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Do You Use Tools to Make Money Online or Are You The Tool?

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Today I decided to shoot a video where I share my perspective on using tools to make money online.

Here’s the video:

So what tools do I recommend for making money online?

There are basically three main tools I recommend every start with:

  1. Kalatu Brand Station – For blogging and branding yourself.  Your “home” on the Internet.
  2. AWeber Email Services – For all your email marketing needs.
  3. ClickFunnels – For creating customized landing pages, opt-in pages, sales pages and membership sites.

Those are the first three tools I would start with.

If you can’t afford all three, I would start with Kalatu and then add-on AWeber later on and finally ClickFunnels when you’re ready for that step.

How to Make Your Blog Posts 100 Times Easier to Read

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Are people even reading our Blog posts?

That’s what I used to wonder myself.

I used to invest time and energy into writing Blog posts and then wonder if people were actually reading them.

Sadly, a lot of well-meaning bloggers like myself when I first started, make some very common but tragic blogging mistakes that make it VERY difficult for their visitors to read their blog posts.

It took me some time to even realize I was making these mistakes, but once I did I implemented these concepts into my blog posts and my user engagement improved drastically.

Here’s a video where I explain exactly what you can do to make your blog posts 100 times easier to read:

If you enjoyed this video and found it valuable, let my know by hovering over the video and hitting the THUMBS UP button now.

Also, if you haven’t already, subscribe to my YouTube Channel and be the first to know when I publish new videos.

How to Build a Blog / Vlog Audience in a World That Seems to Only Want Stupid Stuff

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I’ve had a few people asking me an interesting question related to Blogging or Vlogging recently.

The question is how do we build a blog audience or an audience on YouTube or Facebook and get people to engage with our content, when it seems like the only type of content people want to engage in is stupid stuff like cats or dogs doing stuff or people pulling pranks on each other etc.

If you’re a Blogger who creates content that is educational, or inspirational or you cover a topic that is a little bit more serious than cats doing silly things, it can be a bit discouraging to pour your heart and soul into a blog post or a video and then to publish it, and see very little or no engagement at all.

As a prime example of what I’m talking about, I recently uploaded a picture of myself onto Facebook with a beard that I just recently started to grow and I asked people if I should keep it or shave it off.

Here’s the post that I’m referring to:

 

Well, the interesting thing about this “stupid” post is that it got the highest engagement out of virtually any other post I have ever posted on Facebook – like over 80+ comments in about 24 hours.

That may not sound like a lot, but when I post something where I’m actually sharing something inspirational or educational or where I share a Blog post that teaches something, those types of posts are lucky to get 2 comments and a few likes.

A lot of new bloggers who are just getting started will know exactly what I’m talking about.

They’ll write a blog post or record a video, and they’ll publish it and then sit there wondering why nobody is commenting or liking their stuff.

Meanwhile, they’ll see some other blogger who just wrote one of the worst blog posts of his or her career, and there’s like 150 comments on it.

It can be VERY frustrating to see this happen, and it can make you start to think that maybe you’re not a good Blogger or that maybe there’s something wrong with your content etc.

However, that is very likely NOT TRUE!

There might be nothing wrong with your content.

Your content might be absolutely amazing…

However, you’re not realizing one KEY thing… and that is what I share in today’s video.

Check it out here:

If you enjoyed this video, and got some value from it, take a moment to click the thumbs up button that appears when you hover your mouse over the video.

Thanks!

 

Blog Income Report – February 2015

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It is time again for my official Blog Income Report blog post again for the month of February 2015.

This has been an extremely productive month for me in my Blogging business.

Considering the fact that my Blogging business is just something I do part-time outside of running my other technology company, I’m pretty blown away with what I’ve accomplished this month.

I guess that’s why my Fitbit Tracker reports that I’ve only been sleeping about 5hours / night on average.

When things are so exciting, who has time for sleep! 🙂

Blog Content Report – February 2015

In February I wrote 28 blog posts in 28 days, maintaining my average of one blog post per day.

Here is a recap of all the blog posts I wrote this month:

Just like last month I once again participated in the 21 Day Blogging Challenge put on by Empower Network, that is available to all bloggers regardless whether they are a part of Empower Network or not.

The great thing about participating in the 21 Day Blogging Challenge is that that you get to promote your daily blog post in the private community page that Empower Network has setup specifically for that purpose.

This gives you an opportunity to gain some extra exposure, to connect with other bloggers who are also doing the challenge and to get ideas for the types of blog posts you can create.

If you want to jump-start your blogging career, I highly recommend doing the 21 Day Blogging Challenge.

