Today I’m going to share with you how I get one of my old websites back to top 10 in Google, spending very little time and money.

But before I tell you what I did, let me give you a brief background about this particular website.

I have a niche website that I created back in 2004 and it has been in the top 10 in Google for a competitive keyword for years.

To give you some idea, that ’single word’ keyword gives 6,900,000 results in Google, i.e. more than 6 million websites are fighting for that keyword.

A few months back, I realized that the sales from the website dropped. I suspected that my ranking in Google had probably dropped. Indeed, it dropped out of the first page into the second page. The exact ranking was 12th position. Just missed the top 10 by 2 positions.

To regain my top position, I needed to get lots of backlinks fast.

Thus, about 2 months back, I engaged a freelancer to submit the website to 1000 link directories for less than $30. That’s all I did.

A few days ago, I realized that sales from the website increased. I went to Google and checked. Indeed, I’m back to the top 10. I’m now in the 7th position.

From this experience, I once again prove that directory submission is still a viable promotion method.

Some Advice In Website Creation

When I first started creating niche websites to profit from Adsense and affiliate sales, I followed the advice of the ‘experts’ - follow your interest.

I wrote very good articles and each website took me one month of intensive effort!

Soon, very soon in fact, I ran out of interested topics and I had nothing to write. It took me a while before I decided to create websites using Private Label Articles.

I’m glad that I made that decision.

The traffic and earnings from some of the websites created using Private Label Articles outperform those ’sweat and toil’ websites I’ve created.

For example, one of the websites I’ve created using Private Label Articles is now consistently generating more than $500 a month from Adsense. The highest record was $700 in one month. It took me only a few hours to create the website and a few hours to promote it.

I’ve tried at least 4 different Private Label Article services in the market and there is only 1 that worth my time and investment. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), that website will be closed on 30th June 2008, i.e. it will stop accepting new members after 30th June 2008 (but existing members will still continue to receive new articles). When it reopens, probably after 3-4 months time, the same service will cost you double.

If you are just starting out but are committed to build some passive income online, I suggest you grab this PLR service that I use before it’s closed to the public and ‘naively’ follow the instructions laid out by them, especially their 90-day challenge as well as my step by step guide. If you can just do that, you will thank me one year from now.

Do you know what’s the #1 reason why most people fail to make money online?

The #1 reason is indecision!

They can’t decide if internet marketing is for them. They are getting mixed messages from everywhere, messages like:

“You can make a million trading the stock market.”

“You can achieve financial freedom with MLM.”

“No, I think I should be a REAL brick and mortar businessman. Internet marketing is not a career!”

One of the secrets of success is that when you make a decision, everything else will fall into places. It’s one of the secrets of the universe, as important as the law of attraction.

The tough part is to make a decision.

If you haven’t made up your mind that you’re going to create a full time income from internet marketing, I hope this article can help you to make a decision today.

Ok, let’s compare Internet Marketing with Stock Trading, MLM and a Brick And Mortar Business.

I’ve been through all the 3 other options and I believe I’m qualified to share with you my experience.

Internet Marketing vs. Stock Trading

I see stock trading as a form of wealth management. You should learn how to park your extra money in the stock market to get better ROI (return on investment) than putting money in fixed deposit.

But trading the stock market full time is a bad idea, unless you package it into a business, especially an online business. If so, you’re back to the idea of internet marketing.

The truth is most stock trading experts make money teaching people how to trade stocks! They create courses, software and books to teach people and make huge profit from there.

In stock trading, there is no sure-win. If you get a return of 50% consistently, you are considered an expert.

But do you know that you can get 1000% ROI in internet marketing? For example, I can invest $200 to get freelancers to rewrite articles, create a website and build links. In the years to come, this website will easily earn me more than $2000. That’s a return of more than 1000%!!!

My risk? The worse case is I break even. These days, I hardly have a website that lose money. It’s just a matter of time before I break even.

My advice is, trade stock if you are interested, but spend more time building your online empire because you can get better ROI at lower risk.

