The technology today makes this possible by providing you plenty of programs and tools to automate different aspects of your internet business.  Using these auto programs may cost some money but think about how much time you will save with this investment.  It could literally free up hundreds of hours of your time.  And we all know time is money, so it only makes sense to automate all you can.

There are many reasons that some businesses succeed while others don’t.  But I would say that the main reason why those businesses are successful is because they are able to automate much of the work making it possible for them to use that free time to grow their business in other areas.

What Will Automation do for your Business?

Boost your website traffic - You can have many of the traffic boosting tasks automated for you.  The article writing and submitting., forum posting, press releases, and everything.  If it can be written, it can be outsourced and automated.

Make more money and increase profits - Selecting an auto responder service like GetResponse will allow you to create an email marketing campaign on auto drive.  All you have to do is get interested parties to sign up for your newsletters and the service will automatically deliver your emails.  The system will allow you to setup everything customary so you can tweak it to boost your conversion rates.

Automate your admin - We all know how time consuming it can be to answer the hoards of email we get.  Well, this process can be automated as well.  There are services you can hire to do the job for you.

Run your internet business from anywhere - This may be the most beneficial aspect of automating your internet business.  Not only can we run an online business anywhere that there is an internet connection, but once the business is automated, we really don’t have do too much.  We can even take vacations without having to worry about any meltdowns or lost income with the time off.

Of course there will be some times when there will be some minor break downs or some twitches that need to be made, but for the most part, automation of an internet business means the decrease of your own problems.

Take the time to make your internet business into an automated cash machine.  The piece of mind you’ll receive will be well worth the efforts.

Matt Helphrey
p.s. Look for part two of automating an internet business tomorrow where I will be discussing the importance of setting up an auto responder.

So two weeks ago I had 1,358 back links pointing to my main index page and 1,991 back links pointing to this blog.  Pretty impressive numbers considering they jumped so much in only 7 days. 23 more back links to the index page and 1199 more links to this blog in only 7 days!

Here is a screen shot from Yahoo site explorer as of today…

Now my main index page… http://www.livelifetothefullest.biz has 1,666 and this blog has 10,638!!!! That is 308 more links to the home page and 8,647 more links back to this blog in just over two more weeks. That is some outstanding results!

These enormous numbers are even coming after the holidays where I did very little back linking work at all.  It just seems to keep adding up even without the consistent work.

Now if only I could figure why Google is keeping me at a PR 0….

Stay tuned,

Matt Helphrey

Think Positive

This is the first step to changing your life for the better and it is no joke.  Your daily attitude will shape your life.  If you are a constant pessimist and think the worst about most things, reality will bestow those thoughts and reaffirm your own reality that bad things happen all the time.  Of course they do because you expect it!

However, if you begin to train your mind to focus on the positive things, you will begin to notice the more positive aspects of life and block out the negatives without even noticing that they exist.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” - Buddha

Don’t Dwell on the Past

The human mind is wired to remember the past.  It does this to protect us from repeating mistakes and to protect us from bodily harm.  For example, many kids touch the hot burner on a stove, their brain registers pain, and that kid learns never to touch a hot burner again.

Unfortunately the brain works the same as society puts labels on us.  We don’t easily forget these labels and go on living life as though the labels were adhered to us permanently, never to wear off or fade away.  All of our lives we are labeled and shaped by society and it is these labels that create our thoughts and reality.

If you were born into a poor social class, it is likely that you were labeled as poor and all the other labels that come along with it.  If you grew up overweight, you were probably labeled as fat.

When people are constantly calling you fat or calling you poor, you soon start to take those comments as reality and go on living life as fat or poor because that’s what you must be if people have labeled you as that.

Well I have got some news for you…Just because you WERE poor, DOES NOT mean you are going to be poor in the future!  Just because you WERE overweight does not mean that you WILL ALWAYS be overweight!  It is up to you to shake these old labels that don’t define who you are or who you want to be and begin to focus your thoughts more towards what you ARE and what you want to BECOME.

Once you figure out who you want to be and start shifting your daily habits and attitude towards your new you, you will begin to start earning new labels and the old labels will slowly begin to peel off.

Take Yourself Out of your Comfort Zones

These new labels that will be cast upon you will not come easily and will not come without some hard work and effort though.  Change will not come unless you take yourself out of your normal comfort zones.

