This is a guest post by Sam Bakker. If you would like to guest post on this blog, please Contact me.

When I first started my own home-based business a few years ago, I thought that no matter what my first home business website would work. I thought I had everything important in place and the website was looking great. But the reality of my situation had to sink in eventually; even though I had an excellent website, and what I thought was successful home business information I was missing visitors, rendering my online presence useless.

Two years later, I took a second look, but this time with a careful look at all options. I would learn about Search Engine Optimization and how it can influence a business. Through it, I was able to add life to my websites as well as a sizeable amount of money.

If your website is currently suffering from a lack of visitors, the first place to look for answers is your website’s keywords and their search engine performance. Often we can build links for our website, writing content with the intention of ranking it. But none of that will matter if you don’t have the right keywords. There is a lot of money to be made in internet marketing if this step is taken seriously.

First of all, check the keywords you decided to compete for when you started your campaign. Review their usefulness and relative competition. Once you have done so, visit Google’s Adwords Keywords tool or use WordTracker. These tools will help you see clearly where opportunities in your niche could be for keywords.

If you are able to find some additional keywords that you should be ranking your website for, construct a plan outlining what on-page and off-page content will need to be produced. This is to get your website appearing on the front page for that term. Once your plan has been completed, stay focused on the job at hand. To rank higher in the search engines, you need to be consistently taking action.

As internet marketers, we often get excited and dive into projects without spending enough time working through our foundations. Looking for keywords is an essential step; a website cannot succeed in the search engines without it. Make sure you take the time to review your website’s keywords and take action if necessary so that your website doesn’t stay hidden from your potential customers.

About the Author: Sam Bakker has been in the internet marketing industry for the past 7 years. If you would like to find out more about Sam or learn some free internet marketing tips then you can visit his website at SamBakker.com

Another month has gone by. Seriously… is it going as fast as I think it is? I seem to keep losing more and more time each day and getting further behind on stuff. I apologize for the minimal amount of posts. I’m doing my best to keep up and provide quality content to you all.

Alas, another time for a blog post roundup of last month’s posts. I have some awesome posts included in this, as well as some awesome ones to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them so far and have benefited from them.

I don’t take my blogging lightly. I put a lot of thought into what I’m writing and always have you, my readers, in mind. As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Okay, without further delay let’s get started. Be sure to check out any posts you may have missed.

Affiliate Marketing is the New Job on the Market

30 Ways to Get Free Website Traffic In Minutes

Are You a Struggling Internet Marketer?

Proven Strategies to Increase Website Traffic and Generate Sales

Legitimate Worldwide Work From Home Opportunities

Are You Targeting ‘Paying’ Keywords?

How I Get Backlinks to My Blog Posts Resulting in Sales

Google Celebrates Valentine’s Day – They Gave Me $100!

The Official Alibaba.com Success Guide

I was very pleased to see the first post on this list had gotten Re-Tweeted 27 times so far. Thank you to all who spread the word to your Twitter followers.

The Twitter Tweetmeme plugin has proven to work well and makes it easy for Twitter users to Re-Tweet posts. If you’re not yet utilizing it on your own blog, you should be.

Again, thank you to all my readers!

Today I have the opportunity to answer a couple of questions from a struggling marketer who came to me and is losing patience trying to make money online.

I’m going to keep the person anonymous, but I’ll provide the questions below along with my answers to those questions. I like these kind of posts as it gives you (my readers) a real example of people finding this whole internet marketing thing difficult, which is maybe where you’re at today. If so, I hope you find this post encouraging as well as helpful. This may turn into a two or three part series depending on how in-depth I get here.

So let’s begin. The questions are pretty specific, but I think there’s a lot of general information about each I can provide. The nice thing here is that I’ve already blogged about these topics in the past, so if you happened to miss them or weren’t sure how they related to the questions below, you’ll now be able to put them both together, and things will finally make sense (hopefully).

Here are the questions:

How do i drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?

Is there another cool way of making money online from __________ (Wherever you are in the world)?

From talking with this person I know he has about 6 months of time invested into his online business and has been working very rigorously at it.

Maybe you have less time, or maybe more time spent trying to build up your business. Perhaps you haven’t yet started but come here for the first time thinking about maybe giving an online business a chance, but you’re not sure if the time you spend will pay off in the end.

