While working from home has its many perks—you get to avoid standstill traffic, you can sleep in a little longer, and you can lounge around in your pajamas all day if you want (not recommended) there is another advantage to working from home that most other look: a healthier lifestyle. Eating right and monitoring your waistline is something really hard to do at your typical 9 -to -5 job— you sit on your bottom for 8 hours a day, co-workers coerce you on a daily basis to join them for lunch at the local fast food restaurant across the street and then for a couple of beers at happy hour after work. Not to mention you come home too exhausted to go the gym after work. My first year at my stable in-office job, I gained 15 pounds. But I lost it as soon as I started working from the confinements of my own home. To learn how I did it and how you can keep your health in check as well, continue reading below.

Opt for Non-Traditional Office Furniture

One of the easiest ways to help you stay fit and strengthen your core with little effort is to switch out your office chair for an exercise yoga ball. It might seem a little silly to use one around your co-workers, but if you’re working at home it’s worth giving it a shot. With the exercise ball, you’re constantly using your stomach muscles to keep your balance, so you’re more active than when sitting in a traditional office chair. While a regular exercise ball will do, if you need a bit more back support there are specially designed exercise balance ball chairs available for purchase.

Download Exercise Apps

Even with the exercise ball, you should definitely look into some simple desktop exercises—moves that you can do while sitting at your desk.  Like with the exercise ball, it’s easier to do leg and arm exercises at home instead of at the office since you’re less of a distraction to everyone. While you can easily Google some chair and desk exercises, you can also download some apps like DeskFit App so that you can have a virtual trainer teach you a set of different moves everyday with assisting pictures. Try to create a routine and set an alarm on your phone so you can do them every day—this can also serve as a really productive break.

Have the Right Foods Stacked in Your Fridge/ Pantry

Working from home also makes it easier to make better and healthier food choices when it comes to breakfast and lunch. This could be a risky move however if you give yourself access to salty and sugar snacks like candy, chips and soda. The best way to avoid unhealthy foods is just to not buy them and toss out the unhealthy items you already have in your fridge and pantry. Instead, you should replace them with items that are good for you and will give you the proper energy you need to complete all of your daily tasks such as whole grains, water based-soups, fruits and veggies high in calcium, plain Greek yogurt, and drinks lots of water. Aim for 8 glasses a day. And if you have to get up and use to restroom every 10 minutes that’s fine too—there’s no boss to ask you what’s wrong with your bladder.

Squeeze in Some Exercise Routine

You can cut two hours of your regular commute simply by working from home. It’s important however that you use that extra time to fit in some exercise. Invest in a gym membership, workout videos, or do some jogging around your neighborhood before or after work; the summer is quickly approaching so you can consider doing a few laps in the pool too. Since you’re free to make your own schedule, you can go to the gym during your lunch break as well. As long as you get some sort of activity in 3 to 4 days a week, you’ll be in the best shape possible.

This is a guest post by Eliza Morgan who is a full time blogger.  She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.

Related articles

• How Do You Sit Comfortably and Ergonomically on a Budget? [Ask The Readers] (lifehacker.com)
• Tips on work from home (casualphotos.wordpress.com)

According to Citibank, You Had Better be Using Mobile Phones and the Internet to be a Successful Marketer

A recent survey that was conducted by Citibank states that 65% of small business owners surveyed across the United States indicated that increased marketing activities were the driving factor that grew their business. On top of that, the survey also found that the best new technical solution for small businesses were the integration of smart phones. As technology improves, it is becoming more and more important to integrate marketing campaigns with the internet and especially with mobile phones.

(Courtesy of aaronparecki)

            With this vast improvement in technology, especially in the smart phone and tablet markets, it is imperative that anyone with a marketing campaign integrate them together. The survey goes on to detail just how the small businesses broke down their marketing campaigns. 70% of respondents used their own website and 41% used social media platforms to market themselves. In terms of what trends aren’t as big as they used to be, 62% of the people surveyed haven’t even used email as a marketing tool. In essence, the survey shows that what used to be successful just isn’t anymore.

With that being said, we must look at where the innovation is today in order to find the best place to market products. This innovation is currently taking off in cell phones and the internet. Through the use of smart phones and online marketing, more and more people are gaining a new and much more engaged audience. In order to make this a successful venture, you must realize that this shouldn’t be your only avenue for marketing. It should simply be a tool within your overall marketing campaign to fulfill your goals.

