I took the weekend off (3 day weekend) to celebrate Independence Day and enjoy being with family and friends. It was great to just put business aside and relax and enjoy myself. The fireworks show in State College at Beaver Stadium was amazing; one of the top ranked shows in the nation. It was a blast… no pun intended.

I took pictures throughout the show along with a 40 second video of the finale. If you would like to check them out, just add me as a friend on Facebook. Otherwise, one of the pictures I took is to the right.

As much fun as I had, it’s time to get back into the swing of things. June was a rather busy month, and I’m excited to see just how many posts I had last month. If you happened to miss any of them, you can find them below…

June Comment Contest – Win Cash and Prizes!

An Unforeseen “Benefit” of 3-Way Link Exchanges

It’s Official – Alan Mater is an EzineArticles.com Expert Author

How Blogging About Internet Marketing Can Make You Money Online

New Blog Theme – I’m Using the FlexSqueeze Wordpress Theme

Why You Should Incorporate Exercise Into Your Work From Home Routine

May 2010 Income Report

Why Good Keyword Selection is Essential for Home-Based Business Success

What a Man, a Dog and a Leash Have to do with Internet Marketing

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This is a guest post by Sam Bakker. If you would like to guest post on this blog, please Contact me.

When I first started my own home-based business a few years ago, I thought that no matter what my first home business website would work. I thought I had everything important in place and the website was looking great. But the reality of my situation had to sink in eventually; even though I had an excellent website, and what I thought was successful home business information I was missing visitors, rendering my online presence useless.

Two years later, I took a second look, but this time with a careful look at all options. I would learn about Search Engine Optimization and how it can influence a business. Through it, I was able to add life to my websites as well as a sizeable amount of money.

If your website is currently suffering from a lack of visitors, the first place to look for answers is your website’s keywords and their search engine performance. Often we can build links for our website, writing content with the intention of ranking it. But none of that will matter if you don’t have the right keywords. There is a lot of money to be made in internet marketing if this step is taken seriously.

First of all, check the keywords you decided to compete for when you started your campaign. Review their usefulness and relative competition. Once you have done so, visit Google’s Adwords Keywords tool or use WordTracker. These tools will help you see clearly where opportunities in your niche could be for keywords.

If you are able to find some additional keywords that you should be ranking your website for, construct a plan outlining what on-page and off-page content will need to be produced. This is to get your website appearing on the front page for that term. Once your plan has been completed, stay focused on the job at hand. To rank higher in the search engines, you need to be consistently taking action.

As internet marketers, we often get excited and dive into projects without spending enough time working through our foundations. Looking for keywords is an essential step; a website cannot succeed in the search engines without it. Make sure you take the time to review your website’s keywords and take action if necessary so that your website doesn’t stay hidden from your potential customers.

About the Author: Sam Bakker has been in the internet marketing industry for the past 7 years. If you would like to find out more about Sam or learn some free internet marketing tips then you can visit his website at SamBakker.com

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April turned out to be a pretty good month. I received an increase in proofreading and re-writing work, which I was very happy about. Those are two things I thoroughly enjoy doing, apart from running this website and earning passive income from multiple sources.

Let’s get right into it…

Income from ReplaceYourSalary.com

• ClickBank: $107.77
• PayDotCom – $56.34
• HostGator – $50
• Angela’s Backlinks: $11.25
• Paul’s Backlinks: $8
• Yarie: $23.39
• Google Adsense: $21.11
• SFI: $16.23
• Project Payday: $3 (commissions earned from promoting the program, not actually using it)
• AdFish – $4.20

Total = $301.29

Income from Internet Marketing Services

It’s been a pleasure to be able to work for a highly successful internet marketer. I’m able to learn from and apply the same strategies to my online business, all of which I’ve blogged about here at one time or another.

Total = $160

Income from Proofreading/Re-writing/Editing Services

As I said previously, I’ve gotten a decent amount of freelancing work last month. It’s great to be able to provide a high quality and much needed service, and it’s been an honor serving my clients. You can learn more by visiting the link below.

• Proofreading – $76
• Re-writing – $20

Total = $96

Income from Re-writing Service via David Hurley’s PLR Article Service Membership

It has been an honor to be able to partner with David, a good online friend of mine, and provide the re-writing portion of his article membership. To learn more about his PLR article service, visit the link above.

