So I have successfully fallen off the face of the blogging world again. I have been very busy with the start of the new semester.

Not much has been happening in the terms of starting new projects either. I’ve been able to increase the traffic flow to my design business by reworking the PPC campaign, so that has been a nice boost to my income.

I hope to start launching quite a few niche blogs soon so I will keep you all posted with that.

I launched yet another affiliate marketing site today based around the guitar niche. Instead of making a Squidoo lens and pushing traffic with articles, I opted to try something new. I installed Joomla onto the domain and stripped it down as far as I could to make it look like a real sales page. It actually looks really good! Followed up with some PPC ads on Google. I’ll see how it pans out and post some results. I plan on seeing what else I can do with this Joomla sales page business…

My tip today is on masking affiliate links. If you don’t know what masking affiliate links means, it involves hiding your affiliate link so that visitors aren’t wary of clicking on it. For example, which looks better?

a)strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/
b)www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php

The answer is “b”. This is because the link appears to be internal and have no marketing affiliation. It’s not very hard to believe that people wouldn’t click a link simply because it’s an affiliate link.

So how do you mask your affiliate links? My favorite way of masking links is to create a folder named “goto” somewhere on my server and putting PHP redirect files for every link I have. In other words, after you’ve created a folder named “goto”, assuming the example above, you would create a file called “product.php”. In this file place the following code:

<?
header(”location: strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”);
?>

Using the above example, everytime someone clicks my link “www.myproductsite.com/goto/product.php” they will be redirected to “strommy.product.hop.clickbank.net/”. Some say that PHP redirects are a bad idea if you plan on using Pay Per Click advertising but I’m not sure if it’s true or not. What is your favorite way of masking affiliate links?

Yesterday while searching the web I came across a site that talked about how much money can be made online, how easy it is, yada yada yada. Whatever it was talking about, it motivated me to kick it in high gear and start making money with affiliate programs. Since my experience thus far is minimal and I’ve yet to have a big breakthrough, I decided I should learn affiliate marketing from the ground up again.

After searching around the net for some free courses, I found The Affiliate God. This website is made by a guy a lot like myself except he’s way more successful than I could ever hope to be. Anyways, the course is broken up into 4 weeks of videos that you could easily get through in a day if you wanted. I decided to watch all the videos from week 1 yesterday. I’ve got to admit, and no that is not an affiliate link up there, that his videos were probably the best training videos I’ve watched. He is very easy to listen to and comprehend because he takes a very laid back pace through all the videos. I also found myself laughing more than one time when he would stumble on words or what not. Basically, he keeps you entertained through the whole thing as well as giving you a plethora of information.

Armed with this new information I set out on completing my week 1 niche site. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the mean time, check out Frank Silvestre’s blog on Finding a Money Making Niche.

So I started reading this book today called “Blog Schmog” by Robert W. Bly. The book was written in 2006 so I’m sure most of the statistics are already way off knowing how fast the internet changes. Anyways, I’m only about twenty pages in but the book is about what blogs can and can’t do for your online business. I’ll be sure to keep posting things I learn from the book.

The book so far is a pretty good read. I’ve certainly established that he really hates blogging thus far. However, he’s also brought up some interesting points and given me something to ponder about… What is my blog doing for others? Why should anyone read it? Well, I know it’s not much now but hopefully people who visit my blog will learn how to make theirs a little better.

Blogging in the world today is a lot of information copying and redistribution. The most successful bloggers have unique content and bring something new to the already overcrowded table. What is your blog bringing to the table?

Blog Schmog

I’ve found that one of the best ways to get motivated is writing down my goals. When you have something to shoot for, your more apt to do the work to get there. So, without further ado, I give to you, my goals for 2009…

1. Get Car Club Union over 1000 daily unique visitors.

2. Increase my revenue stream to an average of $3000.00 per month.

3. Turn a profit of over $500.00 on an affiliate campaign.

4. Finish and launch my first e-book.

5. Launch three more e-books.

6. Get 100 subscribers to my feed on this website.

As you can see, I’ve set some concrete goals here. There is no grey area…I will either succeed or fail on each of them. Wish me luck! What are your goals for this year?

P.S. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 today. Wow! Talk about improvement!

Happy New Year to you, my faithful readers! I apologize for not posting more tips for making money online. I’ve been very busy with finals and getting ready for next semester.

