By having your work scheduled, you can look at your mistakes and polish your posts before they are published. Being able to schedule your work days in advance allow you to create more thoughtful posts instead of last minute posts which results in a rushed post. I have my posts scheduled so that I can polish them up before they are published.
Why Be An Amazon Associate?
Having a blog is always great, but when you’re not making revenue, the work required to keep that blog updated can bring out a lot of frustration. This is when most people turn to advertisements on their blog. I do have Google Ads on my Squidoo lenses, and I even thought of putting various ads up on my blogs. When I became an Amazon Associate though, any thought I ever had involving putting someone else’s ads on my blog simply disappeared.
Applying to be an Amazon Associate is easy, and you can get started here. I was able to put Amazon Products on my blog right when I applied. I was approved, and now many of my blogs have Amazon Links. You can see two examples here (Yugioh Philosophy) and here (The Lego Station).
As an Amazon Associate, you can talk about your hobbies, sell products, and not have to think about advertisements. Advertisements can be irrevelent, and they ultimately take people away from your website.
A Victim Of Plagiarisim
There is few things worse than finding your work on someone else’s website. I can say from first-hand experience that plagiarism is no good and results in a lot of angry people (who could blame them). I am a proud lensmaster on Squidoo where great content is published. Sadly, there are people who think plagiarism will lead to quick success. There was recently a website that copied EVERY lens published on Squidoo. My lenses about making money with legos, lego animations (which won the Lens of the Day award), and Lego Station lens were only 3 of the many lenses that had their content duplicated and displayed on another website. There was a lot of buzz in the SquidooHQ Forum about this issue. Squidoo was able to prevail once again and now all of the copied content has been taken down.
There is no victor when content is plagiarized. The real content will lose traffic because the plagiarized content steals some of the views. The person who is plagiarized loses traffic which results in lost sales and revenue. The person who does the plagiarizing will be caught and forced to close their website. Their character is completely tainted.
My content has made me thousands of dollars, and to see it somewhere else can result in a scare. If plagiarized content wasn’t taken down, I would have lost a lot of visitors. Being a victim of plagiarism can turn any good day into a bad day especially when thousands of words formed into hundreds of sentences are plagiarized.
To be a victim can change your whole perspective over the issue. Just 2 years ago, I didn’t have any content online. Now that I have tons of content online, I am grateful for my work, but disguisted when someone dares to take my work and call it their own.
Quality Content Does Go Viral, But What Is The Impact?
One of my Squidoo lenses was recently awarded as Lens of the Day which is the hardest award to get. How does being Lens of the Day make your content viral? The answer is that Squidoo then promotes your lens on their homepage, social media (Twitter and Facebook where they have a strong following), and the SquidooHQ Blog among other places. How does this help? The answer is that my lens about How to Do A Lego Animation went from 22 views in the last 3 days to over 700 views in a SINGLE DAY which is the best number of views I have ever had from a single lens or blog in a single day. For entrepreneurs who are wondering if their new websites, blogs, or Squidoo lenses can make an impact, this lens was only on Squidoo for 4 days when it was selected as the Lens of the Day.
Seeing Something The Wrong Way
The statistics of my websites are very important to me because I can see my strengths and weaknesses. I also get to see how many people visit my websites. The Jetpack feature for WordPress doesn’t show many visitors for this blog at around less than 10 per day. I couldn’t believe that, so I checked my statistics on Hostgator (they host this blog), and I found statistics that showed over 50 unique visitors per day. That’s a lot different from less than 10 (and sometimes 0) visitors per day for the WordPress statistics. Sometimes, we just see the wrong statistics or see something in the wrong way but don’t know it until we see it in the right way.
Don’t Forget Your New Year’s Resolutions!
Now that January is done and February has just begun, it is important to remember our New Year’s Resolutions. Most people stop working on their resolutions by Valentine’s Day, and that is something that shouldn’t happen (if the resolution is good and productive). Although I haven’t achieved my goal of making over 1k a month yet, I have achieved another goal. One of my resolutions was to do Lego animations with no software–just a camera. Doing the Lego animations took me a very long time even though the videos are short. I am putting all of my Lego animations on my Lego Station blog which can be found here. I also got the Squidoo Lens of the Day because of a Squidoo lens I did about Lego animations as well.
I’m working hard on my New Year’s Resolutions, and I hope you are too.