Yesterday I was having a think back to when we were really struggling to make a living online….and actually it wasn’t that long ago. And as I was thinking about it, I wondered why it took us so long to start making a decent income.

We had been working really hard on our websites on a daily basis for over two years but were nowhere near to making a living from it. In fact the only thing that kept us going was knowing in our minds and hearts that this would eventually work if we put in the hard yards.

As I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t just one thing that finally did it for us – instead it was a series of actions that got us to where we are today. They are what I call ‘massive action’ tasks (you’ll know that phrase if you read or listen to Tony Robbins).

In other words, as we reached a stage where we could see that the amount of input wasn’t reaping the rewards, we changed our tactics and instead of continuing to do the same tasks everyday, we took massive action to take us to the next level. Now we are by no means experts at it, and really at the time we didn’t even equate what we did to taking massive action….we just arrived at the conclusion that we needed to do something extraordinary if we were going to make this work.

I love the saying – “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” This happens a lot with people trying to make money online. They continue to do the same things day after day and wonder why they aren’t getting the traffic levels they want or the income they are trying to achieve. If you really want to leap ahead of the rest, then you need to take massive action.

Here are just some of the things we have done in the past that have taken us to the next level in our internet business:

1. Added massive amounts of content – At the time, we had read about two guys online who were adding something like 20 posts a day. We knew 20 posts were just a little beyond our capacity so we decided on 8 posts a day for one of our product blogs. That meant we had to each write 4 blog posts each a day. I did all of mine over the weekend. I think Wanda staggered hers over the week. It gave us a lot of articles to write but we did it.

The effort paid off and the result was that it made a big difference in the amount of traffic to the blog and a huge difference in the amount of  our affiliate sales.

We didn’t end up doing it forever – from memory I think it was a couple of months and then we started to reduce the number of articles steadily over a period of time. The funny thing was that the traffic didn’t decrease – it stayed at a steady level and continues to increase as we add content at a more manageable pace.

2. Changed the Quality of Our Content – We have a lot of blogs and a lot of content, but I can say with all honesty that a good proportion of our blogs have a lot of rather inferior quality content. This is because at the time we weren’t really thinking about our readers but more about making a dollar. When we changed our focus to providing more value to our readers, we noticed a huge difference in our income levels….and I mean huge. This was a major turning point for us. You can read a little about how we write our product reviews here.

3. Concentrated on Less – What do I mean by this?  Well we focused on only one or two websites instead of 20. This made a big big big difference….I know that’s a lot of ‘bigs’ but I need to emphasise the importance of this one. When we were working on all our blogs, we were really spreading ourselves too thin. It just wasn’t effective for us. The trick is to focus on one thing until it starts making you money, then and only then do you move onto the next thing.

4. A Change in Thinking – I think this one was a key ingredient for us. We needed to change our attitude to things particularly in relation to making money online. I remember us having a discussion about why we weren’t making the income we wanted and we came to the conclusion that the only people who make money online are those that tell other people how to make money online.

Well we know that’s not the case now but that was our thinking back then. After all we were working ourselves to a frazzle and getting nowhere, so that must be the reason. We all know this is a fallacy and product sites work extremely well, thank you very much.

5. More Time for Ourselves – It was at this point that we also started to work on ourselves a bit more rather than just the business. This meant that we started to take time out to exercise and to spend part of our day listening to self improvement cds like that provided by Tony Robbins. Funnily enough, the more time we took for ourselves, the more productive we were in our internet business.

Don’t let anyone tell you that making money online is quick and easy. For the majority of us it’s a hard slog. But there is plenty of opportunity for everyone and that is why we want to share our story with you in the hope it will encourage you when it seems that things won’t ever improve, just hang in there it will get better.

Just remember to:

• provide quality information for your readers
• look after yourself, physically and mentally

…and really believe that you can do – because you know what – You Can!

Want to know where we learn to make money online? Head on over to Wealthy Affiliate University for all the latest info.

An eBook is a great way of making money on the internet and you don’t need to have a website to do it. Nor do you need to actually sell the eBook to make money from it.  So how do you do it…well in a nutshell, it involves you writing a short ebook preferably about a topic you know about and distributing it for free around the internet.  It doesn’t have to be long – 10-15 pages is enough. In order to make money from it, you add multiple affiliate links to different products within the ebook.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1: Choose a topic that you have an interest in

The best eBooks are written by those who know what they are talking about. It will also make it easier to write if you have an interest in the topic. Having said that however, there is no rule that says that you need to know the subject to write about it but it will take longer because you will need to do the research for it first.

Step 2: Find products to promote in your ebook

There is no point spending hours writing an eBook only to find that there are no products to add to it. So before you start writing, you need to find products that you can ’sell’ in your eBook that relate to your topic. You can choose products from Clickbank, CJ.com, Linkshare.com, ShareaSale.com, Amazon.com or any of the other affiliate networks. These companies are all free to join and offer thousands of different products and services that you can promote. Clickbank is a good one to start with as they don’t care whether you have a website or not.

