“thanks Tomaz, when you send out emails for link exchanges, is your subject line: regarding link exchange and what is your version of value exchanges email?”

I personally think that asking for such specific examples is just too much. Here’s my reply:

Don’t you think you could come up with something that would eventually work? Do you really feel satisfied and fulfilled by copying EVERYTHING?

I don’t have an exact email because I come up with something. I don’t have a copy / paste system neither for the email and neither for the subject line.

Sometimes I used “Hi from freedomideas.com” as a subject. I introduced myself and simply suggested a link exchange. Sometimes I used something else.

Try googling “link exchange email” and you’ll surely find some good suggestions.

But to build some confidence you NEED to do things YOURSELF. Otherwise you’ll ALWAYS feel that you don’t know stuff.

You know stuff when you come up with something and it works – maybe not the first time but eventually you learn and adapt.

Now you really know. You have results.

Results build confidence – especially results when you did something on your own. Copying stuff will NOT build confidence – you’ll always feel insecure. (regardless of how much money you earn!)

How do you want to feel in the future? Do you even realize that you have a choice about that?

You have a choice. Get ideas from some people who know stuff, then add your own ideas, modify stuff and come up with something creative and new.

Play with it, adapt and eventually it will work.

As Morpheus said to Neo: “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

If I tell you something, you might “know” something about it.

But you need to walk the path. You need to do stuff on your own and then you’ll become the One.

You’ll be able to create money out of thin air using just your brain, a laptop and an internet connection.

Here are the most common myths of why Google and other search engines might penalize your site:

1.Will Google penalize me if I link to non-related sites?

No, unless you link to porn or sites that spread malware and other crap. The Internet is a World Wide Web which means that websites interlink with each other in many different ways.

If you write about your topic you’ll link most of the times to sites that are related to your topic – since you want your visitors to learn more.

Of course it happens that you may want to link to a non-related site but you will in no way be penalized for that.

Example: imagine to how many non-related websites ezinearticles.com links to.

2.Will Google penalize my site if I write about different topics and not just about one?

No, it won’t. In my experience the only negative thing about writing about not tightly related topics is that Google may not figure out for which theme / topic you specialize.

I have a site that is built around 4 very tightly related themes but the majority of traffic comes only from keywords of one theme.

It’s the theme that I started first and it seems that Google decided that my site is about that theme and doesn’t rank well pages from other 3 themes.

It’s not really a penalization thing in my opinion, it’s just a lack of focus.

Example: Look at ezinearticles.com again. There are probably thousands of different themes on it and yet they all rank well if you choose the right keywords. The authority status of the site gives a big boost to rankings of any topic. So I don’t think there’s such thing as being penalized for writing about non-related topics. You just need lots of links.

3.Will Google penalize me if I add 10 pages per week (or 5 pages per day or …) – because that might be too many?

Not at all. There may be some algorithms at Google that check huge spikes of content that are not realistic and may represent spam.

But there is no way you can trigger those algorithms with manual adding of pages.

Example: Let’s stick with ezinearticles.com – they have over 5 million pages and exist since 1999. That means that they have built 5 million pages in around 3600 days or about 1380 pages per day.

Update: You can publish 100 pages per day and that’s nothing in Google’s eyes:

4.Will Google penalize my site because my pages are too long (like over 2000 words)?

No, it won’t. Google wants to find the best expert on the topic online and list it on top. The best expert on topic will most likely have the most things to say about a topic. He / she knows the most about it so he / she will write the most about it.

Example: wikipedia.com has extremely long pages, some over 9000 words long (try tennis) and they typically rank top 3 in Google for single word searches!

So your 2000 word pages don’t even scratch the surface.

5.Will Google penalize me for getting links from non-related sites?

The logic is the same as it was with #1 myth. While I don’t see into Google’s algorithm it seems very unlikely that they would put huge importance on the relevancy of the links.

Example: Note that many websites are not really on one topic. What are ezinearticles.com, BBC.com, CNN.com, techcrunch.com, engadget.com and others about?

They cover hugely broad topics and yet they receive massive traffic. They also get links from all sorts of different topics and are not penalized. On the contrary, they are rewarded with huge traffic.