Total = $57.50

Total online income from all sources…

$614.79

April turned out to be my best month yet since I began my online business venture.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to never give up. Giving up is very easy to do, but sticking with it when things seem impossible is where the real character lies.

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The following is a guest post by Darrell Lischka of about-internetmarketing.com.

You decided that you had enough at your job and want to start building an online business to make money. Great, welcome to the internet club. Now what are you going to do? In today’s article, I will describe the process of creating an authority site and how you rank it on page 1.

The article will go over the essential elements that one should focus their time on, if they truly want to see results. This is not the fluff type of article that tells you how to make 10K a month in only 3 months. Nope, far from it, because if you truly want financial freedom, then you will have to pay a price to fire your boss. My article will cover keyword research, domains, back linking strategies to rank on page 1, niche marketing ideas and strategies, and even mentioning some software that will leverage your time more effectively.

The fact is Google is the most popular search engine and because of that, my methods will be related to ranking well on their search engine.

Authority Site

My definition of an authority site is simple. It’s a website that ranks on page 1 of G. The fact is authority sites come in all types and sizes. They can range from a 1 page website, to hundreds of pages.

How to make money with proper keyword research

When I first got started, I listened to someone that I honestly believed knew what they were talking about. I found out later, they were just trying to up sell me with their own marketing system. So I learned the hard way and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out keyword research. I was new at this SEO game several years ago. I made the same mistakes the that newbies make, by going after the big keyword categories. Forget the big keywords when you are starting off. Go after the low competitive terms. It will literally save you time, money and of course some sleepless nights.

Niche Marketing Tactics – What The A-Listers Won’t Tell You

My advice in terms of niche marketing ideas and niche marketing strategies, is to start at the low end and work your way up the keyword ladder. For example, search for key phrases that range between 10 to 20 searches a day. Your competitors will be lower in that niche market, than attempting to rank for large key phrase categories. Better to start out small, build up your rankings for a number of low phrases and start earning some cash, than waiting 6 to 12 months or more to see results. Successful individuals who earn money online, use this approach all the time.

Domains

Before you register any domain names, first get your keyword research out of the way. The reason, you should when possible, try and include your keyword phrase in your domain name. You certainly don’t have to, but it will give you a little extra SEO juice based on personal experience. You can of course take any domain name and rank it on page 1 for essentially any keyword category. But any advantage that you can get, make sure you do because your competitors are doing it.

Another tip that you can do when registering a domain name, is to see if there’s a domain available for sale with that term. Now, I would never suggest you invest hundreds or thousands of dollars, but depending on the niche and your financial situation, it might be worth it. I would suggest you only do this when you have some experience first.

The Importance of Getting Back Links

Back-links are the back bone of the ranking game. One way links should be mostly external, but you will also need to do some internal linking within your website. An external links means, when you post an article at an article directory like Ezine Articles, you hyper link your keyword term back to your website. That is what the SEO community means by back links.

As well, you can improve your own site by making sure your internal link structure is set up correctly. For example, for some of your pages within your website, link that page back to your home page. Don’t do it for all of them, but a few of them. As well, you can pass some link juice from 1 page to another page. Those little tips can again, give you a little bump in the rankings.

To Rank Well – You Need a Back Linking Plan

Now that I covered what external and internal links are, lets discuss how you go about getting the maximum back links for your website. It really revolves around creating content and submitting it to various article directories and Ezine directories. The most popular is Ezine articles. The best thing to do is simply type in top article directories or do follow article directories in G to get a list. There are literally thousands of places to post content.

My general approach is to post 5 to 10 unique articles at the top article directories and move on. However, there is one key piece of information that must do, to rank well and make your site strong. When you link back to your website, make sure you are deep linking 80% of the time to pages and actual articles on your website.

If you are confused, just hang on for a minute. Deep linking means your URL that you hyperlink from your article will link to an actual article within your site. Fail to do this for competitive terms and you will likely never rank on page 1. Trust me, I have made this mistake in the beginning.

You can help you website by doing some comment marketing at other forums and websites. My only caution is to make sure you add value to the discussion and not some spam type comment. Over time, you will gain recognition as someone that can be trusted and other readers in time, might start checking out your site. The more readers that go to your site and spend time there, will count towards the overall ranking game because how much time someone spends at your site is part of the algorithm for Google or better known as the bounce rate.