Once you know that there are plenty of products you can start writing.

Step 3: Start Writing

This is not as scary as it sounds. If you have a flair for writing then you will probably have no problem getting started but if the last thing you wrote was a report in high school then you might find it hard to get going.

The easiest way to write an ebook is to break it up into sections first. For instance, say we decide to write an eBook on dog training. We might break it up into the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. How to train your dog to sit
3. How to train your dog to come when called
4. How to train your dog to shake hands
5. etc, etc

Once you have the main sections you can then provide the content. Always leave the introduction till last as it will be a lot easier to write.

Here is a really good tip. Start out with dot points. Don’t worry about making it read right at this point. Just jot down as many things as you can think of for each of the sections of your ebook.

Once you have the dot points then just expand on each dot point with sub-dot points. Before you know it you will have lots of content.

Now you just need to structure those dot points into coherent sentences.

If you really don’t want to write it yourself then pay a professional. Elance is a great place for this – it is full of writers willing to work on your projects and you would be surprised at how little it costs.

Step 4: Add Affiliate Links

Once you have completed your ebook you will need to add affiliate links. You can add them within the content itself where appropriate or add them at the end as a list of recommended products – or both if you like.

Step 5: Convert to PDF

Before you distribute your eBook you will need to convert it to PDF. There are a number of free versions available on the internet that are simple and easy to use. Ensure that once the document has been converted that you check to ensure that it has formatted the content correctly and that any links within the document work correctly. Some converters work better than others but we recommend one of the following:

• http://www.freepdfconvert.com/default.asp
• http://www.doc2pdf.net/

Step 6: Proofread Your eBook

There is nothing worse than reading a document with multiple spelling errors or bad grammar. Make sure you run a spell checker over it and read it through thoroughly yourself. Better yet, get someone else to do it for you. The more people that look at it the better so get your family or friends to help out.

Step 7: Distribute Your eBook

The next step is to distribute your ebook. Here are some ideas:

- email websites that relate to your ebook topic and tell them they can send out your ebook to their email list if they have one or they can use it as a free giveaway to encourage people to sign up to their newsletter.
– submit your ebook to ebook directories – there are plenty of them…just do a search in Google
– create a Squidoo lens, Hubpage (hubpage.com) and attach your ebook to the page so people can download it.
– submit to forums

And if you found that your ebook turns out better than you expected and you  might just be able to sell it rather than distribute it free them sign up with Clickbank.

Last week I started having problems sending emails to Yahoo email addresses. This started to become quite annoying and was starting to affect my online business. Whenever I sent an email it would bounce back and I would get the following message sent back:

5.1.0 – Unknown address error 554-’Message not allowed – [320]‘

I scoured the net looking for a solution but everyone kept saying that it was the ISP’s fault and that I should contact them to fix it. The only problem was that I didn’t really think it was my ISP’s problem only because I could send emails perfectly with my laptop. The problem only seemed to be occurring on my desktop PC.

But I emailed the support section of my internet service provider anyway just in case they knew something I didn’t. It wasn’t surprising when they came back and said that they couldn’t see a problem at their end.

So I put up with the problem for another few days and finally got my brother (who knows a lot more about computers than I do) to take a look.

Within a few minutes he had solved the problem and it was so simple. The date on my computer had been changed at some point and was showing a month ahead. This would have meant that any emails that I sent out would have been date stamped a month in the future. Obviously the Yahoo mail system doesn’t like this and so it bounced back my emails.

So problem solved and I am back to sending emails again.

Hopefully this will help anyone with the same problem.

Recently we have been thinking about selling some of our domain names. We probably have about 50 of them at the moment – of those about 30 of them are just parked with no website attached.

It kind of comes with the territory when you develop niche websites so you buy the domain with the full intention of building that website in the near future. Unfortunately there is never enough time so the domain names sit there year after year until one day you really you are never going to get around to building them.

So today we decided to put a few of those domain names on the market. Now we aren’t in a rush to sell so we probably overpriced them a bit but we are just going to test the waters and see if anyone bites.

So how do you go about selling your domain names?

There are really only 2 ways to sell a domain name:

1. Sell it yourself – The advantage of this method is that you don’t have to pay a commission on the sale. However the downside is that it can be a little risky if you don’t know what you are doing

2. Getting someone else to sell it for you – the advantage of this method is that you can rely on someone else to do the work for you. You simply list your domain name and then wait for the sale. The payment is made securely and there is less risk of something going wrong. The disadvantage is that you have to pay a commission on the sale.

How Much is My Domain Name Worth?

