This is a guest post by Tom Walker. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Many people dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The freedom to work for yourself, own your own business, the chance to strike it rich, and the ability to live your dream, might leave you chomping at the bit to quit your day job and pursue your passion. It often isn’t until you’re working 14-hour days, seven days a week just to turn a small profit that you realize how hard it really is, and what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

1. Passion

It’s hard to be a great entrepreneur if you’re not really into what you do. Having a passion for your work, whether it be baking, writing, or selling antiques, can have a huge impact upon how successful you are as an entrepreneur. It’s much easier to push yourself to work those 14-hour days, when you’re doing something you love.

2. Organization

Being organized is necessary for most successful entrepreneurs. Keeping up with bills, tracking and filling orders, recordkeeping, and fulfilling a laundry list of other business related activities can make it hard to keep your wits about you as a business owner, but it can make or break your business’s success.

3. A Willingness to Take Risks

There is a difference between taking risks and taking calculated risks. While it may not pay to take too many chances, almost all entrepreneurs have to take some to succeed. In most instances, the act of becoming an entrepreneur alone is a risk. The hard part is being able to properly weigh the risks versus the rewards of the chances you do take.

4. Foresight

Some people can’t see the forest for the trees when it comes to successfully running their own business. These same people often become so bogged down in the daily operations that they forget to look ahead to the future. Having foresight can help your business stay up with the current trends, have access to the latest technology, and better deal with long-term planning and forecasts that can help your operations grow and evolve.

5. Ability to Budget

While being cash savvy isn’t always a necessity in every case, for many entrepreneurs, being able to make more from less when it comes to money is often important, especially in the opening stages of a project or business venture.

6. Motivation

The ability to stay motivated is often a key characteristic of a successful entrepreneur. It seems that it would be easy to stay motivated when you’re running your own business and doing what you love. Typically, in the opening stages of running your business, it is. However, staying motivated over the long haul and forging ahead when times are tough is often the true test of a successful entrepreneur.

7. A Strong Work Ethic

Motivation, whether by money, love or passion for your work, can fade with time, and as it does, it’s important for an entrepreneur to have a strong work ethic to stay focused on the job at hand. When motivation fails, it’s helpful to be able for an entrepreneur to fall back upon a strong work ethic.

8. Persistence

But even a strong work ethic isn’t always enough to push through extremely tough times. As an entrepreneur, you might just have to keep plugging away until you get it right. Work ethic is important, but even a strong work ethic can fade when you face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and this is where it can pay to be persistent. Keeping at your work, even when you know everyone else has given up on you, is often a characteristic of a successful entrepreneur.

9. Able to Cut Losses and Run

While work ethic, motivation, and the ability to persevere are all important characteristics in an entrepreneur, there is no sense in beating your head against a brick wall. When you know there is absolutely no chance of a project succeeding, it’s important to know when to cut your losses and move on. A cruel fact of being an entrepreneur is that you must often be prepared to lose money, and by allowing a project to die, while you might be losing money in the short run, you could be saving yourself money in the long-run.

10. Effective Communication

Not every entrepreneur has to be a great public speaker or enjoy interacting with the public, but they must often be willing to do so on a regular basis. Even if you are a more introverted type, working to develop your communications skills can go far in helping you to become a successful entrepreneur.

About Author :
Tom Walker blogs on the CreativeCloud for a specialist supplier of cartridges for PhotoSmart printers, toners and refills based in the UK.

Sharing interesting and useful articles from blogger fellows is what I used to do on every weekend in the Sunday Killer Link Love Post, articles cover topic that teach you how to blog, usually articles related to blogging tips, traffic building, social media, search engine optimization, make money online, affiliate marketing and etc.

These weeks I received quite some guest posts from bloggers and webmasters, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for helping to update this blog with great articles. Guest posting is one of the best way to get one way dofollow backlinks, you can improve the search engine ranking for certain keyword and outrank your competition, so I would consider that this is a win-win situation for guest poster and the blog owner.

Top 10 Sunday Killer Link Love Posts

1) Blog Content Optimization Made Easier…Much Easier – Blogussion
When it comes to writing content, you have a lot of things you need to take into consideration before publishing that final draft onto your blog. The one thing you need to consider before publishing anything is whether or not your article is ready to be seen by many people.

2) How I make money…on Twitter – CatsWhoBlog
As you probably know if you’re reading this blog from the start, my startegy to make money online is to multiply income sources the most I can. I got some blogs and websites, I’m a domainer and an affiliate marketer.

3) 4 Ways to Overcome the “Nobody’s Reading My Blog” Blues – DailyBlogTips
Blogs are a great way to brand your business and create a buzz about personal and professional agendas. But, let’s face it; the R.O.I. (return on investment) can be a bit low in the beginning. In my many years as a professional writer and relationship columnist, I’ve started several, gotten frustrated, lost the momentum, and decided to move on to bigger and better things. Then I would visit other sites, love the energy, read the success stories of how Blogs were turned to book deals, and well, have since reconsidered.

4) 10 Powerful Post Ideas to Help Build Your Blog’s – WeBuildYourBlog
There are so many blogs out there that it can be difficult to find new and interesting ways to keep your readership coming back to your site. Finding posts that bring something new or different to the table can be the perfect way to build your blog’s following, and having a strong readership is pertinent to creating a successful blog.

5) How to Create Content for Casual Readers – SiteSketch101
Internet surfers are looking for access to fast, easy-to-find information. They don’t want to spend any extra time searching for information. They want to find what they’re looking for so that they can move on and get back to whatever else they have to do as quickly as possible.

6) 8 Main Factors that Affect Search Engine Rankings – HotBlogTips
Ranking high on the search engines is the goal of any search engine optimization efforts to get found. Local search, personalized search, live search, mobile search and location search … the way that people search has changed and the search engines have to match quality, relevant results with queries to increase user experience.