Integration is the key word here. It is imperative that each aspect of the marketing campaign be integrated smoothly. When looking at mobile phone marketing and incorporating the internet, there are many factors to consider. This could also involve finding out what service providers are most prevalent, what types of cell phone plans are being used, and whether others in your field are using these tactics. However, in the end the target audience is most important. You want to know the demographics of exactly who you want to sell to. Also, you want to remember to keep your goals in mind.

When looking at the Citibank survey the biggest percentage jumps out first. 70% of those surveyed maintained that using their website was the key to their internet marketing campaign. This is incredibly important to realize, because the goal of any good marketing campaign should be to drive traffic to your website. Websites are the most efficient and cost effective way to sell a product.

Keeping this goal in mind, integrating cell phones is an easy next step. You want to integrate a mobile version of your website, and you want to keep it simple. Even though smart phone usage is growing rapidly, many people still have limited data usage within their respective cell phone plans. Create a mobile version of your site that loads quickly, is simple to navigate, and most importantly makes it easy to buy what you are selling.

To surmise, mobile marketing is not only the wave of the future but it is here NOW. Do not fall behind the curve in terms of getting in to this area of marketing. Smartphone usage is rampant and growing by the second. Considering on how new mobile phone marketing is, there are very few who have conquered it. This presents the opportunity for new comers to gain popularity very quickly. The integration of cell phones and the internet into marketing campaigns is here to stay. Just make sure that you get in while the getting’s good.

This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a writer for the website Cell Phone Expert where you can compare cell phone plans.

More Resources on Mobile Phones for Internet Marketing

10 Web marketing trends

Making money on Amazon can take a lot of time if you are to do things manually. Everything from

• searching for the right keywords/product,
• buying a domain,
• getting a host for your domain,
• setting up your page,
• finding the right keywords to promote
• building backlinks
• social media, SEO, writing etc

takes a lot of time awayyyyy…

And all of this just involves one site… What if you want to repeat this across several sites and build many niche sites at once??

Obviously, it will take you even LONGERR…. Not sure about you but for me, I would personally, safe some of my time doing other things that will bring me more money.

Tools For Researching Amazon Products as an Affiliate

Searching For the Right Keywords or product to promote is probably the most important part. If you get this step wrong, then any other step will no longer matter. That is why you need to do good product research before you decide to start a niche site and build links to it.

Here are a few tools for your consideration, that I highly recommend of course.

1) AMASuite

This product was recently on the WSO for a while on a dimesale. It sold like real HOT cakes and now it is sold out… unfortunately. If you did not have the opprtunity to get your hands on this great product, sign yourself up for the early bird list.

The AMASuite product comes with three different tools which include:

• Azon Product Inspector
• Azon Top 100 Analyzer
• Azon Keyword Generator

My fav is the first two tools as I have alternative products that I can use besides the keyword generator that comes with it. If you do manage to purchase AMAsuite, you will be pleased to know that it makes short work of finding bestselling products, newly listed products, and products with the most reviews in whatever category of product you choose to promote on your niche site.

Definitely a time saver in my opinion compared to the old days, when i did everything manually on my own. For those with experience doing this, you should know that it is a real pain…. :S

2) Market Samurai

Need I say more about this old timer?? Although Market Samurai has been around for years, this product still tells you:

• how to do proper keyword research and
• analyze your competition.
• lookup good domain names that are available

Another key thing about building niche sites is to analyze your competition which comes with Market Samurai. If you fail to consider this as well while doing product research, you are in for a hard time trying to rank it or fail entirely.

If you don’t have the funds, other reasonably comparable tools you can consider include this:

• Google Keyword tool
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• SEOQuake
• Opensiteexplorer.org
• MajesticSEO
• Wordtracker
• SEMRush

The top three four tools from this list that I would recommend are Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends, MajesticSEO and OpensitExplorer.

Setting Up An AMAZON Niche Site

Setting up an Amazon niche site can take a lot of time and I wouldn’t say every theme is perfectly optimized for Amazon affiliates.

Themes

I have tried a few like Thesis, Azon theme, ElegantThemes and a few others. 

Of all those themes out there, I would either go for the EasyAZON theme or Thesis. Thesis takes some time to manually set up so unless you are setting up just a few niche sites,

***I would suggest going for a more optimized theme like AZON theme.***

You can get the AZON theme free through Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course. 

