The Featured Post

This Week I received an email from Hubpages that they’re moving all content on Hubpages to subdomains. This means that if you don’t log into your account before August 10th, you’ll be lumbered with whatever subdomain they choose for you.

Why are they doing this? 

Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, especially if you’ve got a lot of links to your existing hubs which will now have to be moved to a subdomain. Will my links be lost? Hubpages say no, as your old url will be redirected to the subdomain. But, it’s still worth monitoring the situation and seeing if you there’s any significant traffic drop after the move, also performing a weekly backlink check through Yahoo Site Explorer or OSE will help you check.

It’s most likely because of the Panda update, and last month Hubpages were testing with some Hubs if they moved them to subdomains would they still the drop off in traffic. Seems they didn’t, hence this new change. You can read a better explanation of how Panda affected Hubpages and what they did here.

The best advice is to login to your account and make sure you choose a personalised subdomain, otherwise you could be given an SEO unfriendly subdomain. I think even with this change, Hubpages still has its merits, and is certainly great for quick article publication and embedding your affiliate links in. But, as Panda has shown it’s not a wise idea to recycle your articles and publish on a variety of different Web 2.0 or PR sites, writing your own content for each site may be more time consuming but at least you won’t have to worry further down the line about your site getting penalised from recycled and rehashed content.

Resources for making your Squidoo Lenses, Hubpages etc. profitable:

• Home Stage Success *
• Squidoo Lens Video Seminar *

Following lots of requests, I’m starting to put together my first coaching program for fellow internet marketers. I’m limiting the number of places to just 10, yes you heard me right 10 places. Read more about it here. This will be the only one I’m putting on this year and will all be done online through video conferencing and support through Skype. You’ll get access to loads of resources including tutorial vids, easily digestable training manuals and at the end a n up and running optimised site in your chosen niche. If you want to know more, please email us at: info@notjustanynichemarketingsolutions.com

Okay so it’s a little late, something went horribly wrong with a site migration, and it messed up a few things. Anyway long story cut short I lost a few posts, in the migration, and they were probably the best posts written ever in the history of this blog. hahaha. What a pain in the bottom.

Anyway I’d like to start off by saying, now what is a belated Happy 4th July to our American readers. Hope you had a great day! In other news, the astute amongst you will noticed I’ve had a bit of a change of this site in terms of design. I’m really liking the new design and there’s going to be lots more improvements in the coming weeks and months, so please do check back regularly.I’m thinking of getting some podcasts and interviews up with other internet marketers, so if you’d like to be interviewed sharing some tips and insight into how you’re currently earning money online, whether its affiliate marketing, selling your own product/service or something else – please drop be a line.

This week has been incredibly interesting and productive, with lots of exciting buzz and new releases, including the new WordPress 3.2 Release, as well as people getting invitationals for Google+ social networking (I’m still waiting for mine – doh!). Also in the world of news here in the UK, this story has seemed to dominated the headlines for the past week and Sunday will be the last printed publication of The News of The World, with many people commenting on Twitter how ironic and comical the homepage around the closure announcements read, e.g. Apprentice Zoe: ‘I won Glenn with socks appeal’. Pure comedy, anyway, when one comic book ends another will surely take its place.

An interesting email also arrived in my inbox this week. Normally, I quickly scan through automated emails from a lot of internet marketers, but on rare occasions if I have nothing better to do I’ll give them some attention. This week it was one from Yaro Starak, who probably was one of the first bloggers out there to make me aware of the potential for earning a full-time living from blogging. Turns out he’s had a bit of bad news, and now has had to give up the full-time job of managing a succesful internet business to take on a new full-time job of caring for his mother. You can read the story here.

Certainly gives you food for thought about whether or not your business could cope if changes to your circumstances took a drastic turn in events. Could your support team handle everything? I think Yaro’s exceptionally lucky in that he clearly has a great team around him, friends and fellow bloggers that can help him. But these can only be temporary solutions. Could your business survive if you weren’t there and for how long?

Lets hope this is only a temporary change in circumstances for Yaro, as its always good to see what new training and services he offers.

Time certainly flies by. It’s now 2 years since I first started this blog and initially started working from home. A lot has happened over the past 2 years, I’ve lived in two different countries in Asia, learnt two new languages, worked for a large software corporation and honed my SEO and PPC skills, and took up surfing! I’m even more passionate about internet marketing, and really believe it can help people earn stable and decent monthly incomes and offer people more freedom in their lives. It certainly was the best decision, and now I don’t have to be fixed to a specific location and have the freedom to work anywhere in the world – as long as I can plug in and connect to the internet. More and more people, are realizing that they don’t need to work traditional 9-5s and slave away to companies who will see you as easily expendable. What’s more you’re always working on their terms, and never on your own ones.