7) Headline Writing Techniques That Just Work – Blogussion
A good blog headline is often the only factor that determines whether or not an article on your blog will be read. The idea that content is king is true, but some people miss out on reading that great content because there is nothing interesting in the headline that represents it.

8 ) 8 Ways to Say The Same Thing Without Writing The Same Thing – MKaKan
There are many topics and lessons, ideas that are worth blogging about again and again. Some things are worth discussing more than once. It could be a topic or idea that you are passionate about or you love. Or it could just be a topic you believe is very important to your readers’. A topic you believe you should constantly remind your readers about.

9) 7 Basic Tips For Designing Your Blog – FamousBloggers
For those who are at the point that they can create their own web pages, no matter what blog or content management system you use, you will have to become quite familiar with the coding. One of the most common support questions at the WordPress Support forums deal with coding issues. I have managed a lot of questions and skimmed the forums to come to this conclusion. I also hear from other CMS communities the same things.

10) 16 Facebook Applications to Boost Popularity of Facebook Fan Page – wChingya
Do you know there are over 20 million people join as fans of Facebook Fan Pages daily? Forget about restricting Facebook as a private network. If you can get 5% of those people to land and join your fan page, the impact will be significant. Time to boost popularity of your fan page with the right Facebook applications.

Guest Posts Of The Month

1) How To Get On Page One Of Google from Jamal Salim

2) Starting an Internet Business – No Compromises from Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko

3) More Options For Monetization – Adsense Alternative from Elad David

4) 7 Popular Myths About Making Money Online from Mark Thompson

Personal Ramblings

This is another week but I’m still busy with my day job and studies, I’ve just finished another test for my studies and I’ll get ready to start another of my assignment and presentation, endless journey. But there is no reason for me to stop writing for the Sunday Killer Link Love post as this is one of the ways for me to update what I’ve been doing these weeks and hope you guys would understand my situation for not updating this blog as usual.

However, I still like to call for more guest posts to be published on this blog for the coming weeks. You would get more traffic from this blog as well as one way dofollow link, you can also brand your blog and yourself by writing great article. I’ll also feature your guest post in the Sunday Killer Link Love post and you would get another one way dofollow link.

If you’re interested in guest posting, feel free to check out the guest posting guidelines.

I have to go university on weekend. So, how’s your weekend? Usually what will you do during weekend?

This is a guest post by Jamal Salim. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

We’ve all been there and asked ourselves the age old question: “How to get on page one of google”?

Our new (review) site has been setup and we’re dying to unleash our posts to the whole world – Move over John Chow.

We’ve done our part to get on page one of Google and the waiting game starts.

You know which “waiting game” i am talking about here right?

Yep. The waiting game, where you’ve published your wordpress post, pinged it to death with every RSS submitter stick under god’s sun and finished every cup of coffee in your student dorm, as you wait to get listed on the first pages of Google.

You wait hours on end, just to catch a glimpse of that glimmer of hope called “First Page Rankings”.

If only Mama G (That’s Google btw) would be kind enough to cut you a break and list your posts on page one of Google …

You wait hours, days and even weeks on end and come to the same conclusion like the one millionth blogger before you.

Your blog posts have been beamed into indexing nirvana and your dream to get on page one of Google bites the dust.

Clicking past page 10000000 sucks and I won’t even touch that nerve ;-(

So is all this SERP BS and the whole SEO get on page one of Google complete and utter BS?

What’s going on here and why the hell aren’t you being listed on page one of Google anyhoo? WTF!?!

Well, if you are not the head nerd at Google Seo Headquarters (that’s the chimp deciding who gets listed on the first pages of Google or not btw *) then you only need ONE formula.

I call this formula the “Hidden Art Of Seo Blogging” (for those smarty pants out there the word hidden doesn’t imply that this method Is new nor that I have created it).

This art of seo blogging is akin to blogging shogun where you start to learn to choose your battles.

What do I mean by this?

You don’t start blogging on the keywords that the super bloggers are targeting.

Instead, you start targeting the low fruit i.e., keywords that bring in decent traffic but are not highly competitive.

Such keywords are called long tail keywords.

So if you are sadistic enough to make your next blog on dog training, then an example of a long tail keyword would be dog training in New York for seniors.

A long tail keyword like this is likely to have less competition than say a more generic one like dog training.

So what’s the advantage of targeting the lower fruit long tails say ye?

Great question.

These keywords are laser targeted and you will be eliminating the guesswork completely on not only knowing what demographic you’re writing for but also make it much easier for the cute little Google bots to crawl your websites – seek and destroy .. errmmm … I mean seek and index away little bots.

But the coolest effect which you will notice is that some or even most of your blog entries will be listed TWICE on the same page in Google.

Know what that means?

You’ve landed on the Google Indexing radar with a big SPLASH.

Irrelevant if your site is new or not you’ll soon notice that some of your posts will start getting listed lightning fast (12 hours and/or even less) on the 1st pages for those targeted low tail keywords.

So what’s the morale of the story?

The next time you decide on your domain name or your blog post for that matter, keep one thing in mind.

Forget the highly competitive generic keywords.

Instead, target the longest tail keywords with the least competition and walk away into the sunset with a cool smile knowing:

It’s just another day where you’ve gotten your content out there onto the first pages of Google.

Want some more tricks to get multiple listings on the first pages of Google?

Check out the 6 minute video, I created for a very cool community that I am proud to be a member of Youtube!

About Author :
Jamal Salim is the co-founder of www.StephenPierceAffiliate.Com. He is specializing in affiliate marketing and he shows you the art of making residual income online.