Another good recommendation that I have is to use WPZonbuilder. Even if you do not have any particular theme that you are interested in, this plugin can help generate product posts immediately.

Plugins

Hmm, what would we do without plugins on WordPress… I would say you definitely need some Amazon specific plugins for your niche sites. One of them that I recommend is WPZonbuilder. WPzonbuilder helps generate products posts with great ease. Great for those who don’t want to spend too much time writing posts manually. Although this plugins saves a lot of time, I would still encourage you to write posts manually or get someone to write it for you (see below…)

Another great plugin to have is EasyAzon. EasyAzon helps you insert affiliate links with tremendous ease. All you got to do is to select an appropriate category for your product and then insert either a text link, an image link or a whole product block link. The other good thing about EasyAzon is that you can get commissions from all the Amazon affiliate programs unlike most people who can only generate commissions through the Amazon.com site.

Building Backlinks

Building backlinks is probably one of the greatest pains of internet marketing. It is not worth spending time building backlinks. Based on my experience, it is certainly no fun writing articles that no one will read to get a backlink back to your niche sites. You might as well outsource it or get someone to do it for you by using a good backlink building service.

Here are some great services that I highly recommend personally.

• BuildMyRank  (BMR)
• Fiverr
• Odesk

“Any form of backlinking method can be done through Fiverr for a MEASLY $5″

Finally…

There are a lot of other good services or tools to help you but if you want to get the most out of your time building niche sites, the above tools are necessary for your business.

Have you been “Pinterest-ing” lately???

Ever wondered what the hype is all about on Pinterest?

Even if you don’t have a clue on how it works or how it should work… you should take a look at the Infographic below. If you are having a business, Pinterest is a great site to promote your business if you know what to do. I am personally using Pinterest to promote some of my business items. Of course, before you start promoting IM stuff, you had better think twice as Pinterest is not so much for it as what I can see ( but I might be wrong in future…)

Anyway, if you hate long words and long paragraphs of explanation on things, this infographic is quite a good guide on how you should use it for your business online/offline or your website or blog.

Want to Know EVEN more about how to use Pinterest, then check out SocialMediaExaminer on its 26 tips to use pinterest for your business:

> 26 Tips to Use Pinterest For Your Business

When you’re starting a new business, it’s hard enough to know what you SHOULD be doing, much less what you SHOULDN’T.  And yet, even if you think you’re doing everything you’re supposed to, you may risk failure with common missteps that could be easily avoided if only you knew what to watch out for.  Luckily, you’re not reinventing the wheel here; plenty of other businesses have laid the groundwork for you and you can benefit from their trials.

Are You Experiencing This????

The only possible way to fall short is if you neglect to learn from those that have gone before.  So here are just a few of the most universal setbacks that you’ll certainly want to steer clear of when you open the doors to your new business venture.

1. An incomplete plan.  As any business owner (or recent business student) knows, you must have a comprehensive business plan in order to move forward with starting an enterprise.  There are many reasons for this, but the most important at the outset is to secure funding.  Without a solid plan that shows you have done the research and taken the steps to be successful, no lender in the world will give you the handout you need to get your business off the ground.  After all, they want their investment back at some point.  But keep in mind that this plan must be flexible.  Running a business is anything but static and you need to start with a plan that accounts for just about anything so that you are prepared when changes occur.
2. The wrong funding.  Most people generally assume that this means a lack of funding.  And this is definitely a problem for a lot of startups.  But considering how many potential sources of funding are out there, you have a lot of options to explore.  The bigger problem is business ventures that choose the wrong type of funding.  For example, you may have an incredible idea that comes with the possibility of rapid expansion.  This could attract the interest of a venture capital firm that is willing to give you millions in startup funds.  Most business owners would jump at the opportunity, but you should beware.  If you want the opportunity to grow with your business by making your own decisions, you should know that anyone willing to hand over that kind of capital is going to want a say in where it goes, so you could quickly find yourself strung up like a marionette at the whims of your financiers.
3. Bad location.  Surprisingly, this applies not only to brick-and-mortar operations, but also to online ventures.  While “real” world shops have to consider traffic and demographics (as well as the cost of a lease), those that operate online have other concerns related to their web space.  You need to ensure that your website is well hosted, meaning easy to find (a great domain name) and always available (no interruptions in service and the bandwidth to accommodate a growing user base).
4. Insufficient DIY.  There’s a lot you can do on your own to save money at the outset, so if you’re paying others to do everything, you are wasting money!  Of course, it’s even worse if you try to tackle jobs that you have not prepared for through education or training.  So take the time to gain the knowledge you need to do some tasks yourself, and hire people only when an expert hand is needed to get the job done.
5. Lack of branding.  Your business sign, logo, and advertising are all part of creating your brand image, but there’s a lot more to the concept, including how you comport yourself with customers and clients and what you give back to the community that supports you.  If you haven’t considered how your actions reflect upon your business then you could be creating a negative brand association without even realizing that you’ve engaged in branding yourself.

