Ok, stop trying to make money for a few minutes! Take a break and regroup your resources. Go have a cup of whatever caffeine-laden brew you like to drink and when you come back we’ll have a quiet moment to ponder the benefits of self-motivation.

Ok, you’re back. Good.

A vitally important part of working for yourself, especially when it’s only you making yourself soldier on, is to stay focused on what you are trying to achieve and above all to stay motivated to achieve it. When it comes to spending endless hours sitting in front of the screen navigating here, there and everywhere through the endless winding maze of cyberspace, Complacency is bound to enter that world. It’s brother, Procrastination is not far behind, closely followed by cousin Diversion!

Once cousin Diversion has taken over, you are in for a frightening time lapse. Once you’ve managed to drag yourself out of that game, or video or whatever it is that Diversion has led you to, you’ll look at your watch and do a double-take in disbelief… Yep, a goodly chunk of your working day has vanished into the void and you are behind with your schedule.

The way to stop that happening is brutal, but necessary. You have to remove every single game from your computer or laptop (whichever you use for your business). Then you have to remove every video playing media and with it all those video clips you’ve been storing up. Hate to say it, but all the music MP3s have to go too.

After you have butchered your PC, have another look around to see if there is anything else that is likely to distract you from your work. I know the very browser you need to do your job is a veritable vipers nest of online games and YouTube vids, but you have to do the best you can and at least narrow it down to a few manageable items. You could also go through your bookmarks and delete any that link to game sites.

If you have kids whose lives revolve around exactly those links etc, then you’ll be doing them a service by forcing them outside into the sunshine to play (remember what that is?) with their friends (if they’re not also symbiotically enjoined with their laptops…

Now by completing that arduous task, two benefits will have been gained for the effort.

1. You will be less likely to be distracted from your work
2. Your computer will undoubtedly run faster as a result of freeing up all that space!

Now you can get back to the process of how to make money with your online business… refreshed, less frustrated by the increased speed of your now uncluttered hard drive, feeling more positive in yourself because you know you will work harder without those distractions and motivated more than ever to achieve the goals you have set out for yourself!

Until next time…

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY

Adsense.

If you’re wondering why it’s taken me this long to get around to that hugely popular money-spinning program called adsense, there is a very good reason.

I don’t like it.

That might be end of post, but that would be a bit unfair of me, because lots of people make a good deal of money from adsense. So I’ll cover adsense in brief, because there’s so much information about it on the internet that I would just be spewing out what you probably already know anyway.

Adsense is a publisher’s perk because technically, all you need is a blog with some content on it and a decent readership and by placing some strategically placed text ads from Google the chances are some of those readers are going to click on the ads and you will make anything from a few cents per click to… well probably a few more cents per click.

Unless you are really cute with your keywords, and are up-to-the-minute on top of the current big payers, that’s about all you should expect from adsense.

Sure, there are lots of so-called gurus out there that will promise that if you pay them a fortune to get in on their adsense secrets they’ll show you how to make one or two dollars per click. But a lot of the research and hard work will still be yours, as those big paying keywords change practically day to day.

To top it all, not only do you have to be right there at the sharp end of the keyword merry-go-round, but you also have to have a sizeable readership in the first place or those precious ads are not going to get clicked on in the first place.

And woe betide any publisher who thinks he can trick the mighty Google by getting people he knows to click those ads for him. It doesn’t work because they will know what you’re doing and kick you out of the program, which means you’ll lose the $2.39 you’ve just spent the last three months accumulating (ok, I’m being a little sarcastic) but the worst of it is once they kick you out they won’t let you back.

I know from personal experience - I got the boot at the end of 2006 because enthusiastic friends decided to “help me out” and click my ads. I never got back into the program. Has something to do with why I don’t like adsense!

The other reason that I don’t like adsense (or any other contextual advertising for that matter) is that once someone clicks one of those links, that’s it.

They’re gone from your site.

So great, you just made two cents from the click but lost a potential customer who might have scrolled down your page a little further and saw your affiliate ad for a $97 ebook and bought it. You made two cents but lost $50 from Clickbank! It happens.

I’ll leave you with that thought, next time you’re spending hours tweaking and fine-tuning your page to get the absolute best possible placement for your adsense text ads, so people will want to click them straightaway…

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY

This next very clever method of how to make money with your blog is an idea that I came across today. Ok I read it in a friend’s blog, but it’s highly worthy of a mention here, because it is a very valid way to make money while at the same time boosting your traffic flow.

To be effective, you’ll need to host your own blog, because it will require that you have a separate page for it and a decent amount of disk storage at your server end and plenty of bandwidth. I already did the big HostGator plug in an earlier post, so I won’t do it again here!

What this devilishly clever idea entails is searching Google for free PLR articles, ebooks, reports and just about anything else you can get your hands on for free that you can re-brand and give away yourself.

Give away? How do you make money giving stuff away?

That’s the clever part. When you acquire, say a PLR ebook, then you re-brand it with your name and make some changes to the content so that it differs enough from the original. Along with those changes are the links it will invariably contain. Change those links to your affiliate links and then put your altered PLR product up for free download.

Now, there are plenty of people out there looking for a free report, or ebook on this or that subject and they will read it before deciding whether to give it away free themselves, of just keep it as a reference if it’s good enough. But the secret is they read it and if they see a link to a product or service they like the look of, hey presto, they click YOUR affiliate link and you make some commission.

It’s known in the business as back-end. And if you’ve got enough of it, you can make some decent affiliate commissions with it.

The other side to this is of course that once word gets around that there’s a ton of free stuff at your site, then your traffic will increase steadily. That’s more people who will hit your homepage and see your opt-in box for your free report, or whatever you’re using to attract opt-ins to your list. And if your homepage is your blog, like this one is, then that’s more traffic to your blog where you have some paid advertising.

And the more visitors you advertisers can see your blog is attracting, the more likely it is that they’ll want to keep their ads on your page and you’ll also attract more advertisers who will pay more for high traffic advertising space.

Win-win, I do believe!

Terry Didcott
MAKE MONEY