Each weekend I used to collect a list of 10 articles from the blogosphere and compile it in a post and I named it as Sunday Killer Link Love Post. All the 10 articles cover topic that teach you how to blog and make money online, articles cover blogging tips, traffic building, social media, search engine optimization, make money online and etc.

I used to read more than 10 blogs a day, so it’s not difficult for me to collect 10 articles from blogger fellows. I’m kinda slow in updating this blog for few weeks or months due to busy schedule especially working and studies, I’ll have a break at the middle of April so I hope I will have more time to write more articles and interact with all my readers.

Top 10 Sunday Killer Link Love Posts

1) The 30 Most Vital & Important SEO Factors – SiteSketch101
Bloggers and webmasters are constantly wondering why Google is such a bully to some websites and why they are so positive toward others. What are the keys to building a successful presence on the search engine results pages? What are the most important SEO factors for getting your site discovered by Google’s search bot and how can we get in on the action?

2) 4 Ways to Overcome the “Nobody’s Reading My Blog” Blues – DailyBlogTips
Blogs are a great way to brand your business and create a buzz about personal and professional agendas. But, let’s face it; the R.O.I. (return on investment) can be a bit low in the beginning. In my many years as a professional writer and relationship columnist, I’ve started several, gotten frustrated, lost the momentum, and decided to move on to bigger and better things. Then I would visit other sites, love the energy, read the success stories of how Blogs were turned to book deals, and well, have since reconsidered.

3) How To Take Your Blog To The Next Level – CatsWhoBlog
Why blogs like SixRevisions.com receive so many traffic? The answer is pretty simple. They produce lots of good content, and work a lot. Cats Who Code had good content, but this wasn’t enought. In January 2010, I decided to take it to the next level and make it one of the most popular web development blogs of the world. The first step will be to get 10000 RSS readers before the 2nd birthday in June.

4) 5 Common Uses For Social Networking And The Affect On Your Target Audience – Blogussion
Social Media is the current big buzzword in the world of Internet Marketing, and with good reason. It is already such a big part of the Internet culture. It is here to stay and should be ignored by marketers, or indeed anybody, at their peril.

5) 5 Easy Ways to Recycle Your Web Content – TheInfoPreneur
Yeah, I know. This goes against many of the principles that James discusses on this site. Work hard, try harder, and increase your productivity. All of these are great pieces of the advice. But the sad fact is I’m a pretty lazy person and I like to give the least amount of effort whenever possible.

6) 10 More Easy Blog Post Ideas – TycoonBlogger
One of the challenges many bloggers face is coming up with fresh content on a regular basis. I have several blogs in my stable and try to post at least one post per day. Some days are easier than others and there have been quite a few days where it took me longer to think about what to write than to actually write the post.

7) 5 Reasons to be Critical of Other Bloggers – DailyBlogTips
This post may be considered edgy to some but I am here to say that I am not a rebel. Just read any of my posts and you will conclude that I am not a malcontent, a dissident, or a troublemaker. Probably my biggest fault is my brute honesty so I sought out one of the largest blogs in the universe to get my message across. Daniel Scocco has allowed me the honor of guest posting here on DailyBlogTips so I am taking advantage of his vast audience to speak my mind.

8 ) 7 Ways to Improve Your Blog in 2010 – Blogussion
The hysteria of your New Year’s resolutions regarding blogging should have ended now. After promising yourself on December 31 to write a new post every day, leave comments on every industry blog going and contacting hundreds of potential new JV partners on a weekly basis, a dose of reality should have set in.

9) How to Attract Huge Sponsors for Contests – SiteSketch101
I am sure that almost all of us, bloggers and blog readers love blog contest. For bloggers, it can be the best way to promote more interactions, get more incoming traffics and get to know with new blog readers. For blog readers on the other hand, contest can provide to them with best chance of getting some online income by doing what they love.

10) 9 Guest Posting Tips: Increase Your Chances to Be Accepted – IWoodPecker
You want to be accepted, don’t you? So, let’s increase your chances and look at the most important factors that should not be ignored by you. But before stepping to those tips, I’ll remind the main benefits of guest posting and its definition.

Personal Ramblings

If you notice, I’ve been telling you that I am busy for quite a few weeks, same to this week as I prepared a presentation and that was just presented yesterday, everything was going smooth. Also, I had a great time gathering with my friends yesterday and today, I’ve been busy for quite some weeks and at least I got some rest this 2 days, I enjoyed that moment.

Next week is another busy week as I have to submit one of my assignments by this weekend, also to do revision for one of the test. Still I would like to receive guest post within this coming days, if you like to guest post in this blog and get one-way dofollow backlinks, please check out the guest posting guidelines.

I have a simple question for you guys this week as I like to know your thought about this blog.

How do you think about the theme structure in this blog? Anything that you think that this blog need to improve? All comments are welcome!

Make money online world is crucial, if you don’t know how to monetize your blog or website which has huge traffic, you’re just wasting the “fresh juice”. These days, many people ask me the same question, “how to make money online?”, “how to monetize my blog effectively?”, “what method brings the most earning for my niche blog?” and etc. The answer is obviously “No!” because there is no exact method which will bring the most earning for your blog or website, you need to go through the trial and error process.

Even though there is no exact method which will bring the most earning for your blog or website, but pay per click advertisement seems very popular on the web and most of the blogger or webmaster do use it to monetize their blog and website. There are many pay per click advertisements on the web, while Google Adsense is the most popular one I believe, other PPC advertisement such as Bidvertiser, Adbrite, and etc.

Maximize Earning With Targeted Long Tail Keyword With QueryAds

Make money online with pay per click advertising is really simple because you just have to place the ads on your blog and voila! Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that you could make more money from it, it has something to do with the keyword that you target and some other factors such as ads placement, color and size of ads and etc.

