The other “tribe” of course is into keyword research, SEO and affiliate/product sales. I swing from one to the other and can see both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses.

Promoting your website can work well for brands and community building. Of course not doing keyword research and SEO for your business could also cost you money in lost sales.

Google have also been experimenting with “real time search”. I was having a problem with a blog of mine and after I fixed it up, I did a keyword search for one of the main keywords and I was ranked number one.

There could be a few different explanations for this, but it seemed like it was because I had just updated the site. It’s not something that makes much money so, I didn’t bother looking into it further.

I also heard that in Google’s real time search experiments, they pulled data from twitter and ranked it based on factors like number of followers etc. I haven’t been much of a fan of twitter, but it made me realize, that if you have at least one niche that care about, you need to be on it.

I also installed a vbulletin mod yesterday on a forum I run, that automatically tweets every new post. I was doing something manually anyway, so it is going to be a real time saver.

Of course you can do the same thing for blogs. You can also create Facebook fan page and import your blog’s feed to it. Hubpages also allows you to add RSS feeds to a related Hub.

I am not saying you should do everything automatically, but if you can use a combination of real and automated messages, it can be a real time saver. You should also link your twitter account to bit.ly, because I have heard a number of times now that Google is also doing something(?) with those links. Bit.ly also provides some nice reports, like how many times your links have been clicked on.

Google came under a lot of criticism with their new Buzz application, which is linked to your gmail account. If you use gmail and have a problem with it, turn it off and create a new gmail account, just for Buzz. Create a nice avatar and start connecting to people in your niche.

While I don’t think people should spend all of their time trying to promote their sites on social media as it has been proven time and again that generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, I don’t think it is something that internet marketers can completely ignore.

I wrote 1 article for Ezine which is still waiting to be approved. I wrote 12 articles on Hubpages and 5 articles on Infobarrel, with 1 article still waiting to be approved. Articles on Infobarrel can take from a few hours to 1 day to get approved. It has been exactly one week since I wrote the Ezine article and it is still in moderation.

Ezine might have the most authority, but they don’t have any revenue sharing options. With Infobarrel you keep 70 per cent of the Adsense earnings and they supposedly have good authority. Making money with SEO suggests writing an article on Infobarrel with links to a hub on Hubpages.

Something which I have kind of been following, but also adding links to my own sites. Since I get to keep 100% of the revenue from my own sites, this seems to make sense to me.

I have a whole bunch of unfinished articles saved on my computer, which I will be able to use for future pieces. Whenever I have an idea for an article, I make a note of it. Sometimes that hardest times to think of an article is when you sit down at your computer to do some writing.

If I am not in the mood to actually write the article, I do some research and save it all in a document. This makes it easy to go back and write when you are feeling more motivated.

I have set up email lists on four of my sites now and I have over 100 subscribers. I have been writing an email follow up series on one of my sites. The follow up feature in Aweber is pretty good and is a great way to get people interested in your site/product and you get further opportunities to sell them your product. Without a list you almost limit yourself to just one time to sell your product, when someone visits your site.

I have forgotten temporarily about twitter and really cut down down the time I have spent visiting my favorite forums. This has really helped with my online productivity.

I haven’t set up channels for all of my hubs and articles, but so far the results have been promising with some nice improvement in my Adsense earnings. It is very motivating to put in some hard work and see immediately the results of your efforts.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate you on the success you have been having with your websites. I remember when you started and were struggling and thinking about giving up. What was the closest you came to giving up and what was the turning point that made you want to continue?

Which time? Seriously I think I got to the point of giving up at least three times. The last and worst was late February – my part-time “real” job had disappeared in the Global Financial Crises about a month earlier – and I was still making very little. Basically I took a long hard look at myself, had a huge argument on a private forum and finally decided to believe that I could make money, before I actually achieved it – my income has gone up every month since then! I think finally I got the key skill that an entrepreneur has – and this is the same for an off-line business as well, you need some self-belief as well as a lot of hard work.

I remember reading your post on the Site Build It! (TM) controversy and how much attention it drew to your blog, how much did that help the traffic and income to your blog?

It gave me a huge kick in reader and subscribers – and that is the basis of making money online – getting the traffic is key. And the post refuses to die because 5 months later I still get regular comments on it – up to nearly 500 now. At the time I wrote it I didn’t have a way to monetize the traffic – but have been doing OK from it since.

