This is a post about an article directory script called Article Friendly. You could just click on the link & see what I’m writing about. Or if you want to see how we got to write this post, then read on:

Here is the whole story:

About a year ago I went looking for my next online project. I was looking for a web based income stream with the following characteristics:

• Had the potential to generate a significant income
• It had the ability to build a very big site.
• It would allow me to generate lots of good quality back-links
• Would build back-links to itself
• Was content based (Google clearly favours content)
• Other people would be able to contribute to the website
• It would give me some insight into what others were promoting across a broad range of markets
• Would be suitable for AdSense
• Was a good fit to a number of other sites I ran

After a while I narrowed the choice down to three options; a forum, a web directory and an article directory.

The article directory won out and was built first. Later on we added a web directory. There are plans for the first forum soon.

The article directory has lived up to expectations. It started off bolted on to the side of one of my other sites then it was split off to run as a separate entity. It’s only been on its own for a few months, so had to start again in terms of the search engines.

The directory has not been promoted much, so under its own steam has reached PR3. As the back-links grow organically, the PR will rise.

Getting article submissions has proven to be easy, in fact at one stage the volume of submissions grew to be larger than I could handle.

Income occurs naturally using a mixture of AdSense and affiliate programs. With so much content (just over 20,000 articles as I write) the incoming traffic is all organic search engine generated and free.

The script I chose was the Article Dashboard script and this was selected because:

• It was free – back then keeping costs down was a real priority.
• The user forum is active, knowledgeable and very helpful
• A number of submission services were setup to automatically submit articles to the directory. Makes it real easy to get a directory up and running.
• There were a good number of sites already using the script. This ensures that the script was a worker and that if I chose to sell the directory, the potential buyer would more than likely be already comfortable with the script.

The Articledashboard script does have a lot of very good features but there are some drawbacks with the script.

• The code is encrypted so changing anything but the templates is not possible.
• The article submission process is cumbersome and time consuming if you have a lot of articles to approve
• The script has quite a few HTML errors which can’t be corrected
• Documentation is not that flash.
• The sign-up process doesn’t always work for new authors which means you lose a few potential customers.
• Development has all but stopped so add-ons are built by others who have installed the site and have the skills to do so. But because the main code is encrypted the add-on ability is limited.

The other day I was looking for a language translation package for my article directory. I found a script called Article Friendly which is built and supported by a few people whom I paid to help me with hosting problems on the current article directory script.

Here’s what it does:

Article Friendly is a feature packed and an easy to use php/mysql script.

• Fast, Friendly front end. Authors can sign-up quickly and edit/delete their article, change their password or edit their author profile. This frees you for more important things.
• Star Rating System on all articles. Let your visitors know which articles are hot! Each article starts up rated as five empty stars and adds stars as the article is reviewed, read or downloaded. When they gain a new star is controlled by you.
• Included Language Translation System. Offer more readers the opportunity to read your site’s articles in their language. Gets your pages indexed by the major search engines in not only English, but in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese and Japanese!
• RSS Feeds for every individual category and subcategory. Instead of your users having only one rss feed, they can have multiple feeds in any category. This is really handy for niche sites that only want specific content.
• Fast, dependable email confirmation system. New Authors must join, then click a confirmation link in your site’s email before being allowed to post their articles!
• **INCLUDED FREE** 2 integrated custom scripts for accepting free Article Marketer articles. With Article Marketer, you can get thousands of good quality articles in a week or so, and you’ll get more everyday. With AF’s included article marketer scripts, you won’t have to spend all your time approving those articles as they are all auto magically approved.
• Multipart emails. Send banners/Ads with your confirmation emails, and admin side author emails! Send to all authors, or just one, as plain text or html.
• Template based for easy customizations, but you aren’t limited to just a few template files. You can customize any page in Article Friendly.
• Self Contained Links Directory. Allows your users to post an link to their site and offers a reciprocal link to your site. Links can be approved, edited or deleted in your admin sections.
• Anti-email harvesting “Contact Us” Form. Stops those email harvesting bots dead in their track and reduces spam from your site, and scripts trying to use your site to mass email through your contact us form!
• Most pages pre-filled in, so all you have to do is edit them the way you wish, or just change the spots for your site name and leave the pages as they are.
• Login system to keep your admin files safe.
• Approve All Articles By Keyword. You decide what keywords to approve article to which categories, then mass approve to your chosen categories.
• You can have multiple admins/editors for article editing/approving. Multiple editors can make your article directory a breeze to run, and all your editors can work at the same time without damaging your database.
• On-board Duplicate Content Finder. Search your database for dupe content for questionable articles that may have been “borrowed” or several top search engines all at once, and all from within your admin section.
• Script auto emails you when a new author signs up! Keeps you informed of new sign-ups and if the sign-up was a spammer or a legitimate author. Please it allows you to keep an additional record of your live authors.
• Duplicate Article Deleter. Removes the dupes, but keeps the original. This will keep Google from penalizing your site for dupe content.
• Short Article Deleter. Set the minimum number of words, and then clear out the short ones!
  Add/remove/edit categories including subcategories!
• Admin can enter articles, and create new user accounts thru the admin backend.
• Add/edit/delete users, articles, countries and more thru the admin section.
• SEO Friendly
• Site Shows Most Recent Articles for rich keyword pages. Helps get the high Page Ranks from Google, and top ranking in all the search engines.
• Full Source Code. Access all the pages any change every html, php or javacript to work any way you wish!
• Edit and customize your site the way you want it. You Aren’t stuck with the same site as everyone else!