Roderick Coleman contacted me last week and told me about the potential of another pay per click advertisement, it’s called QueryAds. The features are almost similar to Google Adsense, but I believe that it has something that Google Adsense doesn’t have.

This is what QueryAds says:

QueryAds offers an easier to use interface that makes setting up your PPC ads easier. In addition, we make sure that the ads placed on your site are relevant to what your customers are looking for. We offer our advertisers long tail keywords that will insure the visitors of your site are looking for exactly what is being offered. Unlike Google, which displays ads for simple keywords such as cars, our software looks for long tail keywords like “2010 Ford Minivan¡”. This will ensure that someone looking for a minivan isn’t presented with an ad for a four wheel drive truck.

In short word, with QueryAds you may get targeted long tail keyword and most probably the ads you get is 99% relevant to your keyword, not ads in general topic. It’s simple to make money online with QueryAds, similar to Google Adsense, you just have to customize your ads and generate the code, then place it anywhere in your blog or website, that’s it.

Make Extra Earning from QueryAds Affiliate Program

Besides of making money from the pay per click ads, QueryAds does have an affiliate program which they recently launched. You’re not only making money from the advertisers that you refer to them, you do make more money from publishers that you refer to them. It looks cool right? Nowadays, rarely we can find any pay per click advertisement offers publisher referral program, but QueryAds takes the challenge.

QueryAds Referral Program

So you’ll be rewarded a lifetime commission from advertisers and publishers that you refer to QueryAds. For advertisers, you’ll get 10% of the amount that advertisers spend on QueryAds; while for publishers, you’ll get 10% of the amount that publishers earn from the pay per click ads.

In the referral account, you can check the referral report which is updated on a daily basis. You can also use the banners which created by QueryAds to promote your affiliate link, they have several sizes of banner for your choice. In order to get paid, you’ll need to reach the minimum cashout limit of $50 and you’ll get paid monthly. The best thing is QueryAds pays you by using paypal, it’s fast and clean.

Wrap Up

It’s good for us to try every pay per click advertisements on the web and eventually we will know which works well and which doesn’t. I don’t guarantee that you’ll definitely make more money from QueryAds, as I told you earlier in this post, we all have to go through the trial and error process, and find out which advertisement brings the most profit to our blog and website. I’ve applied QueryAds in my some other blogs, I would update you the result in future.

There are many options for monetization or Adsense alternative on the web, so be sure you’re not just to stick with Google Adsense, open your window and you’ll find the sky is beautiful.

Have you heard about QueryAds before? If yes, do you have any success story with QueryAds? If no, how do you think about QueryAds?

This week was a busy week but it was a memorable week, as I told you in previous Sunday Killer Link Love Post, I was having holiday for the festival named Chinese New Year. Time past really fast but I enjoyed my time in my hometown. Therefore, I didn’t have much time reading few blogs a day as usual, but I managed to read a few blogs and collect articles for this Sunday Link Love Post.

This post is dedicated for everyone who has missed out some of the interesting and useful articles from blogger fellows, these articles are teaching you how to blog and they cover blogging tips, traffic building, search engine optimization, social media, affiliate marketing and etc.

Top 10 Sunday Killer Link Love Posts

1) The 11 Fastest Ways to Kill Your Blog – SiteSketch101
If you ever wanted to kill your blog and had no idea on what to do, then you are in luck. Compiled below are 11 sweet and fast ways of killing your blog.

2) How to Overcome Creativity Blocks by Making These 8 Simple Offline Changes – Blogussion
Ever feeling uninspired? Lacking creativity? Can’t figure out what you should write about next? It’s a very common thing to face a mental block; something that prevents you from getting your work done. It happens to everyone, and as hard as we try to prevent them from happening – it still happens.

3) 9 More Way to Promote Your Blog Offline – DailyBlogTips
This may seem blindingly obvious, and in many ways it is. But whether out of fear, privacy, or embarrassment, many bloggers keep their digital and real lives separate. I know I did, and many times still do. For new bloggers, utilizing existing social networks will dramatically expand the reach of your blog in the rough, early days. It will help create a community, give you valuable feedback, and expand the reach of your blog.

4) 5 Ways to Make Your Readers Return – BlogGoDown
There’s no shortage of material online with hints and tips for getting people to your website, either through SEO, online marketing or social media tactics. But once you have put all that effort into generating traffic to your site, how do you go about ensuring the traffic is going to come back? Here are a few hints!

5) Get Backlinks – Here Are The 11 Methods And Backlink Tools I Use – WeBuildYourBlog
My blog has 7670 backlinks as stated in my blog post Blogging Guide Blog Is One Year Old and since then I’ve had a number of personal emails asking me how I get backlinks. By the way, today the number of backlinks is 7790. In this post I share 11 methods I use but first…what is a backlink:

6) 5 Simple Ways to Find Your Passion and Take Your Blog from Zero to Hero – DailyBlogTips
Blogging is hard work. It can easily take up to a year or two before your blog starts taking off, if it ever does. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic, because there are a lot of people out there that believe they can jump in, start writing and the money will start pouring in.

7) The 10 Best Ways to Explode Your Bounce Rate – SiteSketch101
Are you working to explode your blog’s bounce rate? No? Then why are you doing the things on this list? The term ‘bounce rate’ simply refers to the number of people who immediately click away from your site as soon as they discover it. For example, if 6 out of every 10 people leave your site within the first few seconds of their visit then your bounce rate would be considered to be 60%.