Evan Fischer is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Related articles

• Richard Branson on How to Avoid Common Startup Mistakes
• Do You Have What It Takes to Run a Startup?
• Top mistakes for small business startups

This week we welcome a guest blogger who will be talking about something that most of us will have in our minds especially when it comes to SEO optimization.

N.B for those of you who do not know what on page and off page optimization is let me briefly explain to you here:

On-Page Optimization: What you can do on your own website to improve its search engine rankings i.e title tags, meta tags, H1, H2, H3 tags, content, keywords etc…

Off-Page Optimization: What you can do “off-site” to improve your search engine rankings i.e social media submissions, submissions to feed directories, article directories, link wheels, guest posting etc..

I hope this article will make more sense after understanding these 2 terms correctly. Without further a do, I will introduce Jason Monroe to continue from here.

I’ve been asked several times lately whether on-page or off-page optimizing delivers better returns. One visitor to my blog expressed his annoyance that after spending a significant amount of time using SEOPressor to optimize his page, he saw little if any improvement in his SERP ranking.

Serious online marketers are fully aware of the importance of page optimization, but we all share the same limitation; the 24 hour day. With a set number of hours each day, and the occasional need to sleep and eat, we naturally will want to spend our working hours in the most productive manner.

This leads us to the question; where is our optimizing time more effectively spent; on-page or off-page? The answer is; it depends.

Bringing Attention to Yourself; Content vs Backlinks

Most of us have already picked up on a discouraging fact; Google is less interested in the content of the page than what other people think about the content of the page. Because even the best algorithms are not capable of evaluating an article as effectively as an 8th grader could, Google relies on others to read the content of a page and decide whether it’s worth the time to link back to it.

While backlinks play a critical role in where Google ranks your website, that role isn’t always a positive one. The quality of your backlinks, as well as their quantity, will affect your page’s Google ranking.

Whether your website markets time-share condos, posts reviews on electronics equipment or offers free car insurance quotes, it will benefit greatly if you develop backlinks to quality sites. This kind of work can be time consuming and a bit mind-numbing, but the Google juice produced by off-page optimization is well worth the time.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of social media, either. An article or webpage which has been “Liked” on Facebook, Tweeted about on Twitter, Dugg or Digged or StumbledUpon will automatically look good to Google because of what’s called the “trust factor”. Any time that one human refers another to your webpage, Google will respond by improving the ranking of that webpage.

If your objective is to rank well for the highly competitive keywords, then building quality backlinks, particularly through the use of relevant anchor text, is the fastest way to enjoy positive results.

On-Page Optimization by Accident

One of the results of the recent Panda upgrade is that article writers and webmasters will be required to produce higher quality pages if they want them to rank well. The top ranking webpages will need to be written for humans, not search engines, and they will need to contain usable information, not fluff.

The good news, though, is that when you produce quality content, one of the inadvertent results of your efforts will be a nicely optimized page. By aiming for quality content, you’ll naturally include some less competitive, long-tailed keywords which will be easier to rank well for. These long-tailed keyword phrases, by the way, will be the ones which your target audience will use during searches.

Two Areas Ripe For On-Page Optimization

Because it has to start somewhere, the Google algorithm will begin by looking at the beginning of your article, where your title and introductory paragraphs are, for the more competitive keywords. These are the places where your targeted keywords should be found.

The introductory paragraphs should also contain a concise description of the content of your article. Remember in the fourth grade when you learned how to write a topic sentence and an introductory paragraph? That is what the algorithm is looking for.

The algorithm also searches meta descriptions for information. This is another place to have your primary keyword on display, as well as secondary keywords and an article description. If you include the targeted keyword phrase in your H1 tag, this would also make the search engine’s job much easier.

