"Journey Through Life": 2010

Thursday, December 16

Curtis Stone’s Christmas Holiday Recipe

Curtis Stone, one of Australia’s most favourite celebrity chef has some very interesting recipes to share with you and they are GREAT picks for your holiday Christmas feast! So let’s have a look at his first one:

1. Mango Glazed Fresh Atlantic Salmon

*Serves 8, Perparation Time 10 minutes, Cooking time 20 minutes

Relaxed Cooking with Curtis Stone: Recipes to Put You in My Favorite Mood

2. Maple & Caramelised Orange Triple Smoked Ham

*Serves 8, Perparation Time 20 minutes, Cooking time 3.45 hours

Read more at www.thehealthpilgrim.com

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Sunday, December 12

Recognizing Social Signals For Website Rankings

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SEO is one of those love hate subjects that people will never stop talking about. They can talk about on-page / off-page optimization, link building, white hat, grey hat, black hat SEO to death! But still there is always a demand for it because as we know search algorithm changes and there are always people interested in SEO for their website.

But is there a need to look into something further, especially social media since Google is now including social signals as part of a website ranking.

So let’s have a look at what I think about what’s possible first before looking at what I found…

Number of authority figures following you on Twitter or Facebook.

Number of authority figures quoting OR Retweeting ( Twitter) OR likes/ shares ( Facebook) your articles or posts

Number of people actually interacting with content on your website and this is not affected by your Alexa rankings or traffic you get on your website.

Number of Retweets your article gets, therefore affecting their rankings on search engines.

Number of Twitter Followers or Facebook Page Likes

There are also a number of things about Google featuring “social” results.

Share By “x” number of people

Realtime results on the main search page for “Justin Bieber“

Google Realtime search for “Chatroulette”

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Friday, December 10

RSS and Email Subscription – Why Both?

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RSS feeds, in simple terms are written in XML, which is a unique language quite similar to HTML. XML allows news reader or RSS reading software like FeedDemon display headlines, links or virtually any other portion of information from an RSS data feed. So when you subscribe to my feed, you will see content generated in FeedBurner or FeedDemon according to what is written on my blog posts.

But why provide the option to subscribe to my RSS feed?

1. You get content straightaway. You don’t have to visit my blog (although I would prefer that) to see what’s newly published. You will definitely receive newly updated content and there is 100% deliverability.

2. It’s automatic. Once you open up FeedDemon (which is my preferred RSS news reader), new content will be updated straightaway and you’ll see it.

I hear a but… yes a but is coming…

What is RSS Lacking?

Personalization

What you see on my RSS Feed is just blog content. Any updated post will be posted as content and that’s all you’ll see. Emails give you the added advantage of being more personal. I can address you by your name. I can tailor my content to your needs. I can make you feel more appreciated and emails give me the chance to build trust and confidence with my readers. RSS feeds are just plain content and that’s it.

Engagement

If you noticed, RSS feeds only allow one way communication. Emails allow communication in both directions. Although it’s not often I get people emailing me back, you don’t get the chance to constantly email or send newsletters to your subscribers on RSS feeds. Emails allow you to keep in constant contact with your readers and letting them know that you are there to help them People are more likely to stay as loyal readers through emails as they get to know who you are and why you are there sending them emails every so often.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Sunday, December 5

Search For Work At Donanza – Freelance Jobs For Everyone!

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If you have been searching for freelancing work at Freelancer, Odesk, Elancer and Guru you will notice that there are tons and tons of freelancing jobs available. Granted, even a whole day wouldn’t allow you to search through all of them. Not to mention that it is a waste of time doing that. Of course the better way is to use filters to look for the right jobs. There are a few posts written here on freelancing notably:

4 Ways to Earn Money at Home Through e-Freelancing Sites

TOP 11 Websites to Search For Freelancing Jobs

Let me introduce to you Donanza! NO it’s not Bonanza spelled in the wrong way but it’s like a bonanza for jobs! There are almost 100 000 jobs searchable on Donanza.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Tuesday, November 30

The Newbie Twitter Cheat Sheet

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When I first started using Twitter, I haven’t had a clue how 140 characters could simply convey your message to others. If you ask me about typing 140 characters on an SMS? Yes I can!

Back then Twitter was a bewildering world of a blue background, a cute blue bird, a tweet feed, profile info and a text box giving you enough space to write ONLY 140 characters. It was easy to key in 140 characters but how to turn 140 characters into something useful puzzles me. I don’t have a clue how Twitter can be so powerful for your website. Social media and Twitter experts began to rise and I soon learn how Twitter can be really useful for not only your website but also your business.

The trouble is there is a lot of noise! Everyone claims to be an expert and social media makes this annoyingly easier. So let’s start for all those of you who don’t know how to use it properly yet..