What I really like is that its unencrypted PHP so I can make changes as I need. Its also better laid out for search engines than the original script. Lots more flexibility to squeeze every last cent out of the adsense and affiliate links I run.

Pretty neat, and best of all the Article Friendly script is cheaper than the translation package I was going to buy. So this one is a no brainer for me, I’m going to just upgrade to this script.

In my case I started off with a free script then will end up buying something with better functionality. I will have to set it up all over again. If an Article directory is for you – save yourself a lot of work and get this one, let the team set it up for you. It will end up being a lot cheaper and save you a lot of time in the long run.

If you are giving any thought to getting your own Article directory then I recommend checking this out. You will not be disappointed. Heres that link again Article Friendly

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

I know it held me back for nearly two years before I finally saw it. You don’t need to take that long :-) Learn from my mistake today and succeed.

I wanted to title this article The Ultimate Secret To Your Online Success. But I suspected that not many people would actually believe the claim. As I wanted as many people learn from it as possible, I settled for a less catchy but more believable title.

I consider what I ‘discovered’ the ultimate secret not because you can’t find it anywhere. You can. In fact many successful people talk about it quite openly.

I do consider it a secret because it took me almost two years online to discover. It stared me right in the eyes the whole time, yet I couldn’t see it. As far as I was concerned it was hidden from me.

Then after two years of struggling to make any decent income online, it was time for some deep soul searching.

I had my back against the wall: It was either turn it around and start making money online, or go back to my old career. For a while I also considered selling one of our homes, but my wife and I decided that this was a dumb idea. Selling a house was not going to solve my problem. It would only prolong my online agony.

What I really needed was to discover what I was doing wrong for the past two years, and change it. Otherwise, I was quite prepared to go back to my successful computer programming career. (But I just didn’t like the idea of working for someone else again.)

It didn’t take me long to discover what I was doing wrong. And this brings me to the ultimate secret:

LASER FOCUS

If you have been trying to make money online and haven’t been very successful, you can probably relate to some of the following.

While still at my old job, I discovered the world of the online marketing. Got quite excited about the possibilities.

I did some research and have invested in what I considered to be the best ebook on the subject.

Few months later when the opportunity came up (or so I thought at the time), I decided to become a full time online marketer. I also decided to specialize in affiliate marketing.

I really applied myself the first couple of months or so.

Then I discovered another great book on affiliate marketing. Bought it.

Then I discovered this great tool that would help you not only create great looking affiliate websites, but would also tell you what you needed to change on each page in order to make it optimized for search engines.

I really liked the idea, so I bought the tool.

Slowly but surely, I was becoming more and more confused. Which guru do I follow? All three approaches worked. But I had to know which one worked better (I’m very analytical by nature ;-) … Instead of following one, I began to follow them all.

I lost my focus. As I lost focus, my search engine traffic stopped growing. As my traffic stopped growing, my income stopped growing as well. I started becoming more and more frustrated and searched for other, “better” ways of making money online.

Then I discovered that another affiliate marketer got quite successful buying ads on Google. I had to find out how. Bought that ebook too :-)

It only started getting worse from here on.

Over the period of little more than a year, I managed to spend thousands of dollars on various Internet marketing ebooks and courses. Most of them were really good. I always do a pretty thorough research and rarely am unlucky enough to buy rubbish (although it does happen occasionally).

