A few years ago, I started doing a little work with residential owners who wanted to get loans to rehab properties as primary residences. There is a specific loan program called the FHA 203k loan. When I called one of the normal lenders I do business with, he recommended another lender who SPECIALIZED in the 203k program. I now do business with this lender all the time because she specialized in this particular program and no one is better at it in our market.

Now, if we put all the real estate references aside, what does this mean to you?
Many of us, especially in the Internet Marketing arena, tend to bonce around from project to project but never really get anywhere on any of them. One week you may be working on setting up a new article directory and the next week you are working on a “how to make money online” site – and the article directory never even got fully set up!

When you start a project, you have to finish it, and you have to become an expert at something in order to really succeed. Look at all your major players in the game – they make money off the same things, or the same “type” of thing over and over because they have become an expert in that field, or have specialized in that field and created a niche which they sell to over and over again. That “niche” is generally YOU. They make all their money selling you the same thing over and over. Sure, it may be the Latest and Greatest, but 9 times out of 10 it is the same rehashed garbage they sold 5 years ago and packaged a different name on it.

Am I telling you to go out and recreate the same things and start trying to sell it? Absolutely not. What I am saying is that you need to carve out a niche for yourself, stick to it, and become the expert on it. People will always seek out the best, the most knowledgeable, and typically will pay more for their information.

Create your Niche and Stick with it!

We live in a negative environment and it seems that our friends and family tend to look on the downside of what could happen instead of looking at the positive of what will happen with work and dedication. The main reason people fail is not because they had a bad idea or couldn’t do it. They failed because they finally gave into the B.S. that their friends and family fed them. After hearing it day in and out, you lose spirit – you quit, you fail.

Napoleon Hill, in ‘Think and Grow Rich’ wrote that “Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach” and this hits the spot right on the head in most cases. Many times, when you listen to others, you can actually create failure by not trying anymore. If you had worked at it one more week, put in the extra couple of hours – you would have taken one more step towards success.  Often times we give up on ourselves just a little too early and it is those that persevere through that who will be the most successful.

The next time you have someone tell you that it “won’t work” or that you “can’t do it”, take it from someone who has been there and persevered through it. If you think you can – you can, if not, then….

It is your life. You make your decisions. Do not believe others when they tell you otherwise.

Things to Ponder:

You wouldn’t buy a house from a Realtor® who gave you their card at the drive-thru at McDonalds!
You would not take advice on stocks from your mechanic!
You wouldn’t take legal advice from your waitress at the Mexican restaurant down the road.
You shouldn’t take advice from broke people!

One last thought. I am making the kind of money online that you want to make. I believe in you and KNOW you can do it too if you PERSEVERE! The next time someone you know says it “can’t” be done or that you won’t be able to do it – ask them if you can see their latest check from their online activities.

Why should you listen to me?

Plain and simple – I know the game. I have played it. (Been there, done that, and the t-shirt was stolen).
I am not trying to sell you anything – take it for what it is – good advice!

Requesting Links (old-fashioned)

Requesting links from other websites and blogs that have similar material as yours is a bit slow, but a good way to start out. This will focus on building quality backlinks to your new website or blog and you can assure it is on sites that have relevant material as yours. By maintaining links from relevant sites, your pagerank will actually grow quicker, as well as your overall SEO score.

One thing that you have to be careful about when building your backlinks would include having too many counter-requests as this can take away from your valuable page space really quickly. Many people will want a link from you in order to give on to you. In this respect, it is very important that you weigh each request closely and give links to the highest quality (generally PR4 or higher links if possible).

Another thing to be careful about is those who want money, advertising revenue per se. It is very easy to create a huge bill doing this. Typically, you can find good deals on backlinks on ebay or other classified type sites but most of the time it is not a good idea to go through these since the sites are typically just glorified link farms which offer very little return ranking because of the huge amount of links on them. Not only this, but you also have to be careful that you don’t get stuck in a link farm and get banned from search engines. google is famous for banning any site linked to from a link farm once they identify one.

Commenting on Blogs with a Link back to you

Commenting on blogs in order to get a link back to you can generally be counter-productive. Typically, the post you are commenting on has very little pagerank, thus not really helping you, and the majority of the time, the links in the comment section are “nofollow” links which mean most search engines won’t follow them anyways.

On the occasion you find a high quality blog with links that are “follow” links, using a keyword as your name can often give you better link juice since the blogs generally link your actual name. Using a keyword will help boost your relevance for that keyword in the link. Be careful about this though because some blog owners view this as a spammy practice and unless your comment has some serious weight to it, may be deleted.

When commenting on blogs for link juice, always remember to ONLY comment if your comment adds value to the post or other comments – no comments like “nice blog” should ever be displayed – this is almost a sure spam comment and with as much spam as blog owners face – you do not want to be known as the guy that keeps coming back.

Article Submission

Many people have been using articles to create link juice to their site and this worked GREAT for a couple of years but as the duplicate content filters became commonplace with Google, it made most article submitting obsolete. The reason being is that you could write one article, submit it to a few higher profile directories, and then over time it would create numerous backlinks as people picked up the article for their blogs, other article directories, website articles, and much more.

The biggest problem with article submission always was that once it hit a few dozen pages, it would start losing juice because of the duplicate content issues. Of course, it would never fail that the lower PR sites would pick it up first, thus canceling out your articles on the higher PR sites. This also became counter productive. Then the trick was to use different articles for different sites, many times using automated software, or article “spinners” to help create more articles quicker. This was still a problem because the articles would still end up being duplicate content as they spread. While it definitely worked better than before, you were only delaying the inevitable.

Probably the best thing that has happened to article submission, is a web-based delivery system and spinner called Unique Article Wizard. With UAW, you create an article, set up a few settings, and it can automatically create thousands of articles and can create them on the fly which allows users to pick an article with links back to you and always have fairly unique content in each one.