The post on how you made $2000 online has attracted a lot of comments on your blog and I am sure it will be an inspiration to many. If there any so called secrets to making money online, I guess the answer is just “a lot of hard work”, do you agree?

Hard work sure, but not giving up is a big one – as I said above – I could easily have given up a few months earlier. Its about being smart too -diversification is critical making all your money from one site or one main affiliate is just to risky for me.

I started off on Hubpages around the same time as you, but I didn’t continue there for very long. I just went back to the site recently and it looks like it has really grown in usefulness and as a community. How much of a role did Hubpages play in your rise in income?

I remember you telling me I would never make real money on a revenue-sharing site

At one level hubpages kept me going – I like the community there – I managed to consistently make a few 10′s of dollars each month – it was better than nothing. I never saw it as a serious player though until Court at the KeyWordAcademy issued the 100 hubs challenge. As part of that I started a new author there and focused on niches where people really wanted an answer and wanted it now. Well much to my surprise I tripled my income from the site inside 100 hubs and a few weeks work.

You mentioned you have been outsourcing content creation, where do you find people to do your writing and do you think you will be increasing the amount of outsourcing you do in the future?

Yes I will – I haven’t yet figured out what percentage of my income I should be reinvesting. I am currently best pleased with results from textbroker.com. I should probably try and get some regular writers from elance or odesk – but I’m not yet at that level of orgainsation.

I believe your partner isn’t interested in Internet Marketing and I think one of the hardest things about making money online is that generally you don’t make much, if any money in the beginning. What advice would you give to people who are interested in making money online and just starting out, but their partner is convinced it is a scam/waste of time?

Its a very personal thing. Personally if my partner hadn’t been prepared to bankroll our lifestyle with his job I would have cashed in some investments I have to pay the bills. My partner knew it wasn’t a scam – he’s in IT – he understood the concept of what I was attempting – he just didn’t believe that I could pull it off. That was fair enough neither did I! Fortunately once I started making it happened he has no problem understanding the dollars in my PayPal account At the end of the day the only way to prove working online is not a waste of time or a scam is to have the pay checks right?

You mentioned a keyword building tool that you use, which I imagine you have to pay to use, how do you decide on which services/tools to use to make money online?

I’ll generally only buy something if its recommended by someone I trust. Though I do try the odd other thing – but only if there is a money back period – which is very common in the field. I don’t hesitate to return the crap! I generally go on recommendations from a few marketers whom I trust. I know them well enough. You can actually do all of this without any paid tools and without buying any ebooks. But I use tools which save me time – because time is the one thing you can’t get back and buy the odd e-book because a good one is a short cut to knowledge.

Many people teaching making money online seem to follow a similar method, find keywords that have a high search volume and low competition and then set up a mini-site based on that topic. Do you think that is a good way to make money?

Well mini-sites work for me As I said above I prefer diversification and that’s what mini-sites provide me with. That said people get hung up on the search vol – all of the tools – including google’s are only wild estimates, and I rather have 10 desperate buyers rather than 1000 window shoppers! A small focused site can provide the searcher with the answer they are looking for – and I get paid – seems like a win/win to me.

What are your goals and plans for the rest of 2009?

We are planning on returning to New Zealand in the first quarter fof 2010 – I hope to have a full-time income of around US$4000/month by then – giving my partner the luxury of retiring if he wants to. So the rest of 2009 is going to be an awful lot of work setting up a whole lot of new sites!

Thanks for interview, Lis. I wish you all the best for the rest of 2009.

Make sure you check out Lis’s blog and some of her articles on Hubpages.

I have used Hubpages for a while and I have to say, I don’t like the interface of Infobarrel. Until you write 10 articles and get approved by an Infobarrel manager, every article needs to be approved by a human reader. I don’t mind this, but I just had a problem with seeing if the article had been entered into the system successfully or not. To be safe I re-pasted it into a new article and it looks as though my first attempt at saving an article with InfoBarrel failed. Fortunately I wrote and saved my article in OpenOffice, which I recommend doing.

Since articles need to be approved by editors on Infobarrel, Google apparently places more trust on the site. The effect is that you are supposed to get the equivalent link juice as that of ezinearticles.

I feel so motivated the past couple of days, producing actual content on my sites and on sites like Hubpages. I think I have been kidding myself that I was working by reading forums, using facebook and twitter. While I think I still think this is important, it shouldn’t be how you spend the majority of your time.