You will get a chance to sell many more baseball gloves or refer more people to the ideal house painter if you’ve properly customized your page description and placed it where Google can easily find it.

Re-Setting Your Priorities

Having considered the information in this article, you probably now know the answer to our original question. Where is our optimizing time more effectively spent; on-page or off-page? You should really do both.

Regardless of whether your website exists to compare auto insurance quotes or educate the public about Japanese Tea Ceremonies, the best way to make it successful is to apply your optimization skills both on and off your webpages.

Off-page optimization gets all the press because it will help your overall ranking on a search results page. By building quality backlinks your entire site will rank better for the high competition keywords.

However, on-page optimization makes your page rank better for the long tail phrases. This alone won’t help your site rocket past About.com for your keyword, but it certainly helps, so on-page optimization shouldn’t be ignored, either.

What has your experience been? If you have some insight or an opinion about off-page or on-page optimization, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to use the comment box below.

About the Author:

Jason Monroe began his adventures as a football star through highschool and carried over his passion as a huge fan of the NFL. When he was busy researching football he could be found researching other topics of interested, which in fact is what led him to affiliate marketing. A young gun in the industry he has fresh ideas to bring to the table and motivation that shows in his writings.

Buildmyrank is another one of those link building services that puts it amongst the ranks of those article submission services like Linkvana. There are other services like Blog Blueprint that is also like Buildmyrank. Some of you might not have heard of Buildmyrank but my recent frustration with UAW has put me on the search for good article submission services to help with my backlinking efforts on my niche sites.

Buildmyrank is basically a service that consists of a network of almost 2000 domains hosted on multiple Class A, B and C IPs to help with your backlink building efforts. Here are some of the other features that you will see with this link building service:

BuildMyRank Features

BMR Dashboard

• Dofollow links back to your site
• All domains have different PR ranging from PR 0 to PR 6.
• Natural looking backlinks
• Links are permanent and will not be removed even if you choose not to be a member of Buildmyrank anymore.
• Create RSS Feeds from each content published which is them submitted to various Feed Aggregators
• Also includes automatic social-bookmarking for each content published to 75 social-bookmarking sites.
• Site Index monitoring – approximately 95-99% of content gets indexed by the search engines (which will then send a trackback to your site once it is indexed)
• Add Videos To your content (***BRAND NEW FEATURE***)

How To Use BuildMyRank?

BMR Write A Post

Buildmyrank is very easy to use. It is not complicated but it is not your typical link submission service. Here are a few things you need to expect while using it.

• Add your domains. Set posting frequency or schedule it. Remember to choose the correct category as well.
• BuildMyRank is pretty stringent on the quality of your content and it does not accept spun content except if it is very very well spunned(according to some users). To date, I have never used spunned content on any of my articles.
• If you have grammatical or spelling errors, your articles will also not be accepted.
• Every article is reviewed and to date, 5 of my articles have been rejected for various reasons as mentioned above. So, yes you need to be cautious about quality but of course you don’t need well researched / thesis standard articles!
• Buildmyrank requires articles of at least 150 words. You are only allowed to have 1 link for every 150 words which means 2 links for 300 words and so forth.
• Buildmyrank is labour intensive and unless you hire a writer from Fiverr or any other freelancing sites, you are going to be typing every single article.
• You can also opt to use Buildmyrank’s own writing service at about $2.50 per 150 words if you are too darn lazy to write or too rich.

Basically, if you sign up for the Buildmyrank trial, you will see your dashboard that allows you to add content immediately for submission. If you signed up for the trial, you can only submit content that will link back to a max of 5 domains. The trial also allows only up to 10 free links.

Should I Sign Up For Buildmyrank?

I put in a lot of thought before choosing Buildmyrank mainly because there are plenty of article submission sites and link building services that don’t work too well. I have used a few before and it has not given me good results. So naturally, the skepticism that I had in my head was not something unexpected but the results surpassed my expectations and changed my views on Buildmyrank completely.

Sure it is a labour intensive process of writing articles and you can only submit to only 1 site but it produced far better results that other article submission sites that submit to many more article directories.

Here are the results of my various keywords, sites and submission results I got from Buildmyrank.

Submission Stats

• I have submitted approximately 158 articles over a course of 1.5 months. Each article is about 150 words in length.
• There is however a ratio of 2/3^rd 150 words and 1/3^rd 300 words or more.
• I have links published on various PR sites – 1 PR6,13 PR4, 30 PR3, 66 PR2, 42 PR1 6 PR 0 in TOTAL.