One final comment about back links. They are not created equally. For example a back link from Ezine articles is not the same as a back link from a brand new article directory. So, when posting your content, go for established and authority directories. To look natural, you will end up with a variety of links for all over the place. Just getting high quality back links could flag Google and that’s the last thing you want is a manual inspection and get de-indexed from the search results.

Strategies To Help Your Article Marketing Efforts

If you struggle for time like most people because they work full time, you can leverage your time more effectively by looking at software tools that help you create more versions of your article. They are referred to as article spinners or an article rewriter. If used properly, you can create dozens of unique versions. Just keep in mind, you still want quality content, but I have found it saves me time on manually editing articles and being able to post to more places.

Well, there you have the essential elements on building and ranking an authority site. Just keep in mind, start with good keyword research, picking the right domain name, niche marketing strategies and the most important part, building back links for your website.

If you want to dramatically improve your article marketing efforts and get more back links to rank higher in the search engines, Go Here: Article Rewriter.

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Alas, another time for a blog post roundup of last month’s posts. I have some awesome posts included in this, as well as some awesome ones to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them so far and have benefited from them.

I don’t take my blogging lightly. I put a lot of thought into what I’m writing and always have you, my readers, in mind. As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Okay, without further delay let’s get started. Be sure to check out any posts you may have missed.

Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes

Are You a Struggling Internet Marketer?

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Legitimate Worldwide Work From Home Opportunities

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales

Google Celebrates Valentine’s Day – They Gave Me $100!

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

I was very pleased to see the first post on this list had gotten Re-Tweeted 27 times so far. Thank you to all who spread the word to your Twitter followers.

The Twitter Tweetmeme plugin has proven to work well and makes it easy for Twitter users to Re-Tweet posts. If you’re not yet utilizing it on your own blog, you should be.

Again, thank you to all my readers!

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Alas, another time for a blog post roundup of last month’s posts. I have some awesome posts included in this, as well as some awesome ones to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them so far and have benefited from them.

I don’t take my blogging lightly. I put a lot of thought into what I’m writing and always have you, my readers, in mind. As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Okay, without further delay let’s get started. Be sure to check out any posts you may have missed.

Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes

Are You a Struggling Internet Marketer?

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Legitimate Worldwide Work From Home Opportunities

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales

Google Celebrates Valentine’s Day – They Gave Me $100!

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

I was very pleased to see the first post on this list had gotten Re-Tweeted 27 times so far. Thank you to all who spread the word to your Twitter followers.

The Twitter Tweetmeme plugin has proven to work well and makes it easy for Twitter users to Re-Tweet posts. If you’re not yet utilizing it on your own blog, you should be.

Again, thank you to all my readers!

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If you’re doing business online, then obviously you want to sell stuff. So, wouldn’t it make sense to target ‘paying’ keywords?

Yes, I made that name up.

I go into all the details in my guest post and provide a video which I previously posted on my blog.

To check out the article, head to David Leonhardt’s SEO Writer blog where I had the pleasure of writing, Target Paying Keywords to Maximize Your Online Sales.

This neat little tool will help you pump out more sales by targeting the right kind of keywords for your website.

Feel free to browse David’s blog as you’ll find other helpful articles on SEO, which I know can be rather bothersome to some people.

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Discover how to get : #1 Google Placement for Local Search! Atlanta

If you’ve been following along with us, my last post was about a struggling internet marketer who is reaching out in a desperate attempt to generate sales with his affiliate marketing website.

One of the questions asked was, “How do I drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

This is going to be the topic of this post, and I’ll be going very in-depth, starting with the basics and moving towards the more advanced strategies.

I apologize in advance if this turns into a very lengthy post, but please bare with me as it will be well worth your time to read through everything.

So let’s begin, shall we?

The very first thing you must understand is that everything revolves around keywords. Keywords are the life-blood of websites and how they become seen by internet users using search engines.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the foundation of using keywords effectively, and this is how you’re going to target specific internet users to generate sales online.

Rather than going in-depth on the subject of SEO on this post, I have a few previous posts that should cover this subject thoroughly enough for you to understand. Please check them out, and if you have questions use the comment section:

• Web Page Optimization
• Easy Free Keyword Research
• Discover Commercial Intention of Keyword Phrases

Optimizing your web page for specific keywords is critical and is the foundation for which you’ll build the rest of your marketing efforts upon. Seriously, nothing else matters until you’ve done this. Don’t ignore it!