And don’t expect change to happen overnight either.  You can make changes slowly and ease yourself into new habits.

John DiLemme is a motivational speaker who has overcome a stuttering problem as a child to become a world renown speaker who makes $1,000 an hour speaking in front of thousands.  He preaches that 1/96th of your day will make a significant difference and change in your life.   That means doing something constructive towards who you want to become for just 15 minutes a day can and will make all the difference in the world.

Conclusion

So stop procrastinating and living your life as though it is impossible to change.  Start shedding old labels that hurt you or hold you back and begin to create new labels that define who you are and who you want to be.  Stop thinking in terms of the past and git rid of those, “Thats the way I am and thats the way I always will be.” feelings.  Start thinking, “This is who I want to be and this is how I will do it.”

Take this week and set some new years resolutions that will benefit yourself and those around you.  Remember just geting in a habit of doing something constructive only 15 minutes a day can change your life forever!  Focus on the positives and you will start to see positive results.

Matt Helphrey

The answer to that question is…pretty freaking great!  Now I would not know first hand yet, but I can only imagine.  In fact, I do imagine… a lot.  I constantly envision myself living the lifestyle of a professional blogger.  To be a professional blogger and make money from blogging means:

• Unlimited income potential.  No hourly wage or salary wage.  You earn by monetizing your blog and then bringing traffic to your blog.  Your pay will be based on how well you run your blog business.
• Work for yourself. No boss to tell you what to do, fire you, yell at you, and no one there to treat you like garbage.
• Work wherever you want.  Tour the world and make money while you sit on the beach, relaxing and sipping on a cocktail (or cocktails ;))Your office is wherever there is an internet connection.
• Work whenever you want.  Blogging allows you to earn passive residual income, which means you are still earning from past work even when and if you do nothing and decide to take some time off.
• You have more free time.  More free time means more time with friends and family and more time to do the things you want like golfing, skiing, boating, camping, or whatever it is you do.

Those are five of the best reasons why I am working hard to make money from blogging. The professional blogger lifestyle is not a lifestyle for everyone, but it is certainly appealing to me and to many others.  If you think a blogging lifestyle may for you, here’s a step-by-step to help you get started.  You may want to bookmark this page for further reference.

How is it Possible to Make Money From Blogging?

This is a question I asked myself a long time ago, and there are actually many ways to make money from blogging depending on what niche you are marketing to.  So lets start with step 1:

Finding Your Niche:

Find a profitable niche that interests you.  Preferably one that you feel well versed in and one in which you can sit down and spend a good amount of time writing on.  A subject that you are passionate about will help you make money from blogging.

To find a profitable niche you will need to do some research.  You’ll want to look for some keywords that you can use to land you plenty of visitors from the search engines.  Use a free tool like the Google Adwords Keyword tool to help you with the search.  Look for about 5-7 keywords that get searched on a minimum of 75,000 - 100,000 times a month, combined.  If it does, you have a popular niche in which you can make money from blogging.

Choose Your Domain Name:

Time to find a name for your blog.  This will be the url or web address of your blog; i.e www . yournamehere . com Don’t spend too much time here.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  Use something that people will remember and will be easy to type in if they were to search for it.  Many people choose a name that includes their main keywords to help them with keyword rankings. That’s not required and probably wont make that much of a difference.

The cheapest and best place to sign up for a domain name is Namecheap.com.  I’ve used them several times with no problems.  I think it’s like $6 to sign up.

Find a Host for Your Blog:

There are many choices when it comes to hosting.  Most of which are free or pretty cheap.  DO NOT sign up with a free host no matter what!  If you do, you lose all your chances to profit from your business.  Free hosting will limit you to the amount of traffic you get, what you promote, and how you promote it.  They will also most likely promote their own interests and monetize those interests on your blog by sticking unwanted banners and ads anywhere they like.

I’m sure there are plenty of valid hosts worthy of recognition here, but the only one I recommend is Host4Profit.  Their services are top notch…seriously.  If you ever have a question or concern, email them and you will have a response in under 10 minutes.  I don’t know about you, but that is important to me.  Especially when running a business.  You can never be too careful when selecting something as important as a provider who’s business it is to host your entire operation on their computer.