Hopefully, this blog has so far given you some useful pointers and advice when it comes to internet marketing and finding a niche to make money from. There’s going to be lots more exciting updates and changes to the blog in the coming future. Its time to give this baby a complete overhaul, so stay tuned….

If you’re running a few blogs or sites, or perhaps even a small network, across different niches, then it can be difficult to know when to inter-link between articles/posts and when to externally link to other sites. Often people will be scared of passing page rank and therefore, only inter-link between their sites. This is not recommended. Not only will your readers soon cotton on to what you’re doing and look for the information elsewhere, but it also won’t help your SEO one iota. It’s important to strike a balance between inter-linking for your own work and externally linking to relevant articles/posts. Generally, a good rule to follow, is that if you need to provide a reference for previous posts (be it on your own site or someone else’s) then link with relevant anchor text and make sure you use the html target: ‘_blank’ to ensure the link opens up in a new tab, so the reader can continue reading your post/article.

There are many web marketing analytic tools to use all fulfilling a range of purposes. But you don’t have to spend wads of cash on fancy analytical tools, that you might not even figure out how to use. Many hosting providers will also provide free web analytics, probably one of the better ones is: AWStats. Also as far as open source web analytics go: Piwik offers many of the features GA does and some more: http://piwik.org/

However, if you thinking of buying advanced web analytics software then you should really carefully consider how you’re going to maximize your benefit from the software. After all it’s no good in buying something just to present your pretty graphs, if you’re not actually taking anything away from it and carrying out tasks/actions on the data presented.

For many of website owners or Bloggers’ Google Analytics will suffice, although sometimes some of the data presented for certain metrics can be dubious at the best of time (hence why other options are considered). Whatever tool you decide upon, make sure it’s showing you what you need to know in order to help you realize both short term and long term goals. Make sure the reporting is adequate for your needs and is versatile enough should your website expand and more data needs to be analyzed.

Here’s a list of top 10 Web Analytic Software according to Sitepoint

First of, I’d like to start off by saying a massive Happy New Year to readers, and I hope this year you manage to check off all your internet marketing goals. Another start to the year, and another affiliate summit in Vegas. Unfortunately this year I was unable to attend, but I’m sure it was as motivational as ever, and a lot of great ideas were fed around. I’ve never been a big fan of these over-priced and over-hyped summits, but I can honestly say if you’ve been involved in the affiliate game for some time you’ll know how everyone raves about this summit as a great way for forming perhaps new joint ventures, making contacts and getting some new ideas for your business. It’s definitely on my agenda for next year to make it, and hope It’ll be well worth the expense.
In the meantime I’d love to hear from people who attended this year, and what the highlights/take-homes were.

Recently I have been stumbling upon a bunch of great sites that reflect some of my hobbies and interest. This Guitar and Amp Reviews site is certainly no different. Being quite a hobbyist guitarist myself, and quite an avid fan of fender Stratocasters in particular I was overjoyed to find a wealth of pictures and in-depth information on various Strats from the decades. My favourite Strat on the site has to be the 54 Stratocaster sunburst colour played by many of the greats. I also enjoy playing other makes of guitars such as Gibsons, and even some of the good Strat copies such as Tokai. I was also pleased to see on this review site some great up close pics in high resolutions of classic models, as well as some useful information on what kind of guitars the greats are famed for playing. I’d well recommend checking this review site out for any guitar enthusiast.

It’s undeniable that 2010 has seen a great increase in the number of slate devices and smart phones. Smart Media organization has also been key with the reliance on such smart phones and tablets. A lot of time is devoted to using social media networks via these smart devices through WiFi and 3G networks. However, there doesn’t seem to many apps and software that help people familiarize themselves with these social networks, and especially in the realm of educating newbies how to get the best out of what many of us take for granted these days. There’s still a big market for educating and teaching people how to use things like Gmail, facebook and twitter. I found this great site offering an amazing free educational toolbar which does the job nicely as educational toolbars for social media go.

free educational toolbar

marketing library toolbar

free charity toolbar

free non-profit toolbar

free church education toolbar

I don’t do many site reviews here, but I regularly stumble across sites which I think are worth a mention from time to time. Online Connect’s colour photocopier site, is a such a website that I feel is worth mentioning and taking a look at. I really liked the site design and the way the products are clearly displayed. Not knowing much about colour photocopiers myself apart from everyday simple use in the office, I found it also a good information point for various models and what’s more their site supports multi-languages which is worth considering for our own sites and optimizing for multi-languages. Also another good feature of the site is the easy comparison retail price product engine, a great tool for comparing prices quickly on the various printer and photocopy machines. Their online colour photocopiers are very reasonable in price too.

Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate for this site. Check the site out, especially if you’re in need of a new printer or photocopier.