One thing I’ve learned is that backlinks are KING. Okay, so content is still KING, but backlinks are a very close second, and here’s why. Backlinks to your website or web pages are what helps to drive your site or pages higher in search engine results pages when someone searches for a specific keyword phrase. See how this is coming together?

Without building backlinks to your site, you won’t generate enough traffic to your site to generate sales. Now I know what you’re thinking here. There are other ways to generate traffic without building backlinks, and that’s true. However, the best traffic is free search engine traffic, and the only way to get it is to rank on the first page in Google, or Yahoo and Bing. I’d focus on Google as it produces over 70% of search traffic across the entire web.

Now that you understand the importance of building backlinks and getting your site or web pages to the top of search engines, you now need to start the backlink building process. There are numerous ways to go about this, and luckily for you, I’ve written many posts on the subject. Here they are:

• Improve Search Engine Rankings the Easy Way
• 80 High PR One Way Backlinks Each Month
• Build Long-Term Traffic to Your Work From Home Site with Article Marketing
• Build Your Online Business with Article Marketing
• Forum Signatures
• Free Traffic System

Remember when building backlinks that you want to use your keywords for the web page you’re linking to. This is the only way that your backlinks are going to be effective in boosting your search engine rankings.

Okay, so you now have  a great start in getting backlinks; however, I’m not done just yet.

Well… sorta. I have a post planned that will discuss another very effect backlink building strategy and will be posted soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hopefully right now you have a solid understanding of doing keyword research and web page optimization, and how it all ties in to building backlinks. This is all part of building targeted website traffic that will result in sales.

As always, if you have any questions about anything discussed here, post them in the comments section.

My next post will discuss the second question asked by a struggling internet marketer, but in the meantime, start applying the tips I mentioned today to your website, and you’ll soon see an increase in traffic and internet income.

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….And Four Tips On SEO

Search Engine Marketing is a form of internet marketing that helps to increase your site’s visibility in a search engine result pages. This is a modern marketing strategy, with the help of which, you can advertise your product globally. This article deals with different types of Search Engine Marketing strategies with special emphasis on Search Engine Optimization.

Types of Search Engine Marketing:

One of the most popular types of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Other popular types of SEM are search engine Marketing or advertising and paid submission.

• Search engine advertising: It usually follows a PFP model wherein you pay in order to ensure a top rank in the results of a search engine, both on the search site along with its distribution network. A successful PFP advertising campaign depends on 5 factors, namely, bid price, keyword selection, ad distribution, ad copy and effective landing pages.

• Paid submission: In a paid submission Search Engine Marketing program, web site owners pay an amount to have their specific websites reviewed by editors. However, there is no guarantee that the site will be accepted into a directory. It applies typically to human-based search engines, which are referred to as directories. A successful directory campaign depends on the title, description and the category selection.

Tips for Search Engine Optimization:

SEO, a popular type of Search Engine Marketing, is a set of techniques, which help to optimize a specific webpage. The primary aim of Search Engine Optimization is to rank a website organicaly (without paying) in popular search engines (such as, Google, Yahoo, etc.). Here are few tips that will help you to rank your webpage high in popular search engines.

1. Create a sitemap: You should create a sitemap as it helps a search engine to understand your website’s architecture as it is difficult to access then from backlinks. A sitemap can be defines as a hierarchical arrangement of web pages that are available in your website.

2. Produce high quality content: It is one of the prerequisites to rank your page high in popular search engines. The content, posts and article need to be of high quality. It is advisable that put informative article that help a visitor to know about your product category. It is better to keep the length of content short and to the point.

3. Maintain keyword density: Keyword density is an important aspect in site optimization. You should always keep the density wityhin4-6%; search engines may label it as spam if the density exceeds 10%. Therefore, always check keyword density before uploading a particular webpage.

4. Include internal links: Link your home page with all the pages in your website. Include suitable internal links on all the webpages; it will increase the number of links to each of the webpages and it will also make it easier for a search engine to find all the pages in your website.

Apart from doing it yourself, you may hire an experienced Search Engine Marketing company in order to market your website. It will help your website to rank high in popular search engines.

Discover how to get : #1 Google Placement for Local Search! Atlanta