Take my advice and stick with Host4Profit.   Only $24.95 a month.

Upload Your Blog:

Once you have your domain and host, all you have to do is upload your WordPress blog.  This requires some ftp knowledge as well as setting up a SQL database.  If you don’t know how to do this, and you have signed up at Host4Profit through this page, I will do it for you…no cost.  Just send me an email at MattHelphrey @ gmail . com (without the spaces) and Ill reply back asking for a few pieces of information.  It shouldn’t take me more than 10 minutes to set it up.

Make Money From Blogging by Getting Traffic to your Blog:

To make money from blogging you need to entice readers to your blog first.  You can do this by creating killer content.  Content that visitors may share or spread the word about because it is so good. Killer content usually comes in the form of written material i.e. informative articles, “how to” posts, “top 10″ lists, etc.  But killer content would also include free software, links to other sites, access to “privileged areas”, and/or any other freebies you may provide.

Once you have killer content provided on your blog, you need to promote it and let people know what you have to offer.  There are plenty of free ways to promote online.  Some free promotion methods include article marketing, blog commenting, posting in forums, press releases, email marketing campaigns, traffic exchanges, and directory listings.  You can pay for traffic by promoting ads in ezines, running a pay-per-click campaign, or purchasing leads for an email marketing campaign.

It is best to use promoting efforts that you are skilled at.  The best advice I can give is to document your advertising efforts to be sure you are getting optimal results.  Once you perfect one thing and become very proficient at that, you can rinse and repeat the same success.

Make Money From Blogging by Monetizing Your Blog:

Depending on your niche and what you are offering, you can make money from your blog using several methods.  Some blogs will make money using one method, others two or three, and others will monetize a hundred different ways.

The simplest and most popular ways are through pay-per-click programs like Adsense, where you get paid a certain amount every time someone clicks on one of their ads on your blog.

You can also promote affiliate products and programs and get paid commissions every time you sell.  This method is easy because it does not require you to produce your own product.

Monetize your blog through pay-per-lead companies.  There are companies who offer pay every time you provide them a lead through one of their links on your blog.  This can be as low as .50 or as high as hundreds of dollars depending on what it is they need.

Offer advertising spots on your blog.  You can charge monthly rates for sponsors who are interested in advertising their products or services on your blog.  Usually you get paid more the more traffic you have.

Create your own product.  This method can prove to be the most profitable.  Especially if you offer it as an affiliate product so others can promote it as well.

The last method I will mention to make money from blogging is through an email marketing campaign.  Just put a sign up form on your blog and offer something of value.  People will sign up and once they do, you can market anything you want to them as long as they stay on your list.

Conclusion

There you have it!  All the information you need to make money from blogging.  Of course it doesn’t happen without constant action and the desire to make it work.  By picking up many back links to your blog, posting to your blog on a regular basis, and using relevant keyword terms in your posts, it is impossible not to succeed. Constant action will lead to constant traffic, and constant traffic will lead to money in your bank account.

Wish you the best,

Matt Helphrey

p.s.  Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter in the upper right hand corner.  It’s 100% free and I’ll teach you many more ways you can use the internet to make a living.  Why wouldn’t you want free information right? Sign up and indulge in all the free information.  It WILL help you make more money.

A brief recap:

So last week I posted on how I thought my link building campaign needed to be revved up because whatever strategy I was using before just wasn’t “paying the bills” so to speak.  My total back links to my home page according to Yahoo was 1335 and to this blog was 792.  That didn’t seem to good to me after almost a year of trying to pick up back links.  This last week I have been focusing 95% efforts on getting back links to this blog and the other 5% to my home page.

One other reason I really wanted to step up my link building is because my PR went from 2 down to 0, and still no PR for this blog.  How or why that happens after all my efforts is beyond me.  I guess I just need to do better…and I will.

Current Stats:

As you can see I have made quite a bit of progress in just 7 days.  My home page now has 1358 back links.  Thats up 23.  This blog now has 1991.  And that is up 1199 back links!

Not too bad for only a week…1222 more back links in 7 days, and that averages out to be just over 174 a day!  It took me almost a year to get those same numbers.