The problem was not with the materials I bought, the problem was that I didn’t apply any of them long enough to see the full results.

I wasn’t following any one expert for long enough to give myself a fighting chance. I was too distracted. In short, I lacked FOCUS.

Affiliate marketing is one of the greatest opportunities on the face of the Earth. And so too are dozens of other methods of making money online. Search engines do reward with free traffic those that apply themselves diligently. Yes, you can make money with Google AdWords, if you stick with it and study it hard enough.

Why am I telling you all of this?

It certainly doesn’t give me any satisfaction to talk about my failures. The only reason I wanted to bring this up is to make you aware of what you are probably doing wrong yourself.

Please learn from my mistakes. Life is simply too short to make all of the mistakes yourself.

I want to save you months or years of frustration. Once you waste that time, it’s gone forever. Not to mention the financial and emotional cost.

You need FOCUS. Not just any type of focus. You need LASER FOCUS. If you look at a 40 Watt light bulb, all you see is a nice, soft light, probably not strong enough to light up an average size room properly. But you take the same 40 Watts and put it out of a laser gun, and what you will discover is that this FOCUSED beam of light can cut through various objects like a knife can cut through paper. Wow. Same amount of energy, different focus. LASER FOCUS.

Focus means, doing only one project at a time.

Focus means, bringing your current project to fruition, before you embark on another one.

Focus means you stop buying every new ebook or PHP script that comes out – which you often do out of fear of missing out.

Focus means unsubscribing from all ezines, except one or two that you consider the absolutely best ones for your particular situation.

Focus means not wasting your time surfing the net. At least not until all of your tasks for the day are completed (and even then you need to put a strict time limit on it).

The day you regain your focus, your life will change around. Mine has.

May the focus be with you.

Andrew Obremski is the editor of Focus And Grow Rich, a free email newsletter that helps the work-from-home community discover what works online and what doesn’t, and helping them to become more profitable sooner.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Submitted to our article directory today was a first rate article on Google Adsense. I hope you enjoy it.

Almost everyone has probably heard of AdSense by now, if not then I am pretty sure you have seen AdSense and may have not even known what it was. To explain AdSense, I must first tell you a little about ‘ AdWords ‘, Adwords is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising system that is available through Google the search engine. You create a small text ad, which is placed on Google’s search result pages, the ads match your websites subject or content. You bid or set a fee that you are willing to pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad, this is a great way to get highly targeted traffic that can turn into sales, subscribers, or whatever you are trying to achieve with your website traffic.

Now that I have explained Adwords, I can now tell you about AdSense. AdSense makes it possible for website owners to earn money by simply letting Google place ads on their web pages. AdSense ads can be either text or images, the ads can be altered to blend into the webpages, so they don’t make your site look junky or poorly designed. AdSense ads are highly relevant to the content of most webpages, for instance if you place AdSense ads on a webpage that sells Coins, you will get ads about selling coins or other coin related subjects. Every time a website visitor clicks on one of the AdSense ads on your webpage, you earn money, and every month after your first balance reaches one hundred dollars, Google will send you a check or you can have the money deposited into your checking account. The AdSense program is a great way to earn extra money if you have a website, it’s easy to make a few dollars every day, and some folks are making thousands of dollars per month doing it.

When I first started Adsense, I placed the ads on my webpages and it wasn’t very long until I had made a small amount of money, a few days later my account balance had grown even more. I was pretty happy, but I thought to myself, after reading a lot of articles, I am not making nearly as much money as others are making with AdSense, something must be wrong. Then I thought, maybe my website doesn’t get the traffic that the others are getting ? I chatted with a lot of people on the internet that were in the program, and I discovered that the amount of visitors I get, was higher than some of the traffic they receive. You may think that 200 – 400 unique visitors a day is low for website traffic, you are very wrong, the average website gets a lot less per day, especially if your website is only a few months old or is not optimized for the search engines, or it’s subject matter has a very low search demand.

