A retirement plan is aimed at providing you with a regular earning after your retirement. This eventually means, you would not need to depend on your children financially.

There are a few common mistakes that people make while planning for their retirement. Read on so as to avoid committing the mistakes and live a stress free life:

1. Plan your retirement well ahead:

The life expectancy of human beings has seen a growth at the recent times. It has been observed that people spend an average of 30 years in retirement. Hence, it is absolutely crucial to plan your savings properly so as to maintain a decent living standard post retirement. While planning you need to consider a few basic things like- your retirement age, minimum amount you require to maintain a healthy lifestyle, etc. Also check the worth of your Individual retirement account (IRA). Learn more about your pension schemes and various social security benefits.

2. Do not take out money from your retirement savings:

In case you want to take out the money, utilize it for smart investment moves. You should ideally aim to increase the cash flow into your account.

3. Start saving early:

Most people wrongly assume that they will have a lot of time for their retirement planning once all other financial affairs fall into place. But then, by the time you are 50, there is no time to plan for your retirement savings. So, it is wise to start as early as possible.

4. Monitor your investments:

Your retirement assets need regular monitoring just like your other belongings (for instance, home and car). You should regularly check your retirement account and reallocate your assets. It is absolutely necessary to do an investment assessment once a year to make sure that you are aware of the risk levels in your portfolio.

5. Relieve your debts:

You would not want to retire with the burden of debt on your shoulders. Make sure to repay all your debts. If necessary, enroll yourself for a debt settlement program.

Contribute as much as possible to your tax deferral accounts like Roth IRA and annuities. Also remember, you have to pay a 10% early withdrawal penalty if you withdraw your money from the retirement account before you are 59 years 6 months old. This will exhaust your savings earlier than usual.

I have currently published 74 articles so far with one pending. Last year I had a couple of months where I was writing an article a day. I got busy after that however with other projects, including writing an ebook, so I have only started using the site again.

The site has grown nicely since I joined, adding new features like a forum and more revenue options. One thing I really enjoy with the site is their ‘points’ system. You earn points for writing more articles, referring people to the site, posting comments etc. When you reach a certain number, Infobarrel refers this to unlocking an ‘achievement’.

It’s not like you get any money earning more points, but it does give you a warm and fuzzy feeling! It would be nice if maybe later they decided that you could actually do something with those points.

They do have contests however, with some good prizes. It’s not easy to win them however, because there are some very dedicated writers on Infobarrel.

Your first 10 articles on Infobarrel are manually approved, which seems to cut out most spammers. People also generally write well written and researched articles, which I think is contributing to the success of Infobarrel as it is not being used purely for marketing purposes.

Infobarrel gives you a choice of four formats for your article, Blank Article, Video Article, How-To Article and Review Article. I have never tried the video article or a review article. Personally I don’t like the how to style format and it seems a bit of a copy of the ehow format.

That is not saying I don’t write, how to type articles, for me they have been the best performing articles on the site. So even if I write a how-to type of article, I use the Blank Article format.

If you are stuck for a topic, you can visit the Things to Do, section where you can find a number of article topics and overviews, which you can write about. I have done a few overviews and articles from the list, but in terms of page views, they haven’t done as well as some of the topics that I have come up with myself.

Infobarrel is a great place for people starting out making money on the internet. Rather than wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars on internet marketing courses, anyone who can string a sentence or two together can join Infobarrel and start making money straight away.

Invariably people who are starting out don’t know what kinds of articles will perform well, or how they can get more traffic. You can see how many page views an article has received, so you can get a good idea as to what kind of articles will get traffic. Rather than paying for someone to tell you what to do, you can find out what works for you by experimenting with different styles and topics.

Probably one of the only things I don’t like about Infobarrel is the text editor they are using on the site. For some reason I often have problems with it. Usually I write the article on my computer first and then just copy and paste it into the article once I have completed it. I would suggest they create something like what WordPress uses.

I would have to say however, the support is fantastic and the few times I have sent an email to them with a problem, I have gotten a fairly quick response.

The forum is also a great place for sharing ideas on how to get more traffic to your articles and how in general you can make money online. I have only just started posting there, but have found it to be a friendly forum with a mixture of experienced writers and people just starting out.

In conclusion, Infobarrel is a great site for people who just starting to learn about making money on the internet, aspiring writers or established internet marketers who are looking to diversify their income streams.

I would say the interview is worth listening to for any internet marketer even if you don’t use WordPress. The interview is more of a general nature on blogging and SEO and is not so technical.

Matt answers many misconceptions about creating a website, like issues with duplicate content, the value of links from social media sites, meta tags and plugins like the “all in one SEO” plugin, which he says isn’t really required anymore.

If you spend a lot time on more advanced SEO techniques, like “pagerank sculpting” this interview could help you to bring it back to the basics of creating solid content and marketing.

I wasn’t half surprised when I searched on “Groupon clone” to find several companies selling website clones of the popular site.

A company called Agriya have a script that looks promising. I emailed the company for a quote and they said it would cost around $1200. A little out of my budget for what I would want to spend.