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Friday, November 26

The Number ONE Blog Monetization Method

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Previously on my post, passive income generation methods I’ve talked about many methods to make money for your blog although the typical blog model is not passive income friendly. Of course, there are numerous ways to make money online as I’ve mentioned in my most recent post. But not every way works well for everyone. However, one method that will surely draw people to continue to make money for you even though you haven’t start making any yet is through building a list. Regardless if you are making money actively or passively, building a list is A MUST to start seeing long term income coming in even up to years from now.

There are many popular autoresponders that can help you with building your list.

Aweber

Getresponse

MailChimp

iContact

It really doesn’t matter which one you choose to use. The point is knowing WHY you want to use one.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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There Is No Holy Grail For Your Online Business!

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1. There is NO Holy Grail

You need to repeat this 3000 times if not more so that it sticks in your head. The point is there are many ways to make money but not every method listed above works for everyone. To give you an example, Pat Flynn may have a way of making money from his iPhone apps on iTunes and earning from his niche sites but following in his footsteps will not necessarily make you as successful as him!

You may know everything you need to know about affiliate marketing or blogging but still you are not seeing any results. You study about SEO, traffic generation, commenting, link building, product creation but still it’s only making you a little bit or you are not having any success at all. And you wonder if you are just stupid or if you are missing out on something. Or you are just not cut out for it…

2. Find A Money Making Method that is Giving You Some Good Results

One of the most important things you need to do after trying all the money making methods is to find one or a few that you’ve done before and stick to it. It’s easy to lose focus when you are trying to concentrate on so many things and make everything work at the same time.

I still remember when I just started, Adwords, Adsense, affiliate marketing and blogging were some of the biggest things around and even today it is still very profitable except Adsense. Adwords sent me lots of impressions but none converted and it burns money like fire on paper. Adsense earned me pittance but it was still better than Adwords (But I won’t focus solely on Adsense if I were you). Affiliate Marketing had great potential but it required a lot of things to set it up. And then I found blogging. Blogging became my focus because it had the greatest potential to utilize all of those money making methods I’ve tried before. I saw great potential with blogging and that’s why this blog was born and it still exists today.

Just like how I found blogging as a way to make money, you must find yours.

3. Hard Work and Work Smart

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Tuesday, November 23

4 Ways to Earn Money at Home Through e-Freelancing Sites

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If you are like many women around the country right now, you’re struggling financially. Maybe your husband lost his job or had his hours cut, or maybe you’re just looking for ways to make some extra cash. Although the job market is in the pits right now, the workload for many companies has not diminished. Instead of hiring more full-time employees—which are expensive—many companies have turned to freelancers to help them out with the work they need to do. And in today’s technologically advanced world, you don’t even need to meet face-to-face with clients or go to any office to get your freelance gigs. You can find tons of opportunities over the internet through e-freelancing websites.

1) oDesk: oDesk is one of the most successful e-freelancing sites on the internet right now. They posts thousands of job each month and set parameters in place that ensure you will get paid for the work you do. One of the biggest headaches of freelancing is collecting payment from your clients. However, since all of your oDesk payment transactions go through oDesk, they can assure you a weekly check for the work you’ve done and the money you are owed. Most of the work on this site tends to be web centered (IT, web design, SEO article writing), so if you have solid training, look no further.

2) Elance: This is another great site for freelancing, and generally has a bigger variety of jobs than oDesk, ranging from web design and coding, to translation, customer service, marketing, and more. Although, it doesn’t have a guaranteed payment program like oDesk, it is also very reliable and has few problems with payments. It also offers premium placement for job bids for a fee if you want a better chance at landing the job that looks like a great opportunity.

3) Sologig: This site is very similar to Elance and has a great selection of freelance jobs across a wide spectrum of fields and careers. Audio transcription, medical transcription, article wiring, and more are available. Sologig also has premium services you can pay extra for, but you don’t have to.

4) Guru: Another great e-freelance site with a variety of jobs, Guru—like oDesk—offers guaranteed payment for those who are wary of potential employers who they have never met.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Friday, November 19

Are You Sniffing the right Social Media Crowd Through Your Business

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Social media is available in a variety of different platforms making it a very useful tool for internet marketing. Although Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are some of the more popular social media networks, there are also free video sharing services such as YouTube that can be easily used by companies as a marketing method. In fact, there are companies that have created commercials and other videos specifically to be viewed on YouTube and other free video sharing services. This occurs because many companies realize how popular such sites are, and they value the exposure that is possible by using these sites.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Thursday, November 11

Are You Disillusioned About Making Money Online?