If my website was getting a nice amount of traffic or visitors, why was my AdSense earnings so low ? The first thing that I discovered that was wrong was ‘ adsense ad placement ‘, that’s right, you have to study each webpage’s layout that you plan on placing the ads on. Wherever your webpage has sections or areas that grab and hold the visitors attention, this is a prime area to place a section of AdSense ads, in other words, place the ads on your webpages where folks will notice them. We are currently allowed to place up to 3 different AdSense ad sections or groups on each webpage. I found after some testing that the best places for my ads are, just under the title or sub-title, near the middle of the page, and near the end or bottom of my page. If you place one section of AdSense ads near the top of your webpage, folks entering your site will probably notice the ads, and if they scroll down a ways and theres more ads, that increases the odds that they will notice them also. Probably the best place to place one section of ads is at the bottom of your webpages, right after your last bit of text or interesting reading, but make sure you place the ads before any other links, because when visitors are ready to leave your site, they may leave by clicking on one of your ads, earning you money, and if you have other links showing before your ads, they may leave your site by clicking on one of them. So after I studied the layout of all my webpages, I went back through and repositioned the AdSense ads, almost immediately I noticed my earnings increased.

I left my webpages alone, and about three months later I received my first check in the mail, it wasn’t a lot of money but still for really doing no physical work I was very glad to get it. My earnings slowly started getting better and better after that first check, the next month I received another check, then the following month I got another and so on. After having been in the AdSense program for about 8 months, and chatting with more folks who were also in the program I found that my earnings were still low compared to some other people.

I then discovered another method that increased my earnings even more. I noticed that my ads stood out from the rest of my webpages text and content. I had always thought, I should make my ads a different color than my webpages background so folks would notice my ads, and click on them, I was totally wrong. Almost everyone that has been on the internet for any length of time, has become so accustomed to seeing banners and other flashy ads that almost everyone now has what is called ‘ad blindness’, that is, when they visit a site they are automatically turned off or they ignore anything that looks like an ad. I used the Adsense editor and I changed my ads background and border colors so they matched the background color of my webpages, and I changed the text color of the ads so they matched the text color of my webpages content. The ads blended in very well, to me they were barely noticeable from the rest of my webpage, but right away the number of clicks on the ads increased, and the earnings went up even more.

I left my webpages alone and for another couple months my earnings stayed about the same, I was content with the results, but my earnings were still not as good as some of the other folks who received roughly the same amount of traffic that I did. Then I found out that they had done something else to their AdSense ads, something that made the ads seem to really get peoples attention, they were placing images near the ads, it seemed adding images made the ads look unique and it helped make the amount of clicks on them rise. So I searched the internet and I found some little icons and images that matched the content of my webpages, and near where the Adsense ads were shown, I displayed the images by adding a simple html image tag. I asked google if adding the images was within the AdSense rules, and I was advised that they were fine as long as they didn’t make folks click on the ads, by this I mean, you cannot have a flashing sign that says, ‘ click these ads ‘, or you shouldn’t have a scantily dressed girl pointing to the ads saying ‘ make me happy – click here ‘ or stuff like that, just make some nice little images that pertain to your webpages content.

The next couple months or so, my earnings still continued rising slowly. By this time, besides my regular webpages I had been working on several BLOG’s pertaining to different subjects, so I thought I might as well place AdSense ads on all of my blogs also and make even more money. For a couple weeks my earnings went up quite a bit, and I was very happy, then all of a sudden, just like someone turning off a switch, my AdSense earnings plummeted. I was now making in a day, what I had made when I first joined the program, what the heck happened I thought to myself ? My traffic was still slowly rising, the number of clicks was rising, but for some strange reason, the earnings per click, (EPC) had dropped a lot, it was horrible.

Then I learned that Google had introduced a new feature or system into the AdSense program, called ’smart pricing’, ’smart pricing’ automatically adjusts the cost of an ad click. Using Googles system of analyzing AdSense data, if it shows that a click from one of your webpages is less likely to turn into an online sale, or other business result for the Ad publisher, the amount you earn per click in AdSense is greatly reduced. When ’smart pricing’, was introduced, some AdSense users saw their EPC drop to as low as 3 cents a click, where before ’smart pricing’, that same click might of earned them a dollar or much more, this was quite a drastic drop in earnings. What is horrible about ’smart pricing’, besides the earnings loss to AdSense users, is that one site or webpage can trigger it, and once triggered by that one webpage, it effects your entire account and every webpage you have will now earn substantially less per click. Remember awhile back when I had added AdSense Ads to my BLOG’s, that seemed to be what had triggered smart pricing for me. The BLOG’s were on numerous subjects, but they were not business or real professional sites, so hardly any business results such as sales, occurred from folks clicking the ads on these sites. After I removed the Adsense ads from the BLOG’s, it took about a week, then I noticed that the EPC was once again climbing back up, yes the ’smart pricing’, spell had been broken.