Well first of all, I just have to say that any type of internet business is just like any offline business. It takes a lot of time, dedication and focus. This isn’t something new that I’m saying for the first time, but a lot of people just don’t get it or haven’t completely grasped that concept. So, whether you’re only a month in or 6 months in, I can say with assurance that it hasn’t been long enough for you to see any substantial return on your time. Earning a comfortable amount of money online will take much longer, most likely a lot longer than you would like.

Every person is unique and has unique abilities and talents, and what might work for one person may not work for another. So, just because you know someone that may have “made it big” in only a few short months, doesn’t mean you’ll do the same. However, the good news is that as long as you stick with it and not give up, you’re time will come. You just have to be patient and keep pushing forward.

Trust me, I know from personal experience. I’ve been at this for a while, and I’m still not close to where I want to be. But, I believe everything happens for a reason, and there’s a reason that my time hasn’t come yet. I have faith that it will, but only if I keep pushing forward and don’t give up.

During my time online I’ve seen a fair number of people that have thrown in the towel and decided it’s not for them. Maybe that’s how you feel right now. But, let me ask you these questions:

Why did you try? (Or, why do you want to try?)

Why did you give up? (Or, why do you want to give up?)

If you could have did/do something differently, what would it be?

In my experience, it has appeared to me that everyone needs to know someone that has “been there, done that” and can learn from their experiences and know what IS working and can then apply it to their own business. Consider reaching out and saying “I need help!” Believe me, you won’t look like a desperate fool if you do. Unless of course you act like one and expect nothing but hand-outs.

A lot of people just need guidance and are looking for somewhere to turn and someone that can help them. I urge you if you’re at the point of failure, it’s time for you to reach out. Hope is not all lost.

Aside from reaching out, evaluate what you’re doing and why you’re not making money. Maybe the first step in getting help is realizing that you’re not putting in enough effort. It takes REAL work, and A LOT of it.

Okay, so right now I’ve just basically been lecturing a bit, but please stay with me here. Everything I said is important, so I hope that you’ll take it in. You seriously need to stop, think and evaluate where you are with your business. If you’re not making money, find out why. Find out what you need to do in order to start making money online.

If you’re not quite sure, then stay tuned for my next post as I’ll be answering the first question, which is “How do i drive traffic to my site that can generate sales?”

I’ve written many posts on this topic, but I’ll be combining everything I know into one jam-packed post, full of useful information you can apply to your own online business.

Hope to see you there.

Traffic Exchanges are still used by many Internet Marketers to build targeted website traffic. They’re great if you want to get a lot of traffic in very short amount of time. I use them myself from time to time and have learned a bit about how to use them to be most effective.

This post is the continuation to my post yesterday which covered the basic idea of Increasing Web Traffic Using Traffic Exchanges.

When it comes to traffic exchanges, you must know that not all are created equal. That is, not all are the same, and not all are going to produce the same results. It’s just the nature of traffic exchanges, so don’t dwell on this fact.

Instead, let’s focus on what you can do to get the best results. I’m also going to point you to a resource that covers the top 100 traffic exchanges and also has a cool built-in system to help you build your downline.

If you plan on using a traffic exchange, it would be a good idea to know how popular it is and what kind of results you can expect to get out of it. Normally this would be hard to know without first using it and doing some testing. Well, thankfully we can know beforehand we dive in and waste our time on a traffic exchange that might not give us the results we’re looking for.

Let’s face it, if I’m going to spend my time surfing for credits, I want that to be time well spent and know I’m going to get some sort of return out of it. It doesn’t have to be a monetary return by any means, but I better see some positive results.

The best way to use traffic exchanges, in my opinion, is to promote a splash/squeeze page that builds your email list. That’s what I do, and that’s what most all other marketers are going to tell you.

Now, perhaps maybe you have a brand new, never before seen system, and you’re trying to get some exposure to it. If you can create a catchy headline or have a very short sales page, then yeah, you might have a chance.

But, I would say your focus should be to build your email list and get more subscribers that you can promote your business opportunities to. That’s the first MUST in using traffic exchanges effectively.

The second thing you need to do is know which traffic exchanges are hot. For that, we have Affiliate Funnel’s Ranking Report. This report ranks the top traffic exchanges based on user experience and user votes. It also shows other important stats… you can check out the report to see what they are.

