I had a few websites that just never got off the ground.  I could never rank up which the big boys in the niche and I let them expire. I had moved some of the content to InfoBarrel to try to monetize it.   I actually got a little more traffic than I did on my own site but can't say that I was really monetizing it.

Then I tried another experiment.  I removed the content from InfoBarrel and turn it into short ebooks to put on  Amazon's KDP program. 

I had to make a book cover,…

I haven't thought this one all the way out but here goes.

I have had way better success monetizing YouTube videos over Adsense on my own sites.

I know you can link to a YouTube video, but can you create "backlinks" ( with anchor text and all) to your YouTube videos just like your own sites?

How would the Google animals ( Pandas and Penguins ) handle that?  Penalizing YouTube ( for a ton of backlinks) would be like eating their own young, wouldn't it?

My MailChimp account was suspended again and I had to go through the process of getting it investigated and reinstated. Not good!

So I have been thinking what I could have done different.

1. I could have simply made a couple of Christmas relevant Squidoo Lens and sent the subscribers…

So I was conducting a little test this holiday season on list building and YouTube that has backfired on me.

I created a template of an envelope from Santa with a North Pole postmark on it. Basically it was a Word file that you could change the address and then print it out on your printer. Pretty simple to create but kind of neat and a time saver if you don't know how to do that sort of…

Everybody desires to have a home of his own. However, the process isn’t as easy as it might seem to be. Times are tough and obtaining home loans us perhaps the most important step in the home buying process. Previously, you had to walk into a mortgage lender's agency and fill out a mortgage application physically to apply for a home loan. Presently,…

I was flipping through the TV channels last night when I came across a PBS channel that was playing a rerun of a Lawrence Welk Chris tmas show.  I left it on the channel because although the show was old, the sing was really good. 

When the show was over, a guy ( I am guessing it was family member that was probably a kid when this was filmed ) said that the show was from 1966. 

Well I wasn't even alive in 1966 ( sorry Russell ) but it struck me that this was "content" that was…

If you are getting started online, then one of the skills you are going to need to learn is how to use a graphic editing program.  My suggestion is to download the free opensource program called GIMP.  It is basically PhotoShop but free.

I bought a DVD that taught how to use GIMP but you can get all the same videos free at this site I found GIMP…

Online marketing

Jonathan Skyped me and asked why we were getting Vol updates on our Facebook page. (Guess he wanted to see Dawg updates!) ;-)

Anyway, it was from a plugin I use that curates content from other sites and I had it going to the wrong blog. It's fixed now but I sure do wish there was a way to use a single plugin for building squeeze pages and landing pages that would integrate with Facebook and Twitter.

But then you have to add a plugin to allow for social commenting, another for…

Today we interviewed the author of Article Marketing Made Simple on the podcast. Michael Fleischner is one of the countries top online marketing experts and he always gives us fantastic information. You can check him out at http://michaelfleischner.com/  - and whilel you are there, check out his books on SEO, blogging, and PPC.

If you think article…