I am going to try and make a conscience effort from now on at creating content on my own sites and income sharing sites like Hubpages and Infobarrel and rather than using forums and commentating on other blogs to try and get traffic. I also want to try and write more articles on ezinearticles to get traffic and backlinks.

I will updated my progress on my new little experiment.

While I have been taking some time off (and neglecting this blog) at least one of my online friends has jumped from making almost nothing to over $2000 a month. I think these kinds of stories are very inspiring and you can learn a lot by looking at how someone went from almost nothing to $2000 a month.

It seems like Liz has been working hard on making niche sites in profitable areas with high search volume. She has also been successful on Hubpages, something I worked on for a while, but have since neglected. She has also been using Ezinearticles to get backlinks for her hubs. I had an account on Ezine and have previously written just 2 articles. This week I wrote another one, but it’s definitely something I think I will keep working in the future.

Hubpages is great for testing new niches. It gives some nice statistics on your traffic and you can include any links to your sites or affiliate links.

Liz’s latest blog post contained a link to this interesting article: Be a better blogger? WTF? responding to Problogger’s article Forget the fatal flaws of blogging.

I love Problogger, but I also have to admit that even though I subscribe to the blog in my reader, I rarely read the article beyond the headline. I think the top A list bloggers really are victims of their own success. While you might get some great tips for making a very “nice” blog reading Problogger, you will get few ideas for making serious cash.

Problogger has been featured on television and been mentioned in a number of high profile magazines and newspapers. Darren Rowse through the blog has built an excellent reputation, so there is no way he is going to tarnish this by promoting a cutting edge method or technique for getting traffic or making money online, that might be a little “creative”.

So if you want to learn some interesting ways to make money online, you might want to check out some of these blogs.

Make money for beginners

How to Make Money Online with SEO
Blogger Unleased

Details and download links can be found here.

When you have something as popular as Facebook, you really need to learn how you might be able to leverage its popularity. I have some ideas as to how I could promote an ebook I have written.

One thing I didn’t know about was Facebook pages. You can create a page for free to promote your business. Here is one I just started to promote my Beijing Olympic site.

I had a feeling that it was hard to get traffic to the sites you create, then I saw this post. The fun thing I like about the site, that it really is a community site with people sending each other comments and helping each other out. The regular people seem to concentrate on producing quality articles, rather than just promoting their sites.

It is an excellent way for people who have no clue about how to make money on the internet to get started. It is great for testing new ideas. Better to write an article there and see how it goes before you go off registering domains and so forth.

The other thing which makes it fun is the scoring system. You may not be making much money, but the more you contribute the higher your score goes. The more traffic you can get to your hub, the higher score you get for the hub. It feels like a bit of a game.

I can only see the site becoming more popular and it could be worth investigating how you can profit from the site more.

Sign up here for hub pages.

I think niches are still a good way to make money, but once you have discovered a successful niche, I think you then need to start thinking in verticals. One thing that has stuck in my mind was something which Darren of Problogger.net said in an interview. The question was if he had to start again, what would he do differently if he had to start again.

He replied that he would stick to the camera or digital camera vertical. He has run various blogs on a wide variety of topics, but it seems like his camera review site, his newly launched digital photography site and of course problogger are his main areas of of interest.

If you have one successful website it is much easier to piggyback off this website to launch a new website along a similar theme or vertical. For me the Tokyo/Japan vertical has worked well for me. From my Tokyo website, I have created a Japan job site and a Japan hostel booking site, both of which are doing nicely.

After coming to China I found ChinaRant.com and thought the idea was a good one, so I launched JapanRant.com. It has only take a couple of hours to put together, but if I spend some time marketing the site, I think it could work.

I have been out of Japan for nearly a year now and was thinking perhaps there isn’t much for people to complain about there, but read how the government is getting all foreigners living there and entering the country to be finger printed.

My boss told me about one employee she had who could not sell high priced items. The person was fine with lower priced items, but not the high end stuff – where the real money is at. My boss came to the conclusion that the employee could not afford the items herself, so she had trouble selling them.

I think you can apply this same lesson to internet marketing. Just because you might not like something (long sales letters, opt-in boxes), it does not mean you shouldn’t use it on your sites. Just because you might not spend a thousand dollars on an internet marketing course, there are plenty of people who will.

You need to test everything and use whatever works.