I have done 2 case studies on two of my Amazon niche sites.

CASE STUDY #1

Site 1 – Competitive Niche, failed miserably trying to rank with UAW.

My monetization method for this site is through Google Adsense, Affiliate marketing and List Building

Keyword 1 – Google placed me on Page 5, which isn’t great!

>>> Started Using BuildMyRank from here onwards…

After 2 weeks of use – BuildMyRank boosted my Page 5 rankings to Page 3 rankings which isn’t bad considering that I am ONLY using BuildMyRank to test its effectiveness at ranking my sites.

After 4 weeks of use – BuildMyRank boosted it to Page 2 rankings on Google. It sits somewhere in between the top and the last on that page. (#15)

After 5 weeks of use – Page 1 Rankings, decent position at about #10.

Currently, this keyword puts my site on #5 on Page 1 for this ranking which is pretty impressive considering that I don’t even use any other backlink methods apart from scattered social bookmarking for this period of time.

I even managed to push one eHow, one Squidoo and a few high authority sites to the bottom of page 1 and the beginning of Page 2 which is no mean feat considering that this site is just about 3 months old.

>>>This is after writing about 40 articles with Keyword 1

Keyword 2 – Google placed me on Page 2 at #17

After 4 weeks of use – Placed on position #7 on Google from #17

>>>This is after just 12 articles with Keyword 2

Keyword 3 – Google placed me on Page 4 at #36 (highly competitive keyword with 8 million competing sites)

After 2 weeks of use – Placed on position #18

After 5 weeks of use – Placed on position #10

>>>This is after about 26 articles with Keyword 3

CASE STUDY #2

Site 2 – Not very competitive niche initially. But has got even more competitive recently and has failed miserably trying to rank in the past. For this site some of my link building efforts include guest posting and BuildMyRank

Monetizing though Amazon Affiliate Marketing ONLY

Keyword 1 – Placed on Page 5 on Google #46

After 2 weeks of use – Placed on position #31

After 3 weeks of use – Placed on Position #18

End of 3 weeks – BuildMyRank boosted my rankings to #13

After 6 weeks of use – Page 1 rankings at #5

This second case study has helped reassured a fact that if your site does not appear on the first page, you will not earn anything at all!

This keyword that I was trying to rank for is a very competitive term when I tried to rank for but once ranked well, it is certainly one of those “MONEY KEYWORDS”.

>>>This is after writing 48 articles with Keyword 1

Keyword 2 – Placed on Page 6 at #53 (another “money keyword”)

After 4 weeks of use – Page 1 rankings at #4

>>>This is after writing 24 articles with Keyword 2

So far, I have got really good results from BuildMyRank and the fact that it boosted my rankings in such a short time makes me want to continue using it. It is certainly the best link building service I have used.

One thing to note is that you must always continue to build links otherwise, your rankings will drop. I have conducted an experiment on this as well by not building links and even within 2 weeks, I see one of my sites drop from Page 1 to Page 2 rankings.

Before you go ahead and choose BuildMyRank as a link building service, I would suggest that you follow these tips that I will share with you based on my personal experience using it.

Tips on Maximizing Results When Using BuildMyRank

1. Don’t write posts that sound so much like a review. Write reviews from a personal viewpoint especially from a first person perspective to get better results i.e published on higher PR sites.
2. Longer posts i.e 300 words will get you better results. But this does not happen all the time. Publish a mixture of 150 word and 300 word articles.
3. Be consistent with your posting. You can either schedule your posting or publish max 10 articles a day. Whatever method you choose be it one article per day or ten be consistent with it.

FINALLY

I hope this Case Study + Review helps you get a better idea about using BuildMyRank. I highly recommend using this service as it really works or has so far worked BEST for me!

Try this service FREE and get 10 permanent backlinks to your sites.

Scott our guest poster today will tell you more about how to use Google Plus for your online business.

If you have been using Facebook as one of the ways you promote your online business and grow your customer base, Google has made the process much easier with the introduction of its Google + or Google Plus. Experts who have reviewed this new social networking site report that they found it to be more compelling and engaging than Facebook and of course, it is easy to use.

How to access Google +

After some testing by a select few, who received special invitations, Google+ is now available for everyone to sign up for.  You need to have a Google account and a gmail address. Both of these are free. If you have an online business, chances are you have been using Google Adsense, so you already have an account in place.