So now you know what you should be promoting, and you know which traffic exchanges to promote it on. The last thing you need to do is test, test… oh, and test. Test your results with each traffic exchange and make sure your work is paying off in the end.

Writing top quality articles is very time consuming. You may have an idea of what you want to write about, but when it comes to actually writing the articles, it just takes time. You may be asking why you would even have a need to write articles, and the answer is very simple. Articles help you grow your online business.

Articles allow you the advantage of getting your name, business and message in front of thousands of readers and seen as an expert… all for FREE. For internet marketers and online business owners who have multiple tasks to complete every day, writing can be a chore.

Introducing…  David Hurley, expert internet marketer, English professional and article writer. David is the owner of Grasp-The-Nettle.com and provides an article writing PLR service for internet marketers. His articles are internet marketing and online business related.

What sets David’s service apart from other PLR services is this:

• High quality, relevant and useful articles – NOT the usual run-of-the-mill, thrown together stuff
• Free from grammar, spelling and syntax errors commonly found in other PLR article packages
• Limited membership – Articles exclusively available to only 100 members
• Reasonably priced

David’s service provides you with 10 internet marketing related articles each and every month to use for your own use. Why spend countless hours writing your own articles, when you can have David save you the trouble?

I’m a personal friend of David’s and have worked side by side with him for several years through various forums and internet marketing communities. I have been impressed with his professionalism and all the work that he does with his various online businesses. I can assure you that anything David does is top notch!

To learn more about David’s article writing service and his risk-free guarantee, check out his Article PLR Service. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve been hearing from different sources on the web that EzineArticles.com would be implementing changes that would have a serious impact on every article marketer out there. If you use article marketing as part of your marketing strategy, as you should, then listen up! This is important, and you’ll want to know how to stay on top.

The recent changes involve new Adsense ad placements on your article pages. They’ve added more and placed them in such a way that might just decrease your article click-through rates. Scary huh? The whole point of writing articles is to have it read and then get your links clicked.

Now, EzineArticles, one of the best article sites around, is making it tougher for the average marketer to make it in this big internet marketer game.

But, don’t fret just yet. I received an email from Travis Sego the other day that just might be the solution to these recent changes. If you’re not familiar with Travis, he’s the bum marketing genius that takes homeless guys and teaches them how to write articles and make a fortune, being a bum. Gotta love it!

I really like what Travis is doing. Plus, he’s a down-to-earth, fun loving guy (you’ll see what I mean in the email he sent me). What’s better is that he wants to help people, and by doing so, allows me to help you.

Here’s the email Travis sent and what he had to say about the new EzineArticles changes and how you can keep your click-throughs high:

Hey!

What’s da haps?

As you may have heard…

EzineArticles.com has made some

changes that will affect YOU!

Wanna talk with ya about them…

I’m in a silly mood though so…

How ’bout a little light hearted fun first?

Have you heard this one?

*********************

Confucius say…

Man who run behind car…get exhausted.

Man who run in front of car…get tired.

*********************

Heeeee….hee…

I know I’m corny…but I luv that one!

Now here’s how a man, woman or Bum

can get on top of the EzineArticles.com

changes.

Without getting exhausted or tired!

They’ve recently made the decision to

add more Adsense to the articles.

Which MIGHT make it a little tougher

to get YOUR links clicked on.

I ain’t worried though.

You won’t be either.

Learned this trick from reading

PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing

System.

(I had to see what all the new folks

were RAVING about).

Here’s what you do:

1. Shorten your articles! Your article body

only has to be 250 words!

2. Make your authors box…L-O-N-G-E-R. You

have up to 300 words you can put in your authors

box.

You should be able to make your authors box…look

like it’s part of the article!

You follow?

Using just this one little tip from One Week Marketing,

and I’m pullin’ in a 34% click through on one article…and others look like they’ll do even more.

Yipee Skipee!

I wonder if you can figure out a couple other

reasons I am so happy about this?

Betcha can?

==>Short articles are FASTER to write.

==>Short articles COST LESS to outsource.

==>Short articles = More Articles = More Sales!

Have any more great ideas on how to get around these new changes? I’d love to hear them.