Internet Marketing vs. MLM

The dream of MLM (Multi-level marketing or network marketing) is that you can achieve time and financial freedom. This is the idea that most MLMers will try to sell you.

To me, the true value in MLM is mindset training. Success is all about mindset. Good MLM companies have good training that can instill the millionaire’s mindset into you. This is something internet marketing can hardly achieve.

Other than that, I really can’t see any advantage over internet marketing.

If you talk about financial freedom, internet marketing can definitely give you financial freedom. Online income is definitely more passive than MLM income. In fact, you can have multiple streams of online passive income, which makes it more stable than just 1 source of passive income.

If you talk about time freedom, MLM can give you time freedom ONLY after you are successful. During the process of team building, it’s hell!! Your working hours are nighttimes, Sundays and public holidays. These are times when your family members are free but you are not!

Internet marketing, on the other hand, gives you time freedom EVEN before you are successful. You still have to work hard, but you chose when you want to work. You can work when everyone is sleeping. Or you can work an hour and play with your kids for the next hour. It’s all up to you.

Moreover, if you truly believe in the power of MLM, you should explore online MLM instead of the old-school brick and mortar MLM. The old-school MLM is really a time waster.

Internet Marketing vs. Brick And Mortar Business

Ever since I tasted the goodness of online marketing, I’ve never thought of doing brick and mortar business again!

I started out running traditional business and it was a relief when I converted my entire business to online. When I ran my offline business, my mind was all about how to pay my rental, my staff’s salary, how to bring in customers etc. I hardly have time to think of business strategies and expansion.

But online business is almost stress-free. When you are small, you work alone. There is no worry of office rental and staff cost. You spend most of your time thinking of business strategies and how to expand your business, which is definitely more important than working hard to pay bills!

Another important difference is in offline business, you can hardly find people who are willing to show you how to make money. But in online business, many people (too many in fact) wanting to show you how they make money. Some of them may charge you, but you are talking about $47 or $97. That’s cheap!

Final Remark……

I hope I’ve been impartial in my comparison. I’ve been on both sides of the equation and I just hope that my experience can help you make a better decision.

Remember, regardless of which decision you make, once you make the decision, everything else will fall into places for you!

“My Google Adsense account is disabled. What should I do?” This is an email I recently received from one of the members in my Adsense membership program.

Frankly, this email is a wake up call to me. I’ve heard of people’s account got disabled, but I haven’t had any close friend whose account has been disabled.

The reason why her account is disabled is unknown. She didn’t click her own ads. The only possibility, she confessed, is that one of her neglected blogs posted junk info. But the site receives practically no traffic and zero click through. Does that justify an account suspension?

Ignorance can cause your Adsense account disabled

We know the general rule of Adsense. Basically, an Adsense website should be content rich and provide values to the visitors. This is the rule that I’ve been playing with all this while and I believe I’m pretty safe.

But after hearing this sad news, I start to think if there is anything else I need to be cautious about. It is possible that your ignorance (or should I say negligence) may cause your Adsense account disabled.

Here are some of the issues I can think of:

1) Do you have a ‘forgotten’ junk site with your Adsense ad in it?

It could be a Blogger blog that you created years ago. You probably followed the advice of some “black hat” marketers to auto-post junk info into the blog and profit from Adsense. This is a time bomb. Make sure that you remove those ads now.

2) Have you been sabotaged?

Google says that you can’t click your own ad or ask other people to click on your ad. This means if you offended me, I can sabotage you by going to your Adsense website and mass-click your ads until your Adsense account is suspended!

Is it possible? One word, yes!

This is stupid, I know, but it can happen. Here’s what Google say about how to prevent sabotage.

As you can see, the answer they give is just a diplomatic answer. It just tell you one thing, that is, you can be sabotaged.

If you have hundreds of websites, how on earth are you going to monitor each of the traffic log for suspicious activity?