8 ) 3 Less-Known Ways to Find Guest Posting Opportunities – DailyBlogTips
The two best known ways to find blogs accepting guest posts are: Looking around your current contacts. Guest posting at your friends’ sites will only make your old relationships stronger and more active. Besides, this is a good way to “learn” to guest post: adapt to various types of audience and blogging atmosphere. Searching Google. I’ve posted about some advanced tips on searching Google to hunt great (and tightly targeted) guest posting opportunities previously, so you just need to go and check it if you haven’t yet. But as an active (and long-term) guest blogger, I’ve become somewhat creative in hunting guest blogging opportunities and in this post I am sharing the three of them which turned really effective for me.

9) 5 Ways to Spread the Brand of your Blog Like Fire – SmartBloggerz
Each and everyone who owns a blog definitely wants to build an audience towards the brand of their own. And of course, we want to spread it and have it exposed to as much people as possible. Since millions of new blogs are created every day, it’s an uphill battle for us, bloggers to spread our own and stand out from the rest.

10) 10 Things Every Young Entrepreneur Should Know – BenLang
You’re in an elite group of young people who have goals, ambition, and wisdom beyond their years. Those are great assets, don’t get me wrong, but have you ever had trouble being taken seriously because of your age? Unfortunately it happens to all of us at least once-especially when just starting out.

Personal Ramblings

I didn’t have enough sleep during Chinese New Year as I hang out with friends and family almost everyday until midnight, but I enjoyed it because I could only do that once a year. Rarely I could meet up with old friends because all are working in different places and all of us have no time to hang out, so Chinese New Year is the best time for us to meet up and have a talk.

The traffic for this blog drops a bit this few days, I believe that this has something to do with the posting as I didn’t have time to update this blog for few weeks, that was why you saw many guest posts in this blog this few weeks. I will try to update this blog more often whenever I have time as I’m busy with my working and studies, but still I would like to receive guest post within this coming days, if you like to guest post in this blog and get one-way dofollow backlinks, please check out the guest posting guidelines.

I just stop here for this week, I’m sure nobody likes to read grandmother’s story, right?

How’s your week? Have you done anything that makes yourself happy and relax?

This is a guest post by Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I have been planning starting a business on the Internet for sometime now. It would help me fill in a few extra hours and yet bring in the important extra cash! I needed the money but I was not willing to compromise on my ethics or for that matter my inner happiness or my peace of mind. Tall conditions those.

Everyone told it would be impossible to find something that would meet all my standards and yet help me make money. The bottom-line was if I wanted to make money I would have to make compromises I did not want to. Was I prepared for this?

My Decisions

My patience paid off. I found exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to make money online with affiliate programs with no compromises on my ethics. There are many affiliate programs but not all conformed to my needs. I wanted an affiliate program that was honest in its dealings and I found one.

The whole idea of starting an online business was to become independent. Even as we strive to become independent we look for security to fall back on or for support to guide us through rough patches. This very human need was also taken care of by my affiliate marketing program. I was working independently and yet could associate with my fellow affiliates to garner support or find advice.

Another thing that I was looking for was ethical marketing. It is usual to see people using hyped promotions to further their business propositions. They may not be bothered about the truth of their content, all they want is business. This was one thing that was not going to work for me. My business promotions needed to be based on the truth. The affiliate program I had chosen supported my cause.

I was already proving my detractors wrong and starting out on a business that did not ruin my ethics.

Balancing Work And Life

Work can be distracting and can easily take us away from our families. And expanding business needs a lot of time and it becomes essential to balance work and family. I could not possibly make money at the cost of my family life. I had been planning to launch a website for my affiliate program but was very hesitant about it. Keeping my skill levels in mind I knew I would have to devote considerable time to create a good website. On the other hand if I decided to use professional service it would cost me a bundle something I could ill afford.

A friend came to my rescue and suggested a website designing software. This software would help me to work on the website and have it ready really fast. This meant I could save money and still have plenty of time for my family. The software worked efficiently and in no time my website was ready. The website had turned out just as I had wanted it to without the hassles.

The next thing in line was a website host. I needed a good web host that did not cost a bomb. There are many inexpensive web hosts available but you can not be sure of the services provided. In most cases the website remains inaccessible due to frequent break downs. I was really worried about this until I started using the software for designing my website. The software came as a complete package along with the web host. I was already assured about the quality of the software giving me faith on the web host too.

My website was designed and built to suit my standards. The content was true with no hyped material or facts that I could not verify.

I now was the proud owner of an affiliate marketing business that ran according to my ethics and standards and made money. I had achieved what I had set out for.

About Author :
Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko are the owners of www.internetbusinessbts.com. They are specializing in helping people to start their home based internet business from scratch.

Sunday Killer Link Love Post has been carried out in this blog for about 3 months and I have to say that this post might be an interesting post that my readers over here may like to read on every weekend. I used to collect articles from blogger fellows who I followed almost in daily basis, sometimes they will share some really interesting and helpful articles, and my job is to share these articles on the Sunday Killer Link Love Post.

These articles cover several tips that teach you how to blog, such as blogging tips, traffic building, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and etc.

Previously I’ve told you about my blog logo design from a designer, I did use the logo in this blog for less than a week and I made a changes on the logo, as what you see on the header. I just use the “M” and apply on the simple header that I created. The header is simple, but at least I feel more comfortable than the previous one, how do you think?

Top 10 Sunday Killer Link Love Posts

1) 7 Ways To Get More Comments On Your Blog – SiteSketch101
A blog without comments is like a teacher without students, you’ll just talk to the wind and get no response in return, that’s cruel and not fun at all right? Comments are good to your blog, when you write a blog post, commentators will be sharing their experiences or point of views, they will be also giving valuable critique on particular matter. With that said, the comments help in improving yourself as well as your blog.