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This blog is mainly about starting your own home business or working from home. I realized that I haven’t actually gone into this topic quite thoroughly yet. Most of my previous posts revolve around internet marketing tips, blogging tips, social media and many other related topics. Today, I want to go back to the root and origin of this blog and put a little more emphasis into working from home. Now, there are a number of things you need to be clear before thinking about quitting your regular income 9 to 5 job.Let’s talk about the 2 BIG truths when you are thinking of starting your online business.

Truth #1

Truth #2

Clearing Yourself of the Illusion

Once you’ve gone through these truths, you must clear yourself of all the illusion of making money online without any effort. By answering these 2 BIG but very basic truths you would save at least 1 year of your life making mistakes like buying programs, products, failed websites, failed businesses etc.

This will save you of the frustration that making money online is just an illusion that will never work. I might even safe you from going back to that darn dreaded job that you are working right now.

So is it still a possibility?

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Tuesday, November 9

Have You Seen All the SEO Proclaimed Experts?

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1. 7 SEO Idiots (I Mean ‘Experts’) to Avoid – Beware those SEO expert wannabes. You will know what I mean when you read this. LOL
Read more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Sunday, November 7

Mastering The Art Of Publishing Top Ranking Blog Posts

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Reviewing the traffic statistics of blog posts it becomes evident how undereducated many bloggers can be when it comes to keyword strategy that places articles at the top of search engines. The greatest difficulty most bloggers seem to have is understanding that blogging is not like traditional copywriting. Marketing blogs online involves optimizing your content words in order to leverage on search engines and thereby have more viewers. To do this, you have to understand how to choose and use keywords.

How to determine which keywords are the right ones for your article?

To begin, you’ll want to use a keyword research tool. Options are available, some of which are free while others require a small fee. You can use Google Suggest that generates the top ten keywords based on a word you choose or you can use the Google Keyword Tool which provides a list of exact or phrase keywords together with their monthly local and global number of searches. These numbers give you a good idea of who is searching for what and what the trends are on a world wide scale. Also, Overture offers a keyword research tool that links to Yahoo’s search engine. It is a good idea to pick words that have a substantial monthly search volume and a relatively low competition. Using these words at the start of your headline will massively increase your chances of ranking at the top of Google search results for the particular keywords.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Thursday, November 4

No BS Basic SEO Do's and Don'ts

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Basic seo for blogs can be divided in to two parts for ease of understanding. In simple words, they are Dos and Don’ts. Seo is not only concerned with what you have to do to increase your ranks but it also focuses on what should not be done in order to rank high for keyword searches. Here are the details you need to know.

The DO’s

If you own a blog, it is easy to monetize your blog and earn a good income from it by learning basic seo. The first thing to know when it comes to optimizing your blog fro search engines is your target audience. Once you are clear with it you can then do a keyword research on what your audiences are looking for. Pick the keywords carefully and use them while you write blog posts because this is what will help your audience to find the blog among hundreds and thousands of web pages.

The Don’ts

Things that you must avoid in SEO include over usage of keywords and phrases, and links from bad neighborhood. Often amateur bloggers make the mistake of using keywords more than the prescribed density and this flaw is known as keyword stuffing. This viewed seriously by the search engines because it misleads them in their judgment of website worthiness. This could end up in penalizing of your blog by search engines.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Tuesday, November 2

Interview With Diane Corriete: Inspirational Speaker & Blogger

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This is an interview conducted with Diane Corriette, owner of Mindset of A blogger and also Membership manager at Blogsuccess. (Long Post but very worth reading it all)

1. Hi Diane. We are so pleased to have you here. Can you tell us more about yourself and what do you do?

I am a mother of three and I live in England. I am a trained NLP Master Practitioner/life coach who turned to the internet back in 2005 and has been hooked ever since. Now I call myself an online marketer. I help local business owners and professionals use the internet to build a presence that will get them noticed. I also work freelance for other marketers, which of course is how we met – through Blog Success.

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Monday, November 1

10 Blogging and Social Media Infographics For Businesses

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We’ve read a lot about how important blogging and social media networks are for businesses. Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine what the impact is like unless we have a visual idea of how important these 2 areas are for businesses. Gone are the days when traditional media is the only way to spread the latest and current trends. Here are some notable quotes:

“Social marketing eliminates the middlemen, providing brands the unique opportunity to have a direct relationship with their customers. Bryan Weiner, CEO at Digital Agency 360i”

“Ultimately, brands need to have a role in society. The best way to have a role in society is to understand how people are talking about things in real time. Jean-Philippe Maheu, Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy”

I’ve written about best social media practices and how important blogging is for businesses but maybe you might not get the whole idea, so I’m going to show you what the stats are.

1. Business to Business Twitter Accounts Benefit More From Blogging than Business to Customers

3. Blog Posting Frequency vs Customer Acquisition

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Sunday, October 31

Hostgator Web Hosting Plans Overview & Analysis

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Have you heard of the saying, “Servers are created equal but hosting companies are not?”