If your website is suspended due to fraudulent clicks, do you think Google will believe you that someone actually sabotage you? Or they will think you actually get someone to inflate the clicks so as to help you earn more money?

I have yet to have a solution to this problem. All I can say is if you ever experience the following scenarios, report to Google immediately. If you file a report with them before they catch you, you are in a better position to prove to them that you’ve been sabotaged.

The scenarios include:

- You experience an extremely high CTR.

If you have a CTR of 500%, it means for every page loaded from your website, a visitor actually clicks 5 ads. This is an obvious sign that you’ve been sabotaged.

- You experience a sudden surge in your Adsense income on a particular website.

There is no absolute amount for the surge. If your website has been earning $1 a day and suddenly it increases to $10 and you didn’t do anything special, you probably want to check out the traffic log and report to Google if necessary.

3) Is your advertising media reliable?

If you advertise your Adsense website, be sure that you know the source of the traffic and that the advertising media is reliable.

For example, you may go to a forum or Ebay to buy 100000 visitors and you drive the traffic to your Adsense website. Many of these cheap traffic services actually use pop-under technology and if Google happens to know it, you are in deep soup.

Talking about advertising media, please do not advertise your Adsense websites on LeadsLeap.com. It’s for your own good. Although LeadsLeap is not a click-exchange program, it does have some elements of click-exchange. Click-exchange traffic is forbidden for Adsense. To play safe, I wouldn’t advertise my Adsense website via LeadsLeap. Frankly, you won’t get much click-through anyway. Instead, those ad will make your ad look unprofessional. I never put Adsense ads in my squeeze page or sales page.

4) Are you keeping up-to-date with Google policy?

Google may change their Adsense policy from time to time. Things that you do today may be violating their rules tomorrow.

For example, in 2006, all the gurus asked you to put a picture beside your Adsense ad to boost click through. But in 2007, Google added to its policy that images are not allowed alongside Adsense ads.

If you have any website built in 2006 with images beside the ads, be sure that you’ve removed those images by now.

5) Do you have other self-feeding ads on your website?

Besides Adsense ads, you may insert other advertising feeds such as those that automatically generate a list of items sold at Amazon or Ebay, or you may sell text links on your website. This is usually not much of a problem if the program that you use is reliable. But some advertising or link selling programs allow adult contents and if you are not careful, you may end up having porn ads on your website!

What should I do if my account is disabled?

If your account is already disabled, you can’t register another Adsense account using your name. However, there are 2 alternatives I can think of:

1) Open another account under a business entity.

You can set up a business entity and register another Adsense account. The advantage is you are still in full control of your Adsense account. The disadvantage is you will have to open a business account with your local bank in order to bank in the money. Depending on the bank, a substantial minimum deposit may be necessary. In Singapore, it’s $10k.

2) Use your relative’s account.

You can open another account under your spouse’s name or someone you trust. The disadvantage is the cheque will be issued to another person’s name and you have to treat that person well or…..

In both options, the best is to use a different mailing address. If it’s under the same mailing address, Google will pay special attention to the activity in that account.

Actually, not all are lost.

Once you have another account, you can put the id back to your existing sites. Your account may have been banned, but your site has not. But this time, make sure you do things right. Also, make sure that you do not put it on sites that violate Google policy or you’ll risk your account being banned again.

Some final words……

Last but not least, I want to say that I still love Google Adsense. The income is 100% passive. There is no need to handle any customer support or do any updating work for changes in affiliate programs. As long as you keep your hat ‘white’ and don’t make ignorant mistakes like those I’ve suggested above, you shouldn’t worry too much about having your Google Adsense account disabled.

After 3 months of work from gathering ideas from our members to building the software, finally I’m excited to present to you our first viral software - Affiliate ID Manager.

If you were with us since we started, you may recall that we did a poll to vote for the best idea for our viral software. Now we’ve turned that idea into reality!

Before I move on, I need to mention that this post is mainly for LeadsLeap members. If you are not a member yet, join us now to get the benefit!

What Does Affiliate ID Manager Do?

