily head down to a local Internet cafe and logon and get to work.

WordPress is also so much easier to work with. To add a page to Frontpage requires at least three times the effort and takes so much longer. With WordPress you can have the page up in minutes and published to the Internet.

WordPress is also very simple to use. It may take a little while to figure out the functions but it is simple enough for anyone to get the hang of and you don’t need html experience.

And when it comes down to it, Google loves WordPress. We can add a post to one of our sites and within half an hour it can be on the front page of Google search.

We had also tried Drupal in the past. Drupal is a cotent management system and very sophisticated but after about three weeks we just had to give it up. For one thing, the site kept crashing for no reason whatsoever and everything we did seemed to involve about three steps compared to the one step in WordPress. 

It took us three weeks to get the site to an almost workable condition and even then it still needed more work. We decided at that point to give up on Drupal and move to WordPress. It took us about a day to get that site into WordPress and up and published. Compared to the 3 weeks of Drupal this was a major difference so we haven’t looked back since then.

Do you use WordPress or another form of blogging or content management system? Which do you prefer?