If you’re worried that Google might penalize your site for something else not mentioned above, feel free to share your thoughts below and we’ll all together figure out whether there might be something to worry about or not.

And lastly you must realize that while your site is very important to you, it’s probably nothing to Google and its massive database of sites and pages.

What Google wants is to provide the best information online to the person who is looking for something on Google search engine.

The average person has no idea about links to non-related sites or some other stuff. They just want to read the info or buy something that they are looking for. And Google’s #1 priority is to give it to them even is that site has been doing something not perfectly aligned with the webmaster guidelines.

I still see many sites on top of Google who very obviously buy links and yet nothing has changed.

So whatever you’re doing manually (and not using some automation tools) will (in my opinion) NOT trigger any penalizations from Google.

What you should do is build a successful online business instead of trying to game the system. Build a large content website focused around one niche and get links to it from quality websites.

If you’ve built a quality site then getting quality links shouldn’t be such a big problem.

After that, the content may grow with user generated content (C2 anyone? ) and links may happen automatically because your site is on top of Google and / or you’ll get link exchange requests because a link from your site will have lots of value.

It was suggested before that I should put up a Donations button but I don’t feel it’s the right thing here.

I am happy to share what I know (or think I know ) and am really happy to see other people succeed online.

That’s why I never really treated this blog like a business model. It’s more like a journal of my Internet adventure and a channel for helping other people on this journey.

And that’s also why this blog never received lots of links and exposure.

So if you have benefited from the free information on this blog (there are over 150 posts right now), you can return the favor by linking to it.

Here’s what would really help this blog:

1. A link to the homepage: http://www.freedomideas.com/ with the link text “Home based business ideas” or “Home business ideas”

or

2. A link to the SBI review: http://www.freedomideas.com/site-build-it-review/ with the link text “Site Build It review” or something similar.

Of course, if any other blog post better fits your content, feel free to link how ever you wish.

If you decide to return the favor and link to FreedomIdeas.com, email me at tomaz (at) freedomideas.com and I’ll share with you one awesome product niche where products are barely starting to appear on the market but it will be just huge in the next two years.

I won’t pursue this niche and there are basically just 3 blogs writing something about this stuff but of course they know nothing about keyword research and correct internal linking so you’ll easily leave them behind.

There will be other people of course who will figure out this niche soon so the sooner you start the better.

There are very few products on the market at the moment so there won’t be much content to put on your site, but there will be literally hundreds of different models in the near future and that’s when you’ll be able to build specific product pages which also convert really well.

Thanks for reading the blog and sharing your comments and I wish you BIG NUMBERS in 2010!

While I personally recommend that you start doing everything yourself at the beginning (to better understand how this Internet thing works), you don’t have to stay stuck in this “mode”.

Instead of thinking “what you have to do”, you should start thinking “what needs to be done” – and what can you outsource.

Almost everything can be done by others; content writing, website design, link building (I don’t have good experiences though), blog commenting, doing research and much more.

If you want to run a successful business, you need to become the manager. You need to manage the whole operation and let the workers do the simple jobs.

I’ve written about outsourcing before so this post is not really about how to outsource, but it’s more about the mindset and how I suggest it changes after a while so that you can get more done in shorter amount of time.

I started to think like that when I started my second SBI site and slowly progressed from just outsourcing content to outsourcing all sorts of tasks – like website design, blog commenting, research about potential link partners and so on.

I’ve even outsourced publishing of articles on a couple of blogs where I created an Author account on a Wordpress based blog so my writer now writes the articles and publishes them and I only take care of an occasional link exchange.

The only thing that you as a manager need to constantly monitor is the quality of work.

“Employees” will always look for shortcuts and look for paths of least resistance. You as a “boss” of your company need to check that the quality is not compromised.

There are crappy websites everywhere (example: jacklalannepowerjuicerinfo dot com) and you need to differentiate from them in terms of quality and that’s how you’ll dominate your niches.

I’ve also seen my articles from my »static« SBI sites being indexed very quickly – in a matter of minutes too.

But since most static websites focus mostly on keywords that get searched over and over again, blogs can focus on keywords that happen »now«.

Getting a blog post quickly up when something interesting happens is crucial to get lost of traffic. Realize that this traffic will typically NOT monetize well since people are just curios and are not in the buying mode.