How did I do it?  What’s the secret?:

Two words… blog commenting.  I really have been underestimating the power of commenting on other blogs.  I mean I always knew you could pick up back links doing so but had no idea it was that POWERFUL.  It is, and there is a specific strategy I used…

What I did was find a list of niche specific or like wise blogs that have the “do follow” tag.  Then I narrowed that list of blogs down to the blogs that have the “top commenter” section on their blog.  (I believe the top commenter is just available for certain themes or it may be a plug in. Ill be adding it to this blog asap.)

Once I had that list I went to town commenting on each blog day after day until my name, with a back link to this blog was featured on the “top commenter” section.  Once it’s there it is a site wide link.  That means my back link is included on every page that blog has.  Some sites have hundreds of pages giving me that many back links instantly.  Now that is powerful!

Here’s a list I got from fellow blogger and PIPSter Peter Lee and his Work From Home Business Blog: Thanks Peter! Ill be adding to it as I see fit.

PR 6

www.shoemoney.com
www.marketingpilgrim.com
www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
www.business-opportunities.biz/

PR 5

www.wpthemedesigner.com
www.blueverse.com
techie-buzz.com

PR 4

zacjohnson.com
www.searchenginepeople.com
theuniversitykid.com
www.bookmarkbliss.com
www.winningtheweb.com
ahkong.net
www.sueblimely.com
www.balkhis.com
www.imbloggingthat.com
vocino.com
www.catswhocode.com
www.bloganything.net
imiseasy.com
www.thisismyurl.com/

PR 3

www.peterleehc.com
thoushallblog.com
www.JohnChow.com
www.JohnCow.com
www.thenetfool.com
www.datmoney.com
www.caroline-middlebrook.com
www.affiliateconfession.com
www.lifeiscolourful.com
internetmarketingsucks.com
www.thewwwblog.com
clubblogger.com
optempo.com
www.michaelaulia.com
www.niharsworld.com
www.francislee.com.au
entrecard.com/blog
www.retireat21.com
www.blogthority.com
www.oneyearmillionaire.net
www.angadsodhi.com
www.benbarden.com
norhafidz.com
www.domainstructure.com
www.skamid.com
getinternetmarketingstrategies.com
extremeezine.com
kikolani.com
otooo.com
www.hippowebsolutions.com
linkersblog.com
theblogentrepreneur.com
www.jonlee.ca
www.peiprofit.com/
www.imjustsharing.com/

PR 2

wassupblog.com
www.enkayblog.com
mrjavo.com
slyvisions.com
keithjameslock.com
www.terencechang.com
www.benjaminpatton.com
bloggingexperiment.com
www.adesblog.com
blogaboutyourblog.com
biznz.org
unlocktheonlineworld.com
bloggervenue.com
www.andrewooi.com
dablogger.com
www.emzdesign.co.uk
www.feedflare.ca
www.netstrife.com
ImwithJoe.com
www.techsagar.com
www.itcanhappen4u2.com/blog/
smartadvise.info

PR 1

www.protycoon.com
imblogger.net
www.bloggerslab.com
www.theathomecouple.com
www.kahthan.com
www.3arn.net
http://www.clydedennis.com

Be warned though, if you are going to use this strategy, be sure to leave meaningful comments and DON’T SPAM!

That’s all.  The secret is out.  Use this powerful link building strategy to your advantage and start picking up some massive back links today.  I’ll be back a week from now to let you know how this strategy is working and I’ll keep you up to date with everything else as well.

Matt Helphrey

The point is there are really only three things you need to increase traffic to your blog on a consistent basis.  That is great content,  great promotion, and posting to your blog on a regular basis.

Great Content

Great content is by far the most important of the three aspects.  Your blog could be littered with articles but if your articles are crap, you aren’t going to gain much in terms of follow up traffic or repeat visitors.  The content on your blog is what captures the readers attention.  They are either going to think, “Wow, this blog has a lot of great information, free tools, and useful links. I’d better bookmark this.”  Or they may think, “I can’t even read this stuff.  It doesn’t make any sense.”

If you think your blog is providing the latter, it may be a wise business move to outsource your writing and find someone who will add the great content for a small fee.

When you provide killer content, and by killer I mean better than good, you are apt to gain readership because if a reader likes what he or she sees, they are more apt to tell someone else who in turn will tell someone else and on and on.  Word of mouth spreads fast, so work on quality content first and you will see an increase in traffic to your blog.