If you are thinking about trying AdSense, or if you are already in it, beware of the smart pricing curse, or if it has already effected your earnings, try removing AdSense ads from your webpages a few pages at a time, the smart-pricing system is evaluated each week, so it will take a few days to see if you have removed ads from the page(s) that triggered it.

Robert W. Benjamin has been in the software business on the internet for over 5 years, and has been producing low-cost software for the past 25+ years. He first released software on the AMIGA and C64 computer systems in the late 1970’s-80’s.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

As you surf the net, you will come across a wide variety of business opportunities. Invariably, each one will claim to have the best compensation plan available and many will claim to offer “residual income”. However, a cursory examination of many of these pay plans will reveal that, although there may be a very real earning opportunity, it cannot truly be described as residual income.

What exactly is residual income anyway? Simply put, residual income can be defined as any payment system where you receive regular, ongoing payments as a result of a single sale. The frequency of the payments may vary – they could be weekly, monthly, quarterly etc. – but they are regular and ongoing with no further selling activity once the initial sale has been made.

Some potential residual income opportunities are listed below:

* Telephone calls and line rental
* Mobile phone supply, line rental and calls.
* Electricity supply .
* Gas supply.
* Web hosting supply.
* Autoresponder supply (monthly rental).
* Any software which is supplied based on a rental basis.
* Property rental.

These are just a few examples, there are plenty more. Any product or service which is provided on a lease or rental agreement has the potential to provide you with residual income. Ideally, your customer will automatically renew each week/month without any requirement for action (effort) by either your or your customer.

There may also be some scope for residual income with disposable or consumable products. In this case, the mechanics of the reorder process have a critical bearing upon your earning capabilities. For true residual income, the reorder process should be automatic as described above. This is not simply a matter of semantics or a pedantic definition. There are several reasons why you should target genuine residual income.

Many people who set up their own small home business do so with the express intent of eventually replacing their salary. Due to the regular nature of the payments, residual income is ideal for this. In fact, it’s considerably better than having a salary as you continue to get paid for work that was done in the past.

With genuine residual income, the automated reorder process means that you don’t have to spend time servicing and supporting your existing customers. You can focus your energies on finding new customers and/or recruiting new distributors/affiliates, thereby continually growing your business at the fastest possible rate.

If your customer needs to take some action to reorder then, even with a consumable product that needs to be replenished periodically, there is a “break point” in the process. The customer may decide to economise and do without the product that month, they may decide to use one of your (many) competitors or they might just simply forget to order.

With an automated reorder system on the other hand, your customer needs to make a positive effort not to reorder. It’s a well known fact that customers who pay for products and services by subscription are much more loyal and less likely to cancel. Even if they do decide to opt out they tend to delay this for longer than they would otherwise.

Think about it for a moment. Have you ever kept a subscription running for longer than you intended, or do you know someone else who has? Perhaps you might even have some small but regular subscription running right now that you’ve completely forgotten about.

That, of course, is the reason why many companies will give you a reduction in the standard rate if you set up a subscription agreement. Reader’s digest know the value of this. So do telephone companies, electricity companies, internet service providers and software providers around the world. Now you know about it too – take advantage if you possibly can.

Finally – and let’s not kid ourselves here – many people don’t like selling. There are ways round this and it’s possible to minimise the discomfort some people feel – but it’s still there at some level for many of us.

Picture the scene. You’ve just made a sale, you feel great and you’re already thinking about how you’re going to spend you hard earned money. Then it hits you – you’ve got to do it all again this afternoon, tomorrow, next week. Takes the gloss off a bit – right?

Now think about a slightly different scenario. You’ve just made a sale. Your new customer has signed a repeat subscription agreement and you are going to benefit for months, if not years to come. Is that a better home movie? I think it is.

There are other benefits of residual income but, for the sake of brevity, I hope that those already discussed above provide sufficient compulsion for you to actively seek out at least one residual income stream.

To summarise, genuine residual income will help you maximise the returns on your efforts and build a solid, reliable and predictable income from your home business. You need it.

Hamish Hayward
http://www.perfectsystem.co.uk/

About the Author: Hamish Hayward — Discover the 6 key assessment criteria you MUST apply before you commit to any business opportunity. — http://www.perfectsystem.co.uk/
Source: www.isnare.com

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.