Blog Traffic Report – Feb 2015

 

In this second month of running this new blog, here are some of my stats for the month of February 2015:

  • Total Users: 2,516
  • Total Sessions: 3,547
  • Total Pageviews: 5,249
  • Avg Session Duration: 1 minute 31 seconds

These stats show a HUGE improvement over my January stats, especially since February was 3 days shorter than January.

Take a look at how the numbers stack up when comparing the two months:

I’m VERY happy with these numbers.

I had 105% MORE Users visiting my blog this month, contributing to 60% more Sessions, 65% more Pageviews, and staying an average of 9.6% LONGER per session than the previous month.

And once again, February was a shorter month, so I’m really excited about these stats.

Now let’s take a look at where my traffic has been coming from.

Blog Traffic Sources Report – February 2015

As you can see from the charts above, my blog traffic distribution chart has also improved quite a bit.

  • Direct Traffic – 1,755 sessions – 49.5%
  • Social Traffic – 584 sessions – 16.5%
  • Referral Traffic – 486 sessions – 13.7%
  • Organic Search Traffic – 716 sessions – 20.2%

Direct Traffic

In January the majority of my traffic (69%) came from direct traffic which most likely comes from my daily emails I send to my email list who then click through to my blog to read my blog posts if they’re interested.

Direct traffic increased by 15% in February which means more people have been visiting my site directly – most likely from my emails etc.

However, as a percentage of the whole my Direct traffic also went down from 69% of the total to 49% of the total.

This is a good thing because it means that my traffic is starting to diversify more so that I don’t have to just rely on my email list for traffic.

Organic Search Traffic

By far the biggest gain this month came from my Organic Search traffic which went up by 623% this month!

I’ve been focusing on a lot of SEO Related improvements, making my website more friendly to Google and the other search engines like Bing.

I used to be really into learning and utilizing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques a few years back when I used to be more focused on affiliate marketing, and now that I’ve gotten back to blogging I have been investing a lot of time, energy and some money into getting trained by the best-of-the-best white-hat SEO specialists in the industry to learn what is working now so that I can apply that to my Blog.

Besides getting much better at SEO, another reason why my Organic Search traffic increased this month is most likely due to the fact that Google has started to index a lot more of my pages and they’re probably seeing my website in a better light now that my domain name has been around for more than 60 days.

Social Traffic

My social traffic increased by 27% this month, which is a pretty solid increase as well that I’m very happy about.

When you have an Organic Search increase of 623% it’s kind of easy to look at an improvement in Social Traffic of 27% and think “Oh, only 27%”, but a 27% improvement in Social Traffic is HUGE as well!

Think about it…what this means is that people on Social media sites are engaging with my content a lot more, and the cool thing too is that when you get more Social Engagement, Google looks at that as a positive signal for improving your search engine rankings.

I’m very happy with the 27% increase. 🙂

Referral Traffic and Other

My referral traffic also went up by 298% and what Google refers to as “Other” went up by 100%.

I don’t even know what qualifies as “Other”.  Perhaps something new Google is now tracking?

My understanding of Referral Traffic is traffic that came from other websites where people clicked on a link that led them to your website, and not counting any traffic from social media sites or search engines.

Either way, whatever Google considers “Referral Traffic” and “Other”, they both went up this month as well, which I’m happy about. 🙂

Blog Income Report – February 2015

Okay, so let’s get to the actual blog income report part of this post, and then I’ll explain all the changes.

Before I start talking numbers though, just a quick income disclaimer.  My results are not typical, not guaranteed in any way, and you should check out my income disclaimer if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, here are my stats:

Total Gross Income – $1,900.61

Total Expenses – $1,756.30

Net Income: $144.93

Ok, so what’s been going on?

Well, this month has definitely been an interesting month in terms of my income and expenses.

Lots of new stuff to report.

Affiliate Income

Firstly, my gross income from being an affiliate with various different programs has almost doubled this month.

Affiliate income is my favorite income because it has the power of being scalable and can eventually become fairly passive in nature, so I’m really excited about the growth I’ve seen there.

If you want to develop an affiliate income for yourself, I recommend two things:

#1 – Become an Affiliate For the Tools You Use

Any time you buy and start using a certain online tool or training course, become an affiliate with that company if they offer an affiliate program.

Then, if you use the tool and find it useful for your business – TELL OTHERS ABOUT IT!

It completely boggles my mind when people are too lazy to sign up for an affiliate program that a company offers.

For example, this past month I had three or four people ask me “Paul, what do you use for your email lists – Aweber or GetResponse?”