Great Promotion

Great promotion refers to the plan you have to get more traffic to your blog every day of the year.  That means you are taking action every day to get more traffic to your blog.  It may be paid methods like Google Adwords PPC, or solo ezines.  It may be free methods like article marketing, networking with business partners, posting in forums and so on.

What you do or how much you spend is not important so long as you are driving more traffic to your blog and that traffic is converting to more money back for you in return of those efforts.  If you have budgeted $100 a month in advertising and you are able to document that the $100 spent made you $200 in profit, would it not be smart then to turn that $200 into $400?  Damn right it would!  That’s how a business man/woman thinks, and that’s what you have to do if you want to succeed.

What I suggest is to find a promotion method you are really skilled at and use it to your advantage.  Use that one method and just promte the heck out of your blog using that one method.  Hey, if it works, why not run to the bank with it?!

Post to Your Blog on a Regular Basis

This last aspect differs for so many people and what works for one may not be the case for another.  What I do know is that the search engines do reward blogs that are updated and added to on a consistent basis.  Whether that means seven times a week or twice a week is up in the air.

What I suggest again is to find a nice medium and one that doesn’t have you overworked and a stressful writer.  Don’t just write to your blog because you feel you have to.  That shows and what it shows is that it wont be that great of content.  Post when you are ready to write and your readers will enjoy the content much more.

Write as often as you can though and as much as your audience wants you to.  Try an experiement and see how many readers you get adding two articles a week, then add seven and compare the results.  If there is not much difference you may be overworking at seven a week and could settle for three or four.  Work ahead and have 20 - 50 articles already written so all you have to do is copy and paste.

Conclusion

All three of these tips will really help you to increase traffic to your blog.  Stay focused on your goals and take daily action.  Action will lead to the inevitable…money in your pocket!

Be sure to sign up for my free newsletter for more insight on how you can make money online.

Cheers for now,

Matt Helphrey

Google also takes into fact the age of your domain (older domains tend to rank higher ), where you back links are coming from (high PR websites give more link juice as well as websites that are of the same niche as yours), and how often you are getting back links. Those are just a few of the factors that Google uses. Im sure there are plenty of more factors that Im not thinking of but the truth is, there are probably only a handful of people in the entire world that truly know the Google algorithm that ranks websites.

With that in mind, it is up to you to develop some kind of link building strategy so you can build your back links up. People use different methods and different strategies to build their back links and there is no “right” way to do this. The only right way is just to do it early and do it often. One of mentors often says 10 a day. After 30 days you’ll have 300, after a year 3600, 5 years 18000!

Thats one way to do it and honestly I think that would be the standard rate at which a website picks up back links. However, in this day in age, and with competition so fierce in many niches (especially this niche), we look to get as many back links as possible so we can constantly rank above our competition.

You used to be able to buy back links or pick back links up by spamming. Not anymore. Google catches on quick and has made internet marketers rethink their link building strategies. Up to this point I would say that my link building strategy was the typical 10 a day, and heres what my link building strategy looked like…

• Article Marketing - At least 8 a month, sometimes more, sometimes less.
• Forum Posting - 5 a day
• Blog commenting - Varied…usually try to leave a few comments a week on likewise blogs.
• Directory submissions - Maybe around 2 or 3 a day on average.
• Social Bookmarking - Just recently started and I try to bookmark every post I make on both blogs.

That was the jest of my link building strategy and for the most part it has been pretty successful. My main website Make Money From Home, according to Yahoo Site Explorer has 1335 back links and this blog has 792. PR for both was 0, zero, zilch…:(

In effort to increase PR and back links, I am going to completely change my link building strategy and be more aggressive in getting back links. I will be keeping you up to date with my progress but will not disclose my new link building strategy until I see if it is going to work or not. If it does (and I think it will) at that point I will document my new link building strategy.

Until then….stay tuned.

Above the fold refers to the space on the website that is visible when you first load the page on your browser.  The bottom of the page is the fold.  It’s obvious but the statistics also back up the fact that the objects above the fold get the most clicks.  Anything below the fold usually gets significantly fewer hits because people are lazy by nature and most are apt not to scroll the browser down.

What does this mean?

Well if it isn’t spelled out for you already, let me help.  Put the most important ads or opt-in forms in a highly visible, highly clickable spot…monetize your website above the fold.

