Do Free Reports Really Work?

My friend, Mike Devoran, has just started a blog about building content sites using WordPress and other free tools. He’s giving away a free report on affiliate marketing which lists many of the tools he uses. When I say free, it’s completely free – all he asks for is a comment on his blog (whether you like the report [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 16 Comments

Top 5 Zero Cost Keyword Suggestion Tools

Here are some free tools for finding the frequency of searches for your keyword phrases.

NicheBot Classic
NicheBot Classic used to be just NicheBot, until NicheBot v2 was released. It offers quite a lot for a free tool. I use NicheBot v2 quite a bit.

Wordtracker
Wordtracker’s free tool shows 100 variations on your keyword phrase.

Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery also shows 100 variations on [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Research | 4 Comments

Is Full Disclosure A Necessity?

There’s an interesting debate going on between Jeremy at Shoemoney.com and Rand over at SEOmoz.org about disclosure. It started with this post by Jeremy, where he says “When I read an affiliate marketers blog and I see links to anything I assume they get paid for it… So basically my disclosure policy is you should assume I am [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Online Business | 1 Comment

My Top 9 Plugins

I thought I’d do a list of the plug-ins I’m currently using on my blog. This list used to be much longer, but I’ve weeded out the ones which didn’t do anything sensible.

Akismet
If only I got one non-spam comment for every spam comment Akismet automatically removed…

aLinks
aLinks automatically inserts a link when it detects a predefined keyword in my blog [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Blogs, Online Business | 10 Comments

Escaping 9-5

I read Ed Zelinski’s book, The Joy Of Not Working, last year. The idea of not being tied to a five-day a week, eight-to-five job, submitting to someone else’s rules, really appealed to me. The vision of being able to quit my day job and work for myself is my primary goal at the moment.

In my quest to [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Online Business | 9 Comments

The BlogCatalog Mass Buzz Experiment

Blog communities have sprung up all over the Internet, it seems. If you look at my sidebar, you’ll see I have three widgets installed: BumpZee, MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog.

Mona Weathers over at iwebis is hosting a “Mass Buzz Experiment” to grow the community at BlogCatalog. Read about the experiment here.

The great thing about these kinds of ‘interventions’ is that [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Blogs, Online Business, Traffic | 10 Comments

Top 5 Action Steps to Build an Online Business

Market Research
Finding a market in which to operate is a vital step in the process. “Follow your passion” is good advice. However, you might prefer to start with a large market rather than a small one.

The key is to find a hungry crowd with money to spend. Indeed, find a crowd which is already spending money, and place your [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Online Business | 9 Comments

Removing the “NoFollow” tag

I was going to do a long post explaining why you should remove the “NoFollow” tag from your blog, but other people have already done the job much better than I could.

I like Fred W. Black’s explanation the best, and he tells you how to do it as well.

Posted in Blogs, Online Business | 11 Comments

Questions for James Brausch

How much time do you spend on each aspect of your business – ie. reading and answering emails, research, creating new products, overseeing your interns etc?
How do you measure and control the work your interns do for you, without it eating into your time?
How do you avoid getting sidetracked?

Posted in Online Business | 4 Comments

James Brausch’s Question Time

James Brausch is planning to do a question time tomorrow. I have a question about his Customer Service software, Sufaq. It’s one of the few products that I haven’t bought from James yet – the others are Trafficopia and the Freedom Business System (although the time is fast approaching for both) and his now $900 a month Magic Email [...] Continue Reading…

Posted in Online Business, Products | 3 Comments