When Will You Find The Time To Work At Your Online Business?

How many times have we all said, “If only I had more time then I could get a lot more done in my online home business?” or “If only there were more hours in a day”. The solution is not getting more time to do what we want - we all have the same amount. The key is to manage the time that we have and make it work more effectively for us.

Even if you think that you don’t have the time to take on anything else, you might be surprised to discover how much time you’re actually wasting during the day when you are not focusing on your work. You can start an online business whether you hold down a full time job or not, many of us do, myself included.

Sometimes when it comes to starting your own business, many people have the mental picture that it’s all or nothing – that in order to be their own boss, they have to take the plunge, quit their day job and put all of their effort into building a successful online business


When Will You Find The Time To Work At Your Online Business? Eprofits Centre

Free Internet Tools and Resources the Steptoe (Sanford & Son) Way

Today I was just about to get into the shower when I heard a once familiar call and the clip clop of a horse. I couldn’t believe what I heard and had to look out of the window to check that I was hearing right. I saw a sight which I haven’t seen for many years – a scruffy man with horse and cart collecting other peoples junk from which he was planning to make money – a rag and bone man.

It reminded me of Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son in the US) the popular sit com from the sixties and seventies, the rag and bone man even looked like Harold Steptoe from a distance. Harold and his father Albert ran a scrap yard and the rag and bone men went out on their rounds daily collecting junk, some free some paid for, the junk was recycled for profit proving the saying that one mans rubbish is another mans treasure.

I used to love watching Steptoe and Son and I’ll never forget the phrase “You dirty old man” said by Harold to his father in such a despising way. The humor probably wasn’t politically correct, but sometimes I think that PC has gone too far anyway.

Seeing the rag and bone man made me think about entrepreneurship and Internet marketing in a roundabout way. It made me realise that just as he collects free products for resale you can use free products and free tools and resources to help build your Internet business and there is no better time to start than now.

We keep hearing about the recession and how it has affected the lives of millions. When recessions hit many people lose their jobs and struggle to find other employment, but it is also a time when entrepreneurs rise from the ashes of high unemployment. Some create empires from real world businesses like my rag and bone man. Others get involved with business opportunities on and offline. Many don’t succeed but some do and it is because of those success stories that so many try.

New businesses need different levels of start up capital depending upon the type of business that is being launched. Real world businesses generally need more start up capital. For instance the rag and bone man would need a horse and cart and somewhere to store his ‘stock’. He would also need the know how to renovate or recycle his ‘stock’ and where to sell his goods.

An Internet business can be started with nothing except a computer, an ability to search and learn, a commitment to hard work and patience and little or no investment capital – but that could weaken your chance of success. However, there is no need to throw your life savings into Internet marketing because there are an awful lot of free products and free tools and resources waiting out there for you to make a start, learn or make money with providing that you realise that it takes time and that you have a lot of patience.

Once you have acquired enough knowledge and confidence in what you are doing then is the time to spend money, but with caution. Throwing money at programmes with claims of high earnings is generally a mistake. Those who make the high earnings are usually those who start the programmes up, but we are talking about tools and resources and it costs nothing to learn using them, a way of earning while learning.

I have a penchant for software, but the majority of what I have paid for I use on a regular basis and most of my purchases have come from profits. The only mistake that I’ve made was spending hundreds of pounds in 2007 on the Memberspeed software. It just didn’t work out for me for various reasons. I’ve still got access to it and may try again but I know that I can use WordPress and free plugins to build a membership site and probably more easily.

Following you will find a list of the types of low cost or free tools of resources available on the internet to help you to build your internet business:

Read More Free Internet Tools and Resources the Steptoe (Sanford & Son) Way Patricia's Planet

The Article Marketing Handbook – Will it Help Article Marketers?

This review is my personal opinion of 'The Article Marketing Handbook' I'll tell you:

1) What it's about
2} Did I learn anything?
3} Is it worth the asking price?

I’ve read a lot of articles, ebooks and forum posts about article marketing and have found that the information and advice offered can be conflicting and confusing to new article marketers. As an article marketer I have studied the results from my own campaigns and come to my own conclusions. As an article directory owner I can see from studying the site stats month after month which articles are working for the authors. I can also see from Google searches which articles have been found on my site and republished on blogs or websites.

With the double insight of article marketer and directory owner it can be frustrating to see articles being submitted that you know will not be effective for the authors. On the other hand you learn to recognise articles that are going to do well for the authors and your directory.

With this in mind I was curious to read ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ written by Allen Graves – an experienced article directory owner and article marketer. I’ve come across Allen in forums and have to admit that we don’t always agree, but it is plain to see that Allen cares about article marketing. Because Allen has been involved with article marketing longer than I have I hoped that I would learn something from his handbook. I also felt that as he had the same opportunity of double insight as I have albeit for longer that ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ should be as good as if not better than anything that I have previously read. My expectations were high so lets see if the handbook lived up to them.