Grouponclone.biz has a script for just $200 and the site has an online demo, although it is difficult to know if the script operates as expected. When buying these kinds of scripts, I like to see if the site has a support forum, which gives you some idea of the install base and the level of support from the programmers. In this case there is no forum.

Grouponclone.com looks like another promising script. It still looks fairly new and is priced at $399.

If you aren’t familiar with how Groupon works, they have some good videos on their website explaining in detail how their website helps businesses.

One of the problems of launching such a site, is the classic chicken before the egg dilemma. How can you convince companies to use your service if you don’t have traffic going to the site and how to get people to subscribe to your site if you don’t have some great deals already going.

Groupon collects the money when people buy an offer and then distributes it to the company if the offer becomes valid. It’s something that I think would be difficult to get going without having some kind of trust happening already between your customers and advertisers.

My thought to get a site going was to just set up a site where companies could create printable coupons and you could make it free initially and then charge later if the site became successful. At the same time you could also build up an email list where people would get automatic emails of new coupons available.

I thought it would be easy to find such a script, but most of the scripts seem to be suited for online coupons. I wanted to create something that people would print out and take to a store as I would be operating a site where internet is not so widely used in business.

After spending a few hours searching, Coupon Press which works with WordPress seems to offer one of the better valued solutions. It’s $79 and it looks to have a good install base and support, judging from the activity on their forum.

There is a free extension available for Joomla which I did try, but it just looks too basic.

So while it might seem fairly easy to set up your own group on type business, you still have to think how you plan to get traffic and people to actually using your service.

Last year I moved to Bali and I created a free guide to how people might be able to find work or start a business. Other than a bit of promotion I did in the beginning, I have had over 750 people download the book.

I have been spending the past few months researching and writing a book that went into much more detail about starting a business in Bali. I released it last week and so far the response has been fantastic.

I interviewed successful expat business owners and that in itself was a great experience for me.

It is definitely a lot more work creating your own products to sell, but building an email list and selling your own products is so much more rewarding than playing the Adsense game.

I have been using e-junkie to sell my ebook and it is working out great so far.

And yes, there is an affiliate program if anyone is interested.

My writing goes back to 2004 and the site has some strong incoming links and has some good rankings for retire and retirement related keywords.

I can include the free ebook I wrote in the sale, which is a good way to build your own list.

The site doesn’t really make much money now as I am no longer really promoting it and I not really selling any products on the site.

I am looking for serious offers only that reflects the amount of work that I put into the blog and the content that has been written.

Update: I have had a bit of a rethink about the website and since no one seems to want to pay what I would like to get for the site, I have decided to keep running it for now.

I had thoughts of starting another website and then I realized how much work it takes to get a site going and building links to it, so I think it would be much better if I just keep trying to build on the content that I already have here.

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.

From time to time, Google.com stops working. They seem to have some serious problems with their proxy. The thing is that I just realized how dependent I have become on the big G.

Bing works fine as an alternative search engine, but that is only one thing I use Google for. I use gmail for my mail, both personal and business. I also store quite a bit of stuff in my gmail account.

I have been using Google docs more and more, as it is great to have your documents available anywhere and is ideal for group collaboration. Adsense and analytics are also important services for my websites. I also started getting back into using the blogger service.

Fortunately, I still like Bloglines to read news and blogs, even though Google reader might be better. I don’t want to be 100 per cent dependent on Google, but it is becoming increasingly difficult.

I am settling now into a new house in Bali and just trying to avoid the stress of starting a new business in a foreign country. I love living here, but sometimes no matter how great your surroundings are, you still have to deal with the usual problems that you face living anywhere in the world.

Anway I am now trying to get back into the swing of internet marketing and updating all of my websites. I want to get back into doing some article writing, blogging and want to write a new ebook.

My lists are going strong, but I don’t have much to sell to people and hoping to change that.

One thing I have been thinking about more recently is trying to utilize free blogging sites more. Before if I came up with a new idea for a niche website, I went out and bought a new domain. Often that is all I ended up doing with the website. My new idea is to set up a new blog on a site like blogger and just write some posts there.

I really wonder if people care that much about whether there is useful information on a blogger blog or whether it is hosted on their own domain. I suspect most people visiting the site don’t care too much at all, as long as it provides the information they are looking for.

I am not saying I am getting rid of any sites, just if I come up with new ideas for niche websites. This blog started its life on blogger and the service has come a long way since then. Adsense can be added with a click of a button and there are thousands of gadgets you can add to your site to give it more functionality.

If you are new to internet marketing or someone who is experienced and looking for a different strategy, I think you could do worse than creating a niche blog on blogger and get links to it using Hubpages and Infobarrel.

I have mainly been using Hubpages to do some SEO experiments and try and get a couple of extra links to my websites. I did one product review type hub, where the products are around $450, but didn’t expect to make any sales.

I was checking my Amazon earnings and I found I had made a $450 sale, which I get about 5-6% of. The hub didn’t take long to write and I have zero knowledge of the actual products.

Although you might not see immediate results, doing keyword research, writing articles and knowing some basic SEO, like how to get links, can make you some decent money.

I suggest signing up with Hubpages and giving them a try.