When you have a Google account, every time you search any topic on the Internet, you will see its symbol (the plus sign) next to the results. You can make sure that this symbol is also next to your website. This will also place the button on your web pages so that anyone who reads and likes your content will give it a Thumbs Up.

It is called getting a pulse. Like other sites where you have to enter a word or phrase to prove that you are a real person, this click on the symbol tells Google that a person has actually visited the site and considers it worthy. You only need to have a few pulses in order for others to see that you have a site that they should check out.

Set up Circles of Friends or Associates

Google + makes it easy for you to grow your business online because you can create circles of friends. If there are only certain friends with whom you share any details of your business, you can set up a special circle containing only these people. All you have to do is drag the icon of each person into the circle and give the circle a name.

Have a face to face chat

You can chat with friends face to face on Google +. In this way it is very similar to Skype, but you can talk to more than one friend at the same time. This allows you to get the word out to all your connections at the same time because you don’t have to email each one individually. You can set up demonstrations of your product if you wish so that they can all see it at the same time.

This feature of Google + is called the Hangout. You simply let others know that you are available at the Hangout and they will log in. At the same time, when you see one or more of your friends at the Hangout, you can join them.

Instantly upload your photos

Share any photos that you wish with specific friends on Google +. The photos are instantly downloaded to a private Google album.

Google + is not quite ready for everyone to use just yet. But when it is there is no doubt that it will very quickly become one of the most important ways to make money online because of all the benefits that it has for businesses – both large and small.

Today let me introduce to you Nick Stamoulis, writer of SEO Journal and a Boston SEO Consultant on his guest post on this blog on a very popular topic. Nick shares with us his views on turning that old boring blog post into some more refreshing.

Check it out…

Blogs are great.  They allow blog writers to share their knowledge and expertise and be viewed as a thought leader in a given niche.  However, for many bloggers one of the most difficult aspects of blogging is to come up with quality content on a consistent basis.  It’s important to blog regularly, but sometimes topic ideas are hard to come by.  When you’re stuck and experiencing writers block it’s a good idea to revisit your previous work and turn what’s old into something new.

Here are 4 ways to update old blog posts:

Add value

Old blog posts may be dated, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be valuable.  Use an old blog post as a guide and add new information to make it more relevant.  As time goes on your knowledge has grown (hopefully) and maybe there is something that you once wrote about that you can now expand upon.  Discuss the details that are missing from the old post.  Turn a post that was once very high-level into something much more specific that provides new insights and value to the readers.

Optimize

Hopefully all bloggers understand SEO and its importance now, but maybe you didn’t a few years ago when you first started your blog, or maybe you just didn’t understand it as well as you do now.  Old blog posts can still rank in the search engines.  In fact, age is a big search engine trust factor and web pages that have aged tend to rank better on a search engine results page.  So, why not go back and see if you can better optimize your old blog posts for the keywords that you are targeting?  Incorporate keywords into the title and content naturally.  Also, be sure to include an image tag using keywords if you’ve used an image in the blog post.  Many people skip this step and just added a photo because it looked pretty, but it can also serve an SEO related purpose.

Follow Up

Sometimes you might not even understand why, but it’s likely that some posts just got a lot more attention and comments than others.  Take a look back at those posts.  Was it a hot topic at the time?  What has changed since then?  Discuss the old post, link to it, and include follow up information in a new post.

Promote

A great way to promote blog posts is through an opt-in email newsletter or via social media.  Hopefully, if you are using social media correctly, you have increased the number of connections, fans, and followers that you have.  Maybe you’ve even joined a few new networking sites in the time since you started writing your blog.  It’s likely that your blog readers never scroll back to see what’s been written in the past- so show them! Promote old blog posts just as you would promote the new ones.  It’s just important to make sure that the content is still relevant before using this strategy.

About the Author:

Nick Stamoulis is a Boston SEO consultant and the President and Founder of Brick Marketing.  He writes SEO articles daily on his blog, Search Engine Optimization Journal.  For more information please call 781-999-1222.

This is probably the most common question any webmaster will ask. This is also probably the greatest source of frustration especially when it comes to your money sites. Most people who ask this falls into the category of those who have worked hard and spend hours building content and backlinks all over the internet trying to rank well on the search engines (like me..)

The truth is trying to rank on the first page is HARDDD work.