The Content

At first I was impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the ebook and wasn’t happy with the long introduction and theorising in the first couple of chapters, but then I saw that Allen was expressing why it is important to get your article marketing campaign right. It isn’t just information - it’s plain common sense that every article marketer should consider before embarking on a marketing campaign and worth reading.

Allen then guides you through selecting your niche, ways of discovering what information your readers are searching for and spending money on and how to find the best keywords. All useful information and if used correctly should help you to write more effective articles.

You learn why you should use pen names and how to select them. How to write titles that grab a reader’s attention while appealing to search engines. How to best summarise your articles and how to format the article body to capture the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Some tips are also included on how to write your author resource box to gain higher click throughs to your website.

Did I learn Anything?

Yes I did. I was particularly interested in a chapter explaining how to find the best places to submit your articles to and why. Also how to get more click throughs by promoting your articles after your submissions have been accepted. Both ideas are so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of them.

There are several more article marketing tricks that I have noticed used by authors who submit to my directories and hadn’t really thought about. To find out if they work I checked my site stats and sure enough those articles were getting more than the average hits. That could be a coincidence or those tricks could be working for the authors and my directories.

What I Think

There is a whole lot more information but now I’m going to tell you what I think about ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’. The ebook is well written and in a no BS style that I personally like. For anybody familiar with article or Internet marketing it’s easy to understand, but those new to the field may struggle without more basic information about for instance the importance of keywords and phrases. But, that and other basic information can be readily found with an Internet search.

Is It Worth The $47 Asking Price?

For most ebooks I would say absolutely not. That is because there are thousands of ebooks available on the Internet free or at incredibly low prices and that muddies the water on perceived value. The Article Marketing Handbook is different in that it provides a lot of information and advice that I haven’t seen before in any article, forum or ebook. Information and advice that I know from experience is correct even if I hadn’t thought about some of it before reading the handbook.

The Article Marketing Handbook is by far the best guide I have read on the subject of article marketing, so I wasn’t disappointed. As Allen will be providing updates as the market changes I would consider the one off $47 payment to be a good investment for ongoing success in the article marketing field.


The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including The Creative Writer and Make Money From Writing

Visit Eprofits Centre for free digital downloads

Writing Reviews For Article Marketing

There are several review sites on the Internet and for two years I regularly submitted reviews to two of them. Reviews are a writer’s opinion of a product or service and writing and submitting them are in some ways similar but also different to writing for article marketing. In this article I’m going to make comparisons and show how I think that reviews can be used in article marketing.

Detail and Information

For me writing reviews was good grounding for article marketing. I had previously written articles for home business magazines but when I started to write reviews I soon found that I needed to add more detail and information to do well in the review site ratings and earnings, sometimes it could get a bit silly when over critical members would want to know every little detail about packaging when the site owners did not.

The more detail and information we add to an article the better. Some article marketers split their information into several articles instead of writing one information packed article. That may work better for getting quick back links but if I tried to do that I would feel as if I was selling myself and readers short. There is always the option of using part 1, 2, 3 etc in the article titles but if a site visitor looking for information found part 3 first would they bother to look for parts 1 and 2 when they can just click back to the search engine and find a full article on the subject that they are interested in?

As we are always hopeful that a publisher may use our articles as website or ezine content I suspect that if an article comes in several parts it would have to be really good to stand a chance of being chosen.

Warts And All

There is a difference between reviews written for sites like Ciao and Dooyoo and reviews written for article marketing. On the review sites you review a product warts and all. The reviews need to be honest because it is useful feedback for manufacturers and because the review sites are communities your credibility is at stake amongst other members. The rewards are not very high even for top writers, but I guess that would depend on which area of the world that you live in.

Most of the reviews that I’ve seen in article or Internet marketing are full of praise and no warts. You know that the authors are trying to sell a product or get readers to join the latest millionaire making affiliate programme. You also know that many of the reviews will be dishonest because the authors are trying to gain product or affiliate sales.

In article marketing the rewards are backlinks to your sites and hopefully syndication of your articles to get more backlinks. The money that can be earned through article marketing is greater and especially if an article goes viral, but as with review sites you don’t earn anything if you don’t get it right.

Getting Content Right

Getting the content right for reviews and article marketing is much the same. Quality, information, legibility, correct grammar and punctuation, advice, detail, layout and for me simplifying technical explanations to a level that most can understand. That last one was my idea! If a reviewer is writing about a particular model of mp3 player and that review is found in a search for information about mp3 players by somebody interested in buying one; and the reader can’t understand the technical jargon then they are going to look elsewhere for advice.