In order to sell your domain name, you need to know how much it is worth…or at least have a basic idea. Most domain name sellers like Godaddy provide appraisal services. However, oftentimes you will have to pay for the privilege. If you want to get a basic idea of what your domain is worth you can try this free service. But remember that it is only a computer spitting out an answer here so don’t take it too seriously.  Your domain name could be worth a lot more or a lot less – it all comes down to how much someone is willing to pay for it.

There are so many factors that come into play when valuing a domain name including:

• the length of the url
• how many words are in the url
• the type of extension ie. .com, .net, .org etc
• does it have hyphen

A good way of determing a price for your domain is to check out past sales for domain names similar to your own. One of the best places for this is Sedo. This is one of the biggest buyers and sellers of domain names so you are sure to find a domain name or two that relates to yours.

Where is the Best Place to Sell a Domain Name?

Good question. There are hundreds of different brokers on the net but one of the biggest and the one that I use is Sedo. They have over 11 million domains on their site so they must be doing something good.

It is easy to add a domain and the commission for a sale is 10%. You simply set your price and then sit back and wait for a sale. There are a few different methods of selling your site – you can auction it, set a fixed price, or choose the Make an Offer option. I like using the fixed price but I also combine it with the Make an Offer option.

We are going to be holding a contest on one of our blogs and have been looking for a Wordpress plugin that will give our visitors the ability to vote for their favorite blog. My initial thought was that I would have no problem finding something suitable and I was even willing to pay for it! But unfortunately the options were limited and very disappointing.

However, I did end up finding a Wordpress plugin called WP-Polls which as the name suggests provides the ability to add a poll to your blog. The only problem was that I was looking for something that would allow me to add an image of each blog so that our visitors could see exactly who they were voting for. My initial assumption was that this plugin wasn’t capable of doing that so I kept looking for something that did.

During my search I came along a blog post at the zebida.com website written by Hesham. It describes how to add thumbnails and links using the WP-Polls plugin.

YES!…now I had the answer I was looking for. So my initial assumption that I couldn’t add images was wrong but I didn’t care as I now had everything I needed to create the blog contest.

How to Use WP-Polls

If you want to create your own blog contest using WP-Polls then this is what you need to do:

Step 1: Upload the WP-Polls plugin to your blog and activate it.

Step 2: Click on the Polls option on the left hand menu on your blog Dashboard and select Manage Polls. It will most likely be at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 3: You should already see a Poll listed. This is just an example poll but you can use this one instead of creating a new one. So go ahead and click the Edit link next to that poll.

Step 4: On the Edit Poll screen you will be able to enter the details of your contest so just overtype the information in the Poll Question and Poll Answer sections and select the options that suit you in the remaining fields. In the Poll Answer fields you will be able to add html in order to add an image but we will get into that in a little more detail below. For the moment just enter text into these fields.

Step 5: Click Edit Poll to save the changes.

Step 6: Add a new post and in the html part of the post add the following code: [poll id="1"]where ‘1′ is your poll ID. You can find the poll id in the Polls list on the Manage Polls page.

Step 7: Now save your post and preview it and you should now see your poll on the page.

Now for the Good Stuff…

So if you are like me you are probably wanting to add some images to each option. The code  below is what I used for my blog competiton. It displays the radio button above the image, provides a link to the website and also includes a horizontal line under each image.

To use this code you just need to paste it into the ’Poll Answer’ fields in the Manage Polls section. Obviously you will need to replace the links to correspond to the correct urls and image sources that you will be using. You can also play around with this if you know a bit of html – bold the text etc. I did notice that these fields were limited to only so many characters so you won’t be able to go too crazy here.

<a href="http://www.websitelink.com/"><b>Title of Blog Here</b></a><br>&nbsp;<img src="wp-content/uploads/2009/10/imageofblog.JPG" ><hr>

You can see in the image below exactly where to insert this code. Once the html has been entered just click the Edit Poll link to save your changes.

So now  if you have done everything right you should see something like this on your blog post.

Just a word of warning to anyone who decides to start working online from home. Beware of the scams.

My daughter has been sucked into a number of schemes simply because she won’t take the time to research emails that are sent to her promising untold wealth if she signs up and sends money.

Unfortunately she refuses to listen to me. I have been working online for a number of years now – but what would I know.

So many hundreds of dollars later and with nothing to show for her effort, she has finally woken up to the fact that maybe her mother does know what she is talking about.

If it appears to be too good to be true, you can bet your boots it is.

Never send bank details to anyone without ensuring that you are dealing with a reputable firm and NEVER send money to anyone offering to set you up with an online business that will make you wealthier than Bill Gates.

Here are some Legitimate Companies that we work with and they have all proved to be totally reliable with both opportunities and payments.

Join online affiliate marketing groups (such as Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, Link Connector, Amazon Affiliate Program),

All of these companies are free to join and as they are all well known in the online business circuits and have a reputation to uphold so you will get paid for your endeavours.

It takes time and effort to generate a reasonable income online but perseverence will pay off.