But still, they might subscribe to your newsletter, the RSS feed or even bookmark your site for later.

I wanted to show you an example of how much traffic you can get if you quickly write a blog post when something happens.
Serena Williams just lost her semi-final match against Kim Clijsters and she lost it in a very controversial way.

Since I watched the match live on TV, I quickly wrote a blog post about Serena Williams’ foot fault and what my thoughts were.

The traffic immediately shot up and I literally had to sit behind my PC and approve comments every few minutes because they were just flowing in.

One more thing: when I noticed that I get lots of traffic for Serena Williams foot fault keyword, I then decided to quickly write this post so that I could get a text link to my blog with that exact keyword and hopefully push it up a few more places higher.

In such cases, timing is everything.

Update – 2 days later:

The traffic to my blog was incredible; over 18,000 visitors in one single day and the article was not on Digg.

It was almost all through Google as you can see from the keywords below:

Again, the key to such traffic was writing a post on an event that just occurred and of course using the right keywords. Some of it was luck and the rest happened with tons of comments flowing in.

Did this extra traffic result in more earnings? Yes, some of the people coming in also found my site for the first time and I made a few extra sales of my tennis ebooks and videos:

Anyway, very interesting to see all these stats and also good advice for those focusing more on blogging and not so much for creating big websites focused on keywords that get searched over and over again.

Write articles and share your passion and knowledge with other people, build links yourself by submitting articles, looking for link exchanges and using other link building strategies, and do all the other work related to your site, like setting up a newsletter, setting up an RSS feed and so on.

If you follow this process for a year or so, you’ll most likely start earning some money which you can then use to buy yourself more time.

In my opinion, there is almost an unlimited amount of money we can earn in our life, but only limited time that we’ll be here.

That’s why time is more precious than money and I use money to buy myself more time to do what I wish and not what I have to.

That’s where outsourcing comes in. What can you outsource?

1.    Content writing

I don’t outsource any articles that are on my tennis sites and I outsource all other article writing.

My tennis site is me sharing my ideas with the world and my other sites are money making ATMs that I work hard to make them very useful to the visitors who find them.

For example, I have had an article about the best vacuum cleaner newly written 3 times so far and I keep looking on how to improve it. I have recently ordered around 60 articles for my vacuum site to REPLACE not very well written articles that are already there.

I find writers mostly on Getafreelancer.com and test them with 5 to 10 articles to see how well they write. I might try 3 writers and use the best articles on my sites and the rest for article submissions or I save them to later publish them on another site I might start – like a supporting blog.

Typical bids for articles are at around $6 per article, but I usually offer more later to encourage the writer to do well. I used to pay around $8 per 800 word articles, but I now have a very good writer who charges me around $1,80 per 100 words and I am willing to pay that price for the quality I get.

You can also get quite good articles an NeedAnArticle.com which has finally improved their website and added an option to choose a writer. Their prices are:
-    5,52 per 550 words
-    9,03 per 750 words
-    12,5 per 1000 words

Again, you’ll have to test a few writers to get a really good one.

2.    Link building

I have tried several times and outsourced link building but have always been disappointed with the results. In all cases, the guys behind link building services have access to hundreds of websites which have links / resources pages with many websites listed there.

That’s where you’ll get a link too and it’s a really poor link.

I suggest another approach; I’ve outsourced research for example and asked for research of water related blogs with pagerank 3 or more. I asked for 30 blogs and once the guy that I chose found them, I checked them myself, removed poor blogs from that list and then outsourced blog commenting.

3.    Blog commenting

You can outsource blog commenting too for 2 reasons:
-    To comment on do-follow blogs and get links that pass pagerank
-    To become more known to the owner of the blog who you can later ask for a link exchange

If you outsource blog commenting, ask the guy / girl you hired to regularly send you the list of links (comments) so that you can verify that these comments are not spammy and that they bring some value to the owner of the blog.

4.    Research

As mentioned above, I’ve asked for a freelancer to find me high PR websites. On another occasion, I came across a list of 300 blogs listed on one website which were all related to my niche.

I then started a project on GAF asking for someone to go through the list and send me a list of blogs with pagerank 3 or more. This cost me $35 and saved me probably 3 or 4 hours of boring work.