The same applies to article marketing. If your article about mp3 players is linking back to your site or blog that incidentally has adverts for mp3 players you want the reader to go all the way down to the bottom and click on your link, not click away because you have lost their understanding part way through. As a publisher looking for website content I would be more likely to go for an article that is easy to understand rather than one giving the same information but full of technical jargon. That is unless you are aiming your article towards techie sites and that’s a whole different ball game.

When you write product reviews for the review sites you don’t need to think about key words and phrases as in article marketing, though if the review sites pay per visitor click it’s not a bad idea to use them. In article marketing we learn to use key words and phrases in our article titles and article body, but when we use too many it can make an article harder to understand and read. If a publisher is looking for good content that will capture visitor’s interest and keep them on their site longer they will be happy with key words and phrases used in context with an article but not if they are too many and placed where they don’t fit.

Knowing Your Subject

When you review a product you are expected be familiar with and have used the product enough to be able to give a fair assessment of it. For instance a review about a washing machine that you have been using regularly for several months is far more credible and useful as feedback and for prospective buyer information than a review about a washing machine that you have only just bought and used twice.

The same should apply to article marketing and in many cases it happens, but there are also lots of contrived articles. The best writers can carry it off and make it seem as if they use a product or service but many writers can’t fake it. It is pretty obvious that they have gleaned their information from sales spiel and the lack of user experience in an article lowers it’s worth for readers looking for information and publishers looking for content.

My biggest bugbear is travel articles. I love reading about different places from a visitor’s point of view. Contrived travel articles are generally boring and next to useless for readers who want to know what a place is really like and are looking for tips before they book their holiday. If I couldn’t produce more information than can be found on a travel brochure I wouldn’t write about a place.

Do Reviews Work In Article Marketing

I think that there is a place for reviews in article marketing and if they are well written and show user experience they are good for publishers to use as content. Reviews can be written about almost any product or service giving a wide range of subjects to write about – as long as that product or service isn’t your own!

The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including Mega Music Site, Articles Abroad which offers travel information and The Creative Writer

The Negative & The Positive

The Negative
Calamity seems to be following me this month. My server for the new membership sites Eprofits Centre and Articles Abroad took over a week to get back up and running. The sites were extremely slow to load and when I tried to send out newsletters to apologise for the sites being down I found that all of the cron jobs were missing and I had to set them all up again. There was also regular patches of downtime.

If you have read my earlier posts you'll know that cron jobs and I don't get on so it was no surprise that I set them up wrong. Each site has over a dozen so lots of mistakes to be made. I got the Articles Abroad cron jobs sorted but 3 of the Eprofits cron jobs weren't right and emails were being sent to my inbox every 10 or 15 minutes. I was limited for time and just deleted the emails twice a day until I had time to figure out what I'd done wrong.

The time came yesterday. I tried to log on to Eprofits and found that the site had been suspended with no warning and no explanation. I could only think that either a scammer had latched on to another of my sites, or the cron job emails going into my site inbox were considered as spamming, though I wasn't letting them build up.

Another possibility was that several days before my monthly fees were due to come out of my account I got an email saying that my payment was overdue and my account would be terminated if I didn't pay. It was the second month running that I'd had that warning email and when I complained I was told that it was just a reminder. Reminders don't tell you that you are late paying, nor do they make threats.

A few hours later Articles Abroad was suspended, as there were no problems with the cron jobs that couldn't have been the reason. My 2 new ventures down twice in one month and just as they were starting to gain momentum. The server support could only say "The server just is not acting right. There are still some bugs we are fixing."

The other problem that I have with them is that it is an hosting reseller account and I haven't been able to log into my hosting cpanel since they got back up and crawling again. Fortunately it is a new account with no customers, but what I have at the moment is one site up and running out of 3 but that site is totally useless because I can't set up accounts for new customers.

So I am paying for a service that I'm not getting. 3 of my sites are not doing anything and as I extensively advertised them the suspended pages won't be doing my credibility much good. Of course I am now in the process of looking for a new server. I got back ups of the sites, but I've never moved a site from one server to another so I'm a bit apprehensive about moving even though I know that I must.

The Positive
During the down time I was able to spend more time working on my older sites. I haven't done much with them since setting up the article directory so it was long overdue.

I've also been messing around with various scripts and software and found a neat little script that builds Youtube sites with content that automatically updates. I built 3 mini sites, the last one taking all of 5 minutes. You can see that site at www.bb-articles.com/spicegirls I think it's rather neat and have a few ideas on how I can use the mini sites to aid my business.

More positive is that BB Articles Alexa ranking is now 285,386 and still rising। A massive improvement in a relatively short time. Some really good writers are now becoming regular submitters so I can only see a good future for BB Articles.

Merry Christmas