I have some big plans for all my sites in 2009, especially this one. I have my first e-book on the way. I can’t release the details yet as it isn’t a very saturated niche but I will release information as I feel necessary!

Best of wishes to you all in ‘09!

It’s been quite some time since I opened my design business and I tell you, it has been quite the learning experience. You can read and read about how to do things but there is no better teacher than experience. One of the biggest things I’ve learned to keep customers coming back is getting to know them, what they are doing online, and how they like the work done. That is one of the premier advantages of owning a small business opposed to a larger company. People know small businesses are more about quality than quantity.

Getting personal with your customers doesn’t mean you have to know their life story. You could start by ending your e-mails with “Have a great day!” or “I hope things are going well for you!”. While these seem like simple, everyday phrases, people love to hear them. The thing is, bigger businesses don’t say things like that. That is because the businesses are paying support representatives to be robots. They are told to answer the question and ask for more, that’s it. When you own a small business and are more often than not your own customer support, take the time to write a little more. You may find customers coming back more frequently.

Here are some more business tips: Top 5 Business Tips

I came across a pretty cool Firefox addon a couple weeks ago called Flagfox. The addon displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.

Why is this important to webmasters? Well, it’s not that big of a deal really. There is some debate amongst search engine experts as to whether server location effects search results. It is, however, a known fact that domain extensions affect search engine results, especially for Google. For example, the domain pastrommy.us will be higher in the search engine rankings for users submitting the query from inside the United States. The same goes for .ca, .uk, and so on.

Either way, it’s up to you whether you want to run the risk of lower SERP’s because of your web hosting location. I’ve found a very reliable host located in Canada that I’ve decided to stick with despite the possible altercations.

Today I discovered something mildly hilarious. My school runs some educational software called Desire2Learn on a web server in order to manage classes. It’s basically a way for students to connect with their teachers over the internet. The funny part is that the server is hosted in Canada. You would think a state school with government grants and the like would be putting the money back into the United States economy. What ever happened to logical thinking?

One important part of search engine optimization is making sure your URL’s aren’t competing with one another. The URL “pastrommy.com” is different than “www.pastrommy.com” according to search engines. Since search engines are the most important traffic source, you better submit to their standards.

It doesn’t matter so much whether you choose to attach the “www.” or not but it is very important that you pick one or the other. Not choosing whether to append the “www.” or not means that your web pages will be spidered with and without the prefix. What does this mean to you? It means you’ll be competing with yourself! It’s hard enough to rank on competitive keywords so why make it harder.

So how do you fix it? Wordpress couldn’t make it easier. In fact, if you wanted to, you could totally forget you ever read this post and you would be perfectly fine. Wordpress automatically changes your URLs according to your settings.

For example, if your settings look like this:

Then when someone types “computermemoryinfo.com” into their browser, they are automatically redirected to “www.computermemoryinfo.com”. It is very important that everyone sees the same URL.

What if I’m not running Wordpress? If you’re not running Wordpress, you’ll need to make a file named .htaccess in the root directory and insert the following code.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURDOMAINNAME\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Voila! You now have a single URL that all visitors see!

My name is Eric Stromsodt, but you can call me Strommy. I’m a 19 year old college student at South Dakota State University majoring in Electronic Engineering Technology. I’ve been working with computers since the age of 5 and first started my online business ventures around the age of 13. Since then, I have started my own web design company, launched multiple social networks, and had more trash websites than I know what to do with. If trash websites were food, I could probably solve world hunger. Unfortunately, they are not food. I’m beginning to dabble in affiliate marketing in the hopes of never having to work a nine to five job. We’ll see how that goes. If it works out, my readers will be the first to know.

Here I am, starting yet another blog. I’m not going to lie, I absolutely despise blogging and writing in general. However, I’m taking an alternative approach to this blog. Instead of just a sappy blog about life and its problems, I figure I’ll use this site to track my success as a businessman online. Whether it turns out to be decent content or not, at least I’ll have a record of my accomplishments and the methods I used to get to each level. Hopefully these posts will also give you, the reader, an idea of how to make cash online.

Anyways, welcome to Pastrommy [dot] Com. I hope I give you some insight to the world of online business and the life of a young entrepeneur.