2) How to Deliver the Highest Impact with Each Post – DailyBlogTips
That’s not to brag, but to illustrate a point: frequent posting isn’t necessarily effective blogging. If your goal is to reach a wider audience and establish yourself as a blogger, your aim should be to have a big impact with each post. And if your goal is just to put your thoughts out there, maybe to stir up some discussion in the blogging world … you should also aim for high-impact posts.

3) Win The Hearts Of Your Readers In Your Next Blog Post – HowToMakeMyBlog
I’m not very good at writing opening lines. It’s like when I see a cute brunette sitting by herself at the bar. I want desperately to get her attention, but can’t wrangle up enough courage to go over there and give it a shot. I’ve always considered myself to be an outgoing person, though, but I’m just terrified of opening lines.

4) How to Write Quality Blog Posts That Engage Your Readers – BlogGoDown
You can put up a blog fairly quickly with very little knowledge using some simple blog strategies. If you do that, what have you accomplished? Probably very little, but what a blog really entails is well written, meaningful posts about all sorts of information that you wish to share with your readers and by the same token get useful insights and comments back from your readers.

5) Dramatically Improve Your Blog In One Night – TycoonBlogger
Last night I took the night off from posting blog promotion tips and spent a couple of hours performing some much need blog maintenance. Maintaining your blog is hard work and should be done regularly to ensure your blog is running at peak performance. My blog is coming up on one year and I have performed some tasks for the first time that should have been done a long time ago.

6) The 6 Pillars of a Seemingly Successful Blog – Blogussion
Whatever reason we have in building our blogs we all have one end in mind—to succeed. But why do many bloggers fail in this respect? The answer lies on the fact that they don’t know the important areas on which they should work on. Also, they are not willing to make the necessary sacrifice of allowing time to do its work on each of these areas.

7) How to Build a Powerful Blogging Alliance – SiteSketch101
I’m an Infantryman in the United States Army. In the army we have what we call battle buddies. If I get pinned down in a fire fight, I need someone to yell to me what they see, to provide cover fire for me, and to throw grenades for me from their position…and I strive to provide the same for them.

8 ) The Mass Guest Bloggging Strategy: Can You Do It? – DailyBlogTips
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post saying that I needed to hustle more, and one of the goals I set to myself was to reach 50,000 subscribers by July 21. Many readers posted a comment or emailed me asking how I planned to achieve that goal. Well, I have many things in mind, and I’ll talk about them individually. Today I want to talk about the first strategy I’ll use: mass guest blogging.

9) Seven of the Best Methods for List Building – WeBuildYourBlog
A list of contacts is one of the most important things a blogger can have. If you’re serious about making money online, you need to learn how to build a list the right way. Getting people to provide you with their email addresses willingly can be somewhat difficult, so you need to prove to them that you will only send out informative emails and updates and not spam.

10) How to Promote Your Business, Blog or Website on Twitter – Kikolani
Twitter offers many ways of promoting your business, blog, or website with interested people in the Twittersphere. Before I get started on the various ways to promote yourself, remember that Twitter should not only be about self promotion. While there are many opportunities to promote your own agenda on Twitter, you have to keep a healthy balance between promoting yourself, responding to others who ask you questions, thanking Twitter users that help you out, and just sharing valuable information with your followers from other websites and blogs.

Personal Ramblings

As I told you in last week Sunday Killer Link Love Post, right now I’m enjoying my holiday in my hometown and celebrating the biggest festival for my race (Chinese) in my country, it’s Chinese New Year. Of course, I’ll be spending less time over here as I got to hang out with family and friends during this important festival.

Anyway, this would be the best time for me during these few busy months, I was busy for works, studies and blogging. Now I forget about everything and enjoy my time. I’ll only get back to work after Chinese New Year which is 22th Feb 2010.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all Chinese a happy and prosperity Chinese New Year!

How do you think about the header that I customized last week? I would appreciate if you could give your kind thought.

This is a guest post by Elad David. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

By far, Adsense is the most popular choice for publishers seeking ad revenue from their websites. With Google’s reach and capacity, Adsense is a great monetization option for many bloggers.

But in the last couple of years, In Text advertising has been growing in popularity as an alternative to Google Adsense. There are several big players in the field. For small websites and blogs, with relatively low traffic, In Text has proven to be a great option. Why? It’s a new, attention-grabbing yet unobtrusive platform for delivering relevant ads to consumers. The ads are activated only by the visitor’s hover over a specific double-underlined keyword.

More and more publishers are finding that In Text ads, in conjunction with their Adsense ads, can really turn their readership into money. In fact, most publishers who use In Text use Adsense as well, and enjoy the best of both worlds.

An Unique Monetization Opportunity

Having worked in the web advertising field for several years, I believe that every site, even with 5 visitors a day, has potential to be something big. But to get there, these sites need (and deserve) monetization from the start.

Infolinks.com, for example, took a different approach, requiring no minimum threshold to earn money on clicks, and establishing a low minimum for payout. Indeed, since Infolinks went live almost two years ago, many of its publishers have grown in popularity. Needless to say, their monthly revenue has grown too.

DaemonsTV.com, which features TV news, reviews, recaps, and videos, now earns a solid monthly paycheck after having grown wildly since first joining Infolinks as a much smaller site. Daemons Media now included a network of sites, such as Daemons Movies, Daemons Food, and Daemons Books, all of which are monetized by In Text ads.

Other publishers serve a niche audience and are content with staying small. They just want to earn some money in order to cover costs such as monthly web hosting fees and domain registration. Non-obtrusive and high-yield In Text ads are a great resource to them as well.