UNLESS, very few people compete with you to rank.

Managing my niche sites have been a very educational experience even if I didn’t see it getting the success I wanted. I’ve talked about my methods here.

Niche Site Experiment – Keyword Research

Niche Site Experiment – Finding A Niche

How I do it now has changed slightly but the fundamentals behind it remain the same.

So why the heck are some of my sites not ranking well? This is what I’ve found out so far…

It Takes TIME

This is so true. When all the internet marketers talk about “pushing the button” , you should really run as far away as possible from them because there is no such thing as immediate results. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is using SEO, building backlinks and doing the same thing as you, so unless you don’t wanna work hard to get your site rank over the long haul, you won’t see results.

Expect up to 6 months or more in some cases to see you getting some decent traffic and page 1 rankings even with all your efforts put into creating backlinks and content. Some might say 3 months but I don’t see that happening with mine so far.

Even if it takes time, learn how to work smart. Check out this post on using the 80/20 method.

You should also learn how to outsource here. Follow my Tips on Outsourcing.

Ranking Criteria

The rules of the game have changed. If you wanna play the Google game, you have to live by their rules. The change in algorithms recently have led me to believe in a few things with some research done to back its findings.

Domain Age – I’ve discovered that domain age is an important part of rankings. For example when this blog started it did not rank well for quite a number of keyphrases but right now, it didn’t take much effort to find its way into the page 1 rankings for quite a number of posts. A lot of other SEO pros agree that Domain age is a factor in rankings so even if your site is in the top 500 rankings, wait a while and see if it changes, (although I wouldn’t recommend just waiting and hoping for it to happen.)

Backlink Building Consistency– Backlinks are an important part of any search engine ranking process. There are plenty of folks around who agree that your link building efforts have to be continuous and there is no way you can stop building links in the earlier stage of your website and hope for it to rank unless you don’t even want it to rank.  It has to be a continuous process especially for your money / niche sites. Consistency is the key if you expect good rankings. Diversity, relevance and authority should be part of your link building process.

Number don’t really matter although you need to continue building it. Instead of focusing on numbers you should focus on quality. Take a look at your own backlinks, are they primarily from article submission sites? (like most people do).

Backlink Diversity – What is Your Backlink Strategy? Is it fully concentrated on article marketing? Bear in mind that article marketing must not be your sole focus as it is generally recognized as LOW QUALITY in the eyes of search engines. If your backlinks are skewed towards article marketing you should start building links somewhere else too.  Blog commenting, social sharing sites, feed bookmarking, guest posting articles are some examples. Consider those even from .edu and .gov websites.

Another question to ask is are all your links build on roughly the same sort of domains? Links build on different domains and different countries can affect your rankings too. So don’t just focus on sites from US.

Spread your links to the entire world!

Is Your Site Loaded with Thin Content or Repeated Content?

This part is probably the most important thing you want to focus on. It is obvious that poorly written content, duplicated content or sites with little content will have trouble ranking.  If your site falls into this category, go and fix it right now. Don’t expect all the thousands of backlinks to help your site rank well.

>>>Take a look at this article on thin or no original content on Google Webmaster

It is much better to write content so good that people would want to link to you. My suggestion for every new site you create is to preload it with a number of good content for Google to crawl.  You should also take a look at this article on Google’s guidance on building high quality sites. It is a MUST read.

>>> Google’s Guidance on building high quality sites

You should also read some guidelines about building affiliate sites. With thousands of webpages showing the same thing, what can make your site better than the rest?

>>> Guidance On Affiliate Programs

Anyway, creating good content is hard but if this is your aim on every single article you write, you are sure to be linked by other sites. Strive to make all your content link worthy. Remember, Google ABSOLUTELY loves quality content so give it to Google! Even if no site links back to you, Google will want others to look at YOURS FIRST!

HTML/ Code Errors On Your Page?

Good clean code is another important ranking factor. That is why I chose to use THESIS. Even Matt Cutts use Thesis!

Point is, you should strive to keep your website as error free as possible. It is quite impossible to keep any site error free. Even mine here has quite a number of errors that I’m working on. The trouble with coding errors is that it can confuse or make life difficult for spider bots. You want them to find all your content easily. You also don’t want the spider bots to get lost crawling.

Want to find out if your site has clean code? Use this tool.

>>>W3C Markup Validation Service

I hope this has answered most of your ranking problems. Good Luck!