This is especially true for the people managing and working for Hostgator. I personally think Hostgator has the best service out there, but before I get into the details of the good and bad about Hostgator, let’s see what Hostgator has to say about its service.

“HostGator has been a world-leading provider of web hosting service. Although our office is in Houston, Texas, we provide top-notch service to clients from over 200 countries internationally with our staff of over 400 employees. We offer Shared, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated server packages for both beginners and professionals alike. Each of our shared Web Hosting plans includes 24/7/365 support, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 45-day money-back guarantee. If you would like to learn more, please visit our company page.”

To break it down for you, Hostgator comes with 4 plans and they are:

Web Hosting Plans

Reseller Hosting Plans

VPS Hosting Plans

Dedicated Server Plans
Read more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Tuesday, October 26

Google In-Page Analytics: A Brief Overview

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Some of you might have already heard of the new feature called In-Page Analytics from Google Analytics. If you are totally lost about what I’m talking about, login to your Google Analytics account and go the content section and have a look at the sub-menu In-Page Analytics (beta).

It might be sound a little techie here but this feature is really cool. It takes a snapshot of your page and tells you visually how readers interact with content on your page, ranging from the number of clicks to the number of views below a certain level of your page. What you see here is actually an extension of what you view in numbers on your Google Analytics dashboard.

Let’s look at 2 features that can be analyzed using this feature.

1. Number of Clicks

2. Number of Views

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Monday, October 25

Consider these 3 Google Analytics Features

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Google Analytics is a must have for everyone who has a website or blog. If you are someone who hates looking at stats and your head spins when seeing it, Google Analytics is a necessary evil! You really need to have it tracking traffic, visitors and other vital stats for your site. It is free and it has some of the best features that will cost you a fortune to get something similar to it in the market.

Let’s have a look at 3 Google Analytics features to further emphasize my point.

Bounce Rates

Average Time On Site

Visitor Loyalty

See more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Thursday, October 21

what is your email writing style?

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Email says a lot about you as a person and as a professional. Because email is written communication, it can reveal your level of intelligence by your ability to articulate your thoughts, your education by your ability to construct a grammatically correct sentence, and your diligence by how many typos you allowed. Similarly, your email reflects upon your company. You want to have the type of communication habits that convey competence and respect so that people can have confidence that your company can provide the services that they need.
Read more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Sunday, October 17

How to become an authority in your field?

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As promised every week, I will present to you a handful of articles worth your time reading. Today we look at website speed, building authority, writing tips, and creative ads. I’ve also added a very inspiring read of a successful internet entrepreneur.

1. How To Become An Authority In Your Field – There are a lot of articles around the internet teaching you how to be an authority in the field. I think this is one of the best that I’ve read around.
Read more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Thursday, October 14

Inspirational Quotes that will make or break your business

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We humans like to live by example and we tend to gravitate towards people who have set an example. This happens in almost any situations in life. Whether you are trying to emulate that straight A student or that amazing marathon athlete or even just someone already making it in their home businesses.

Sometimes we need a bit of guidance to steer us towards the right direction. Unfortunately, when we are born there are no sign posts that tell us what to do. So we tend to learn through our experience and mistakes. Today I like to talk about a few quotes and how we can learn from them for our business.
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Tuesday, October 12

Lessons To Learn From Print Mags For Blogs

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Printed magazines bring flair to the printed page by liberally changing their designs. The successful magazine will alter the design according to the content of their article. It will present text in the short bulleted form, have sidebars, and be appealing because it caters to the wandering eye. Blogs generally have the same format for each article, regardless of content. Here are some lessons you can learn from the print magazine.
Read more at www.earnmoney-fromhome.com

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Saturday, October 9

Social Media Bes Practices For You To Consider

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Marketing you business with social media is a very useful way to get exposure and target the right groups of people providing that you do it the right way.

Whether or not you are marketing for lavender products or launching a social media campaign for an online bridal company or a home business website, there are best practices to follow in order to succeed.

So what are they?
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Friday, October 8

BURGEN... What is Burgen??

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You might ask… WHAT IS BURGEN???

Burgen, is one of Australia’s most popular bread. Have you tried them yet??? Ok, granted if you’re an Ozzie, and you’ve not tried it then you must be really in the bush for too long

( If you’re asking… NO I DON’T WORK FOR BURGEN! )

See more at www.thehealthpilgrim.com

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Thursday, October 7

Are You Developing A Content Plan For Online Success?

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Developing a Content Plan That Ensures Online Success

Succeeding with your own home business website requires you to carefully develop a content plan that consistently attracts users. Developing a content plan that ensures online success will require practice. By approaching tasks with a strong content plan, you can turn your home business website into a content rich center that seamlessly incorporates focused writing with optimized keywords and titles.