The Road Ahead – In Text Advertising Becoming Visible

Video Blogging Tips, an industry insider, tested this approach in April 2009, and recommended it. Eight months later, the blog still features both Adsense and In Text advertising, and it looks like the publisher is still enjoying the rewards. In his words: “As you may not earn as much with [In Text ads] as you would with a program like AdSense, it is still a nice way to supplement your income. In fact, if you don’t know much about AdSense or where to place your ads / or maybe AdSense just isn’t working for you, Infolinks may be an even better option for you anyway…”

2010 – The Big Year For In Text Advertising

On the current trajectory, In Text Advertising looks to make big gains in 2010. As more advertisers enter the field, CPC rates continue to rise- and webmasters are definitely taking notice. Look for more websites and blogs embracing the technology, and more sophisticated algorithms for highly matched ads. 2010 will bring lots of rich media carefully embedded into the bubbles for a richer user experience and higher conversion rates for website and blog publishers worldwide.

About Author :
Elad David is a blogger and Web Community Outreach Coordinator at Infolinks.com.

Wordpress has became the largest and the most popular blogging platform on the web, one of the reasons that Wordpress is popular is because of the features and it has tons of plugin available. I believe that major internet marketers do have at least a blog and the blog is hosted by Wordpress, people loves it because it has a lot of plugins available and we can enhance or improve our blog in easy way.

There are many plugins available on the net, either free or premium one. Wordpress.org itself has up to 8,245 plugins in the database and all of them are free for download, the number doesn’t include plugin from other webmasters that don’t upload the plugin to Wordpress.org, I estimate that there would be up to 10,000 wordpress plugins available on the net.

15 Must-Use Wordpress Plugin In Year 2010

This blog currently is using up to 35 wordpress plugins, if you experience slow loading time, that might be some errors occurred from one or more of the plugins, just like what I mentioned about the Blogengage Button, but it’s back to normal right now. So here is a list of 15 wordpress plugins that I’ve been using, and I think they should be used for any blog in Year 2010.

1) Contact Form 7
This plugin generates a contact form, it allows people to contact you via the form in simple step. Many people are still leaving their email address in the contact page and ask readers to contact them via email, so readers have to open their email address account and send you an email. Since there is a plugin, why not you make the thing simple and make your readers happy?

2) Akismet
That’s the most common and useful plugin. It used to filter and block spam comment, it saves a lot of your time. It’s a default plugin, that will be in your wordpress plugin folder when you create a new wordpress blog. Many newbies don’t know what’s the purpose of Akismet, so now you know. Be sure you activate it.

3) Wp-Optimize
This plugin optimizes your wordpress database and your blog will load faster than usual. It removes all post revisions, cleans marked spam comments, cleans unapproved comments, and optimizes database tables. You don’t want to keep rubbish in your blog for a long period, use this plugin to clean your database and your blog will load faster.

4) Wp-PageNavi
A plugin that displays the page number bar within your blog, it makes your readers easy if they want to search something in your blog and don’t want to click the “Previous Entries” button, the page number bar would be faster.

5) Lucia’s LinkyLove
It’s a great wordpress plugin that I recently installed. It’s something like Dofollow plugin, it dofollow the commentator’s link when the readers leave enough number of comments in the blog, says 3 comments, otherwise they’re nofollow. This plugin is good to avoid people who just want to leave a comment and a dofollow link, then run away.

6) Top Commentator
This plugin is widely used by many bloggers. This plugin shows a list of top commentator together with the backlinks, it’s to encourage your readers to leave comment and increase the rate of participation on your blog. They leave comment and receive dofollow backlinks, and it improves your blog, that’s win win situation. So this plugin is a must-use for your blog.

7) Comment Approved Notifier
This plugin notifies the commentator who leaves comment in your blog and the comment is approved in email. I believe that majority of blogger read tons of blog in a day and leave uncountable comments, sometimes they wouldn’t remember which blog they’ve left their comment, so this plugin would be good to notify them that their comment has been approved in your blog, so they will return to your blog and see whether there is any updates.

8 ) Commentluv
This plugin shows the latest blog post with backlinks from the commentator. This plugin would help to increase the rate of participant in your blog as well as people likes backlinks, especially dofollow backlinks.

9) Google XML Sitemaps
A very common plugin that used to generate google sitemap for your blog, your google sitemap can be built in few simple steps in few minutes time. It saves a lot of time with the help of this plugin.

10) Wordpress Related Post
As the name of the plugin, it shows related post in every of your single posts. It makes your blog sticky, which means your reader won’t be leaving your blog after reading a blog post, they would be interested to read other related post in your blog as well. Usually we place the related post at the end of the content.

11) WP Smush.It
It’s a plugin that would help to cut off the loading speed if you have many images displayed at the main page. It smush or optimizes the existing images to smaller file size, says from GIF to PNG. In future, every images that you add to the post, it will be automatically run through Smush.it. With that said, your blog will be loading faster.

12) Wp Super Cache
That’s a great plugin to give the best experience to your reader when they visit your blog, your reader will experience a better loading speed in your blog. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. I’m sure you know about “Cache” in Google search engine right? It shows the latest snapshot of the site.

It goes same to wp super-cache, it shows the snapshot of your blog in a time frame, says it refreshes every 30 minutes if there is no updates on your blog. So your reader will be served static html files in your blog, and they will experience faster loading speed because the WordPress PHP scripts is much more heavier than the static html files.

13) Insights
It’s a plugin that saves your time, when you’re searching some relevant information with your blog post such as images, videos, blogs, news, books and etc, this plugin shows relevant information with your blog post and you can use them in your blog, but be sure to give credit to the owner.

14) All In One SEO Pack
It’s a SEO plugin that allows you to write your own title tag, meta description and meta keywords for the blog post you write. It’s must-use wordpress plugin if you like to receive organic traffic.