I reply “Actually I have both AWeber and GetResponse.  I personally like AWeber better, but I signed up for GetResponse to check it out as well, but so far I haven’t seen anything in there that AWeber doesn’t have, and I like AWeber better.  I do have an affiliate link I can send you that will set you up with an AWeber trial account for just $1, if you’d like.  That way you can poke around see if you like it.  Want me to email you that link?” or something that effect.

And then I email them my affiliate link!

To be totally honest, in most cases people don’t end up signing up when you send them an affiliate link, because they might not be ready to buy the product and they were just asking a question… but you know what?  Sometimes they DO buy through your link and you start making affiliate commissions.

When I use a tool, and I like it, I am not afraid to tell people and to send them my affiliate links.

It adds up!  Last year I made $182.10 from AWeber just by sending people my affiliate link when they asked me about AWeber.

#2 – Join Empower Network and Become an Affiliate

Empower Network has an amazing array of tools and training programs aimed at helping Bloggers, business people and Network Marketers to make money online and with their businesses.

But you know what’s even better than Empower Networks training and tools?  Their affiliate program!

Empower Network has one of the most lucrative affiliate programs of it’s kind.

If you’re not signed up yet, I highly recommend checking it out.

Mentoring / Consulting Income

Another new thing I launched this month is a new income stream – offering Mentoring and Consulting Services.

I’ve had a lot of people asking me for 1-on-1 help with everything from mentoring, to mindset training, to overcoming blocks in their businesses, to getting traffic to their websites etc. so I decided to now offer that as a service on a very limited basis to a few individuals.

My schedule is already almost 100% full, so if you’ve been thinking about hiring me as a Mentor or Consultant, let me know right away as I’m almost all out of space.

As you can see from my reports above, mentoring / consulting brought in quite a bit of income for me this month.

Most people who run blogs don’t realize that offering 1-on-1 consulting services on their blogs is an awesome way to build up another income stream for yourself.

When we go through the training that we do, as bloggers, such as for example learning all the different things that Empower Network teaches us – our expertise as Internet Marketers starts to skyrocket.

Even after just a month of going through training with Empower Network can put you ahead of 95% of the businesses out there in terms of knowing how to market yourself online, how to develop a brand, how to build traffic, how to engage with social media etc.

All this KNOWLEDGE that you learn by being a part of Empower Network and by actually BUILDING your own Blog is EXTREMELY valuable especially to traditional business owners.

The stuff we learn as we’re building our blogs is like MAGIC to traditional business owners.

If you chose to, you could EASILY go out and start taking on small contracts for small businesses helping them with their web strategy just by applying the stuff we learn in Empower Network for their business.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Yeah, but why would a business owner want to pay me?  I’m not an expert!  I just started doing this stuff recently.  And why wouldn’t the business owners just go to Empower Network themselves or the people who run Empower Network for this type of consulting???”

Here’s the answer to that.  Firstly, most business owners out there have ZERO desire to learn any of the stuff you’re learning as a Blogger.

They simply don’t have time.  They’re too busy running their businesses to spend time learning this stuff.  It would COST them way too much money in lost revenues if they had to stop what they’re doing to learn the stuff we learn in Empower Network.

They don’t want to learn.  They want someone to do it for them.

It’s just like if you had a burst pipe in your house and water was flooding your house, would you turn off the water and then go to school for 4 years to learn how to be a plumber?  No! You would just call a plumber to fix it!

Secondly, you might be asking yourself why business owners might want to hire you, and not someone like David Wood from Empower Network for example?

The simple answer to that is that people like David Wood don’t do 1-on-1 consulting unless you’ve got a multi-million dollar budget.  Even then, I doubt it.

Of course Blog / Internet Marketing / Website consulting is NOT the only type of consulting you can offer on your Blog!

My wife offers energy healings, psychic readings, and various different workshops on her Blog.  She started her blog back in 2009 and it wasn’t long before she was able to quit a job she really did not like to work from home offering those services she loves helping people with.

If you’re an artist, you can offer custom commission work on your blog.

If you’re a Yoga enthusiast, you could offer consulting or even Yoga classes on your blog.

If you’re a musician, you could offer mentoring or teaching via online chat on your blog.

If you’re a designer, you could offer design services on your blog.

The sky is the limit.  You can use our blog to promote virtually ANY service you would enjoy helping people with. 🙂

You DO NOT have to limit yourself to affiliate income and/or advertising income as the only income sources your Blog can bring you!

Now, let’s briefly touch on my expenses for this month.

Expenses

As you can see from my report above, my expenses for this month have also gone up fairly significantly.

I had three main types of expenses this month, all of which went up…

Firstly, my tool expenses went up.  The reason for this is that I’ve been testing a lot of different tools to find the best ones to keep in my toolbox going forward.