5.    Blog updating

If you own a Wordpress blog, then it’s very easy to set up another user who has limited usage of the blog and can only post new content.

I’ve done that before and I am actually starting a new blog to support one of my sites which will be updated by my writer who knows how to do that. I only need to monitor the process, edit the posts and add some links pointing to my site and pay the bills.

If you’ve had success with outsourcing too, then share what worked for you!

She was building a site in a certain niche and found out that other people were building their sites on the same concept. She used SBI and actually found a couple of SBI-ers building their site in the exact same niche.

Should I continue? Do I stand a chance now that even someone using an SBI system is going for this niche?

Here’s my answer: When I bought Andy Williams’ niche blueprint on vacuums, there were eventually 100 sold.

Where are they? Where are these sites?

I also bought a juicer niche and made a smaller site for my girlfriend. It ranks in the top three in Google for many in-demand keywords in the juicer niche.

There were also 100 juicer niche blueprints sold. Where are these sites? I can’t find them on the first three pages of Google…

That’s the thing with people, they just don’t stick to something until it’s done. This is especially true when it comes to making money online.

People are greedy, impatient, and have no real working discipline.

If they were focused, disciplined, followed a system, and were patient, they would be successful OFFLINE TOO!

Maybe not at the same level as the internet allows you (since it works for you even when you are asleep), but successful enough not to be in debt or have financial problems.

But this is rarely the case (in my humble opinion) when it comes to making money online.

So 90% of your competition will not be disciplined enough to follow the process through, will eventually jump on some other GRQ idea, and their site will never become an authority site.

They’ll earn $3 per day and then they’ll say: “Bah, this doesn’t work, let me try something else…”

The point is this: Suceeding online or offline has very little to do with your niche or the system you use. It’s all about YOU.

Google really doesn’t like to place newly registered sites high in the rankings, and it will take more than nine months (probably more than a year) before you see some nice income.

Stick to your plan, put your blinders on, and invest everything you’ve got into your project for a year.

You’ll also gain tons of experience and, even if this project is really not a winner making $100 per day, you’ll know how to make one with your next site.

Ken Evoy, the CEO of Sitesell.com has recently posted a new page which explains, in detail, why blogging is not the best way to build a successful online business.

I suggest that you head over to the Blog or Build page, prepare yourself a drink and read the full page. It’s long page so take your time…

(And if you are using Wordpress as your blogging platform, don’t skip the »Nitty Gritty Wordpress vs. SBI! Comparison«!)

Back already?

Let me share my experience with content sites and blogs (especially this one) and explain when you should use each one.

The problems with blogs are already well explained by Ken Evoy in the above article (look for The Three Fatal Flaws Of Blogging), but I believe Ken missed another extremely important one: keyword based pages.

They say “Content is King”, right?

I used to say “Content + Quality Links = King.”

But now I say “Keyword Focused Content + Quality links = Financial Freedom!”

Take this Financial Freedom Ideas blog, for example: I believe that I’ve shared very good information on how to create successful website, how to monetize and so on.

There are almost 180 pages of good content and there are a lot of high quality links pointing to this site – including links from Problogger, Chitika (from a PR5 page) and other high quality sites.

And how many daily visitors does this blog receive? Around 50 per day!

Compare this with an SBI site that I started at the same time as this blog – in August 2007.

Google has 83 indexed pages, the site has pagerank 2 and doesn’t have even close to the number of high quality links pointing to it as does this blog.

Over 200 visitors per day!

The reason for this huge difference is very simple: every article on this SBI site is optimized for a certain keyword, with good demand and reasonable competition. (I have posted only one quarter of the planned articles on it so far!)

And almost none of the articles on this blog (and this goes for a typical blog too) are keyword optimized.

There is just very informative content written for visitors. (The content is definitely good, since it has been linked to from various high quality sites.)

And even if I try to optimize a few articles here and there, there is so much competition in this niche, that just a few articles (based on keywords) rank on the 1st page in Google.

So why do I blog?

Because I like to.

I like to share my ideas, I like to help people and I find it such a waste that the knowledge I have, that helped me achieve financial freedom by working from home, would only stay in my head.

That’s why I put my knowledge on this blog and hopefully someone else can benefit from it. If I make a few dollars here and there serving other people, great!