Before I answer this question, let me ask you a question.

Where do you keep all your affiliate IDs, passwords, affiliate links, payment info, cloaked links, etc? Excel file or simply keep them in your email inbox?

How about your hosting login passwords, membership passwords, social media passwords and tons and tons of other passwords? Where do you keep them?

I think you get the idea.

Affiliate ID Manager will manage all your IDs, passwords, links and many other details related to that particular account in one secured database, with powerful search function and organization features. This means you can easily look for the details that you need and update it any time if necessary.

How About The Viral Part?

Good question. As a LeadsLeap member, you will get the rebrandable version of the software.

The rebrandable version allows you to rebrand the software with 2 banners and 4 text links. By simply giving away the rebranded software, you will be able to build massive traffic to the websites you’re promoting.

Many of you have probably read about the S-Buzz phenomenal that is happening now. It’s the power of giving away free software to build traffic.

If you are an affiliate marketer or you are running your own website, it is vital that you have some form of viral campaign running. Rebrandable software is definitely a powerful viral tool.

A high quality rebrandable software will typically cost you $39. But now, you have the same power at $0 cost.

If you are a LeadsLeap member, you can download the rebrandable version here. (login required)

The Purpose Of This Blog Post……

The main reason why I post it up in our blog is because I want you to post all your technical question about the software in the comments section of this post.

This is a multi-functional software and I reckon that some of you many have questions on how to use it. Instead of flooding our support emails and answering repeated questions, I thought it would be easier if you can throw all your questions here so that other savvy members or I will answer the questions here.

Of course, before posting your question, please make sure that it is not already answered.

If you know the answer to some questions, I would appreciate that you can contribute your answers.

Thank you and have fun playing with the software.

This post is about how to use pingback/trackback to get more links and contents for your blog.If you have a blog, you probably have 2 important things to ‘worry’ about.

1) Finding/writing quality content to post to your blog

2) Getting quality links to your blog

Here’s a proposal on how you can have both at the same time!

The idea is to use the pingback/trackback feature that comes with a Wordpress blog.

Here’s a typical scenario:

- Person A writes something on her blog.

- You read her blog and have some afterthought.

- You blog about your thought in your own blog (hence more content for your blog).

- You either pingback or send a trackback to Person A’s blog

- Person A’s blog receives the pingback/trackback and displays it as a comment to the original post, linking it back to your blog (hence another link juice for you).

Now, for this method to work, 2 things must be ready:

1) Person A’s blog must allow trackback and pingback

2) Ideally, person A’s blog sets “DoFollow” for her trackback and pingback.

How to know if a blog allows trackback and pingback?

Simple, just check out the blog and see if there’s any trackback or pingback links. They are either in the comments section or a section on its own (like LeadsLeap blog).

How to know if the trackback/pingback has “DoFollow”?

If you use Firefox, you can install a plugin called SEO For Firefox. The plugin will highlight links with “NoFollow”. Any link without “NoFollow” is “DoFollow”.

If you use IE, change to Firefox! (How is my humour?)

How to create a pingback or trackback?

1) First, it should be enabled in your wordpress blog. You can do that by logging into Options » Discussion - and making sure there is a check mark next to Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.).

2) Next, write a post and link back to the original post.

In most cases, Pingback will happen automatically and there is no need for you to send any trackback.

If you have any difficulty in pingback or trackback, refer to this excellent guide.

A note on “DoFollow” trackback and pingback

Wordpress blog, by default, has “NoFollow” trackback/pingback link. If you own a blog and would like to advocate “DoFollow” for trackback and pingback, you can install Dofollow Trackbacks Plugin.

If you decide to do that, write a comment below to let our readers know you advocate “DoFollow” on your blog. Who knows, some readers may decide to read your blog and pingback to your blog

Final note

You are welcome to link to LeadsLeap blog and get a pingback or trackback, provided that you don’t spam. For LeadsLeap members, you can add your referid to the link. It will pingback to the original post.