For example, I upgraded my AWeber account to the professional version which offers you advanced analytics.  This bumped my cost for AWeber from $29/m to $149/m.

This is a significant increase, but I wanted to see what kind of benefits I can derive from the pro version of AWeber.

If I see value in it, I’ll keep it, and if not, then next month I’ll downgrade back to the $29/m plan.

Next, I also invested in upgrading from LeadPages to ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels is an amazing tool for creating all kinds of different landing pages, funnels, and even membership sites!

It’s only a few dollars more than LeadPages but it offers so much more value.

You’ll notice in my expense list that I have both of them listed.  That is because I haven’t had time yet to fully migrate all my landing pages from LeadPages to ClickFunnels.

Once that’s done, that’ll shave $67/m from my expense list.

There are a few other tools there on my list which will be axed next month as well.

You can’t be afraid to invest in tools and to test new things all the time.

Secondly, you’ll also notice that I invested quite a bit of money this month on additional training and tools related to SEO.

This is the part of my budget where I invest in myself and my skill-set to “sharpen my saw” so that when people hire me to work with them 1-on-1, I can provide them with world-class consulting services and results.

You can’t be afraid to invest in training and tools that will make YOU better!

Finally you’ll also notice that I spent over $500 on Facebook Advertising as well.

This was used to run ads which generated 216 new email opt-ins / leads for me in the month of February.

These are highly-targeted leads that I’m generating for the purpose of building my Empower Network team and my blog audience long term.

The return on investment on this traffic probably won’t appear on my income reports for a few months still as there is a sales cycle / process that these leads have to go through before they decide to buy anything from me or to join my team, but I have full faith that the ROI will eventually be there.

You can’t be afraid to invest in traffic and generating leads for your business!

My Blogging Goals for February

Here were some of my main goals for February:

  • Participate in my 2nd 21 Day Blogging Challenge – Check!
  • Continue on with daily blogging – Check!
  • Generate 100-200 targeted leads for my eBook/email list  – Check!
  • Launch 1-on-1 mentoring / consulting and get some clients – Check!
  • Increase my traffic from last month – Check!
  • Invest in becoming better at SEO – Check!
  • Get my Blogging business into the green / profitable – Check!
  • Launch a Private Membership Site for my Empower Network Downline – Check!
  • Grow my Empower Network Team and Income – Check!
  • Start my Manifesting Body Diet Plan – Check!

Summary

To summarize, my traffic, my income and my expenses all went up this month.

All in all, I made a net income of $144.31 from my Blog business this month, which may not seem like a lot but it means that I’ve reached a point of profitability and that I’m on track to much higher incomes in the coming months.

If you’ll remember last month I had a net loss of $299.98 so I actually made $444.29 more this month as compared to last month.

I’m extremely pleased with the results that I’ve been able to accomplish and I’m really looking forward to March!

In January I wrote a post declaring my intention to build up my blog business income up to the point where I can get a Free Car from Blogging.

Although I’m not there yet I’m definitely closer to reaching that goal than when I started!

Final Words

One final thing I’d like to say.

If you’re just starting a brand new Blog, and you’d like to learn how to make money with it, and you look at this massive post I just wrote and all the moving parts of my business, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed.

You might be thinking…HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of stuff going on just to make $144!

Don’t be overwhelmed.

Let me explain something.

I’m building my Blogging business to be a SIX and eventually SEVEN FIGURE online business!

Meaning, I’m setting up my Blog to be able to generate between $10,000 – $100,000 PER MONTH in income.

That is why I have all these crazy things going on all at once, and why I’m investing in all these tools, all this training and why I’m tracking all my stats with such precision.

A lot of the stuff that I’m setting up right now will form the foundation of my 6 and 7 figure business, but you don’t need all this if you’re just getting started.

If you’re just starting out and you just want to learn how to start making SOME money online with your Blog, you probably don’t need 90% of the stuff I’m talking about in this post.

All you really need to get started is the Kalatu Brand Station and the Empower Network Affiliate program, and that is enough to allow you to start making some income!

You can get started with Kalatu for just $9 and you can get access to the Empower Network Affiliate program for free for 60 days by following this link.

That is all you need to get started.

Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 Review and Sound Test

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Yesterday I bought a Logitech HD Pro C920 Webcam that I plan to use to make more YouTube videos as well as team hangouts for people who are on my Empower Network Team.

Today I shot a very short review video just demonstrating the picture and sound quality you can expect form this camera.

The camera does full 1080p HD resolution, but I’m only planning on using it in 720p mode for now, so that’s what I show the video in.

The webcam retails for around $100 and you can find it here.

Here’s the video I recorded:

 

What do you think?