If not, no problem. I am at almost $12,000 per month with my few SBI sites.

But for many other bloggers this is a problem.

They spend hours writing great articles, then they spend hours hunting for links in the Social bookmarking sites and their result is, in most cases, very similar to the results of this blog: a few dollars here and there.

So if you’re a blogger and your results are very similar to the ones mentioned above, consider building a keyword focused content website based around a tight theme.

Follow the SBI process of C-T-P-M and you’ll definitely do much better money wise than you’re doing now with your blog.

My advice to my friends who are interested in making money online and building an authoritative online presence in their chosen niche is this: get yourself at least one SBI site.

You’ll get access to the Action Guide, Forums, Help section and great tools. You’ll learn how to make the most of your knowledge and time and the SBI system will take care of the technicalities.

Once you learn the process, you can always build a non-SBI (yes, even on Wordpress if you wish) site, where every article is based on a keyword around a tight theme and is internally linked for the best possible search engine rankings.

Invest a few months or a year of building a 200 page website and Google will take care of the rest: sending you thousands of visitors every day who are interested in what you have to offer.

Scroll down on this page:

Pete Sampras Vs Roger Federer – Who Wins?

And you’ll find a comment from Jeffrey which is 1494 words long!

That’s not a comment, those are 2 or even 3 articles! And Jeffrey’s English is excellent too.

There are a couple of long comments on this blog too and I want to thank all those that contribute!

So what was the longest comment you got on one of your blogs? (Feel free to post a link to your post with the longest comment!)

The Easy Way

The easy way is to subscribe to 2 lists where you really won’t be spammed with tons of promotional emails.

1. Nicheaday.com

NicheaDay.com is a project from Scott Standke and it does exactly what it says: you’ll get an email every day with a niche idea, high PPC bid price from Overture and up to 1000 keywords already attached to the email.

These are sent from Nichebot.com in cooperation with Jim Morris.

What I like about Nicheaday is that eventually you can spot a good niche since you’ll get an email every day. I also like that Scott doesn’t use this list to heavily promote other internet marketing products.

I’d say you’ll get a promotional email once a month and Scott usually promotes good stuff.

2. KeywordExplosion.com

This is a project from Jonathan Leger and if you sign up here, you’ll get a list of high paying keywords in your inbox once a week.

What you’ll see in this list of keywords is that the usual keywords in the over $20 CPC range are mortgages, credit cards, lawyers and so on and are extremely competitive.

But when you scroll down you’ll see keywords in the $10 – $15, $5 – $10 and $2 – $5 ranges.

Here you can spot some cool keywords like thermal binding machine, spectrum analyzer, introduction to voip and others.

Your next stop is the free Wordtracker keyword tool where you need to check if that niche has some demand or not and whether it’s worth your time and effort to build a site around it.

I get a couple of emails per week from being on Jon’s list but I am not 100% sure that the KeywordExplosion is the only list I am subscribed to. (from Jon’s lists)

You can of course buy the whole package for $67 and get unlimited access to high paying Adsense keywords.

Read Jon’s sales letter and decide for yourself. (the above is my affiliate link)

The Hard Way

The hard way takes a lot of time to research various topics and products on Amazon.com, Ebay.com and similar.

So basically you need to browse through their products and manually check the demand on Wordtracker and the CPC prices in Google Adwords tool.

One cool sub-page of Ebay which can shorten your research a little bit is the popular products page where they list best selling products in some of the categories.

Hopefully these tips will make it easier to find your money making niche. And if you still get stuck, ask me a question and I’ll do my best to help you out!

Update:

I got an email from Travis from BumMarketingMethod.com with a link to a free report. I occasionally read his emails but I have never bought anything.

This report is very related to the topic of this post so here’s the link to the Great in 2008 – Trends, Hot Markets and more in 2008. (just left click and you’ll end up on the download page)

Note that I haven’t changed and code of the link so if you end up buying something (there are a bunch of links in the report) you’ll help Travis make some extra cash.

If you benefit from the report, then of course, return the favor.

By the way – I am of a few “guru” lists, but I almost never buy anything. If one is patient enough, these “gurus” will sooner or later come up with free stuff from which you can benefit.

Just don’t fall for their copywriting tricks.