If you don’t believe me try it yourself.  If you haven’t already, put your opt-in form above the fold and you will see a significant change in sign ups. Put your adsense above the fold and you will see more daily clicks.  Put your affiliate ads above the fold and you will get more sales.  Anything you put above the fold will get the most attention, so optimize your site accordingly.

Matt Helphrey

SubmitYourArticle.com is an article distribution service (duh) that uses the power of article leverage to distribute your articles. What they do is use a piece of software that allows you to switch up some things in your normally written article to give it more leverage in the search engines. You can either submit your article as is or use their easy to use software to change your title, introduction, a few sentences, and the resource box as many times as you’d like to give your article the most leverage.

The optimum percentile change rate is 30%. That means you have x amount of article that are an average of 30% different than the original. I try to hit at least 30% on all of my articles that I submit to them.

What this does is basically trick the search engines into thinking you have written several unique articles rather than just one article submitted to many directories. This helps because when you do submit one article to lets say 20 different directories, Google may only index 5 or less of the 20 you submitted to. When you use the leverage service, Google may index as many as 15 or more out of the 20.

So you can see the real difference and how leveraging your articles through this service can really help your online business because it will give you plenty more back links and will allow your website to rank higher for your specific keywords.

Now you know why and how SubmitYourArticle can help you make more money online, I’m going to conduct a little article marketing research. Just a few hours ago I submitted an article entitled “Take Action to Make Real Money Online”. I used their leveraging service to get a 33% total difference and choose to submit the article right away but to slowly distribute my article to the network over the next 30 days.

What I want to research is just how many directories my article will be indexed by Google. To do this I will track a line I used in the article and did not change. The line is “Last but not least, don’t be afraid to spend money to make money.” So when you type this line (with quotes) into Google you will see no results. As my article begins to get indexed you should start to see just where and how many times. This may take about two or three months to see the overall effect but it will be a good judge of just how many back links I am getting every time I use this service. I will keep you posted every few weeks and hopefully have an end result after about 70 days or so.

Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey

As internet marketers, many of us are busy with day to day back linking techniques such as article writing, forum posting, blog commenting and social bookmarking to name just a few. Now this is all good and dandy and is going to create a nice steady flow of traffic for you in the long run but all of these tedious activities are not going to make you any immediate money or income and can lead to a lot of frustration. Here’s my advice to create some sales funnels that are guaranteed to make you some real money for your efforts…finally!

It is important not to get behind on the daily activities that I was just speaking of, so…what do you do?? How in the world are you supposed to create a sales funnel when you are so busy with your daily activities? The answer…outsourcing.

You can’t possibly do all these things yourself so you’ll need to find someone to outsource to. Keep doing the things you are good and efficient with and outsource the rest. Of course it’s going to cost you some money but you have to view this money spent as an investment that will result in you receiving more money back in the long run.

One sales funnel that will pay over and over again is creating an email marketing campaign. There are several ways you can do this. You can either sign up through an affiliate program and promote their products or create a product of your own. Once you decide what product or program you are going to promote, you’ll have to write a series of sales letters pitching the benefits of that product or service. It could be as few as one letter or as many as a hundred. It all depends upon what you are promoting and you’ll have to do some trial and error to see what the optimum amount is.

You’ll also have to create a squeeze page that people will view and want to sign on to your list. Once they are on your list they will begin to get the sales letters and hopefully convert those sign ups into real sales. Find a decent auto responder company to sign up for to run your email campaign. I use GetResponse and it works well for me. Aweber is another legitimate company.

Another sales funnel idea is to create your own Ebook and offer it to fellow affiliates to promote. They’ll be more apt to promote your product if their is an opportunity for them to make money as well. What you can do is offer the affiliates a 50% commission at a real low price, have the interested buyers sign on to a list, then back end them a more expensive product on the back end through another email campaign. Or you can offer a 100% commission to affiliates, then after every sale you make or they make, send the buyer to another sales page promoting a higher end product as well.

Whatever you decide to do, just be sure to do something. Money will not result without taking action. Don’t even worry about creating the perfect product or creating the perfect email marketing campaign. Just get it going and make the changes later. The money will come if you take action to make it happen.

Matt Helphrey