15) TweetMeMe
The last plugin will be tweetmeme. As we know, twitter is the largest social networking and microblogging service on the web, so you might want to share your blog post in your twitter and drive more traffic, at the same time you want others help you to re-tweet the blog post and drive even more traffic to your blog. So tweetmeme does the job, it displays a small tweet it button within your blog post, your reader re-tweets it and voila!

Wrap Up

Having excessive numbers of plugin in your blog might slow down your blog, so you might want to choose the best plugins for your blog and giving the best performance to your readers. These 15 wordpress plugins are the one that I think you should install for your blog in Year 2010, especially akismet, wp super-cache and etc, all of them help to improve your blog and may bring your blog to the next level.

Also, be bear in mind that you’re recommended to update all your wordpress plugins to the latest version, the owner may fix some bugs or add some new features.

Do you use any plugin from the list? Any other wordpress plugin that you think is great and must be used but not in the list?

Each weekend I’ll write a post that called Sunday Killer Link Love Post, I used to share about articles from the blogosphere that I find interesting, useful and benefit to my readers. Articles cover topic about blogging tips, traffic building, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing and tips that teach you how to blog.

Recently, my brother and one of my blog buddy told me that my blog loaded pretty slow, I’ve been using Blogengage button for quite some times and recently the site is down, so the button couldn’t be able to function and that causes my blog loads pretty slow, but I’ve fixed it. I did start a poll earlier and asked for blog loading speed after moving to Hostgator, and I would like to take back the poll and place it here, I hope you would help me to test and cast a vote, of course drop a comment and tell me your result would be much appreciated.

Top 10 Sunday Killer Link Love Posts

1) The 30 Best Ways to Build Blog Traffic in 2010 – SiteSketch101
Let’s drastically revolutionize the way we blog in 2010. One of the most difficult challenges that bloggers are facing is how to build high quality blog traffic in 2010. Many of the tips below aren’t necessarily tips that are unique to this year. Rather this is a serious challenge for you to determine to use this new year to bring a fresh vitality to your online presence and to build blog traffic in ways that you have never done before.

2) 9 Ways to Treat Your Blog More Like a Brick-and-Mortar Business – Blogussion
Most of us want our blogs to become more than just blogs. If that’s the case with you, then you need to treat your blog like it’s a business. When I was planning this post I realized there are a lot of similarities between your blog and the corner store down the street. Except, the corner store is making money and you probably aren’t.

3) Why A Blog Should Always Be Niche Focused – CatsWhoBlog
So you want to create a (new) blog? Congratulations! This is a very good idea!
Before your blog goes live you have to be sure about something really important things: what you will talk about and how you’ll do it so you’ll not end up with an abandonned blog one year after launching your new project. In fact, choosing a niche and stay sticked to it is one of the essential keys for success in blogging.

4) 20 Email Productivity Tips To Become an Email Master – DailyBlogTips
Like it or not, email is the standard communication channel these days. Whether you are an attorney, a student or an online worker, you’ll certainly spend a good percentage of your day in front of an email client. If that is the case, learning how to be more productive with email is a must, right? Below you’ll find 20 email productivity tips for that purpose.

5) 50 Tips For Bloggers Who Work From Home – WeBuildYourBlog
Many people could benefit from some simple tips to improve their life, but those people who blog or work from home face special challenges. From ways to succeed at work to how to relax, here are fifty tips to help turn your life around.

6) Is Premium Content Really a Big Myth? – Blogussion
Now I believe that blogging is a powerful way to make money online through the selling of products (our theme), affiliate’s products, advertising, and a few other random options. The real challenge I have with blogging as an income source is with the content itself. You see as a vesicle for other products, blogging is a great way to market your wares, but as an actual income source for content it may be lacking a few major elements of profitability.

7) Increase Blog Reader Interest With Parody – HowToMakeMyBlog
If you’re like me, most of your blog posts are serious—that’s s-e-r-i-o-u-s. For some reason, known only by the Gods and Google, blog writers believe their writing styles must be as solemn as a funeral dirge. But what if you could write in an entertaining, purposeful way while still achieving your goals, whether it’s convincing readers to take your advice, subscribe to your RSS feed or learn something from you? You can with parody.

8 ) How to boost your pageviews – BlogGoDown
Increasing Page Views is a science as well as an art. By ’science’, I mean that there is a rational reason behind every technique and the ‘art’ is, to use it in the best way possible and which suits the blog.

9) Why Your Comments Section Should Be Like A Forum – TheInfoPreneur
Comments on your recent work or a guest post are the quickest and probably one of the most reliable ways of gauging your readers reaction. Most of the sites that belong to the readers of this site accept comments and encourage them.

10) 7 Productive Things To Do When You Can’t Blog – WchingYa
It has been several days now since I’m out of internet service at home. The area seems to go static with no connection whatsoever while some areas in town are not affected. As a fulltime blogger I find that a little devastating to start my new week. Negative thoughts crept in but I knew my foremost task is to eliminate them for good — by being practical!

Personal Ramblings

I was really busy this week as I prepared for the test of one of my subjects, I’ve just done it today and it went smooth, hardwork paid off. I just completed one test for one of my subjects, two more tests to go in coming weeks, together with few assignments and presentation, that’s going to kill me. Anyway, Chinese New Year is around the corner, I’m going to forget everything and relax during the holiday!

I’ll take some times to update this blog during holiday, or I might totally leave it for 2 weeks. These days I received quite some guest post from fellow bloggers, thank you guys for helping to update this blog, of course you would get some traffic and dofollow backlink as well. Anyone who would like to guest posting in this blog, please check out the guideline.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
*Number of vote is counted from 24.

So, as the poll question, how do you think about the loading speed for this blog? Leave a comment below and tell me how many seconds you take to load the whole page.