As you grow older it becomes more and more important that you take care of your future, not just for yourself but for your family members and loved ones as well. And what with the current financial climate happening in almost every part of the world it is even more important than ever.

There are many things you can do but one company you might not have heard of is called MarketRiders.

They are a company that specialise in asset allocation, a certain type of investment that I believe is safer. You answer a few questions about yourself and they will draw up a custom investment package just for you.

One reason why this is a good idea is because if you take up one of these investment options then you will not have to worry about your money falling victim to the devastating fees and taxes that most governments implement. The company deliberately goes for the lowest tax options available in your country.

It is certainly a better option than any 401k rollover option I’ve seen.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Asset Allocation Better Than A 401k

Every now and again, when I’m looking through my old blog articles, I come across one that was either really popular or was very informative and helpful to many people. Months after it was published it is still being visited and comments on by people.

I have an article that I posted over 2 years ago that is still being used today, despite the fact that some of the information on it is outdated now. It sort of makes me wish that I could re-post these popular articles again.

Don’t try and tell me the same thought has never crossed your mind. )

There are ways that this can be done. I’m not talking about copying and pasting the same article into another post either. Below I have given you four quick ways to turn your old posts into nice shiny new ones and get some more traffic.

1. Post To Ezinearticles

This is something that can help bring in a lot of traffic as articles on sites like Ezinearticles rank very highly in the top search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bling. It takes little to no effort as well.

Simply give the post a quick rewrite (to avoid you becoming penalised by Google), give it a flashy new title and don’t forget to include a link back to your blog in the byline.

There is another benefit using this method: Many people use articles form sites like Ezinearticles to fill up their own blogs so you will get extra traffic this way as well as the link in the byline is mostly always left there.

2. Send It Through Your Mailing List

Do you have a newsletter? Every blog that is serious about making money should have some sort of mailing list set up.

Rewrite one of your old posts and then send it exclusively to your mailing list subscribers as a bonus post for them subscribing to your mailing list. You can also leave links at the bottom to other old posts if you wish.

3. Send It In Tweets

We all know how fast Twitter has grown over the past year or so and it makes sense to try and use it to gain extra traffic to your blog. Find an old article, cut it up into 140 character chunks and then publish them on your Twitter account.

Simple but very effective.

4. Turn It into a downloadable Report

If you have been blogging about your chosen niche for a while then the chances are that you will have collected a number of very informative and helpful articles over the past year or two.

You can gather up a collection of them and compile a downloadable report which you can give away for free or sell for a small fee.

Personally I would offer it in exchange for joining your mailing list or RSS feed. If you make it easy for people to get hold of your report then more people will download and read it.

Do you use other methods? Why not share them via the comments section below?

Post from: I Need Discipline

4 Ways To Regenerate Old Content

Just like last month I was not sure about whether I was going to post a monthly income blog report for this month as I had down pretty much the same as I did during January. But again I thought it would be unfair so here is a brief post.

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

The unique visitor count for February stands at 381, which is a big drop of 485 from the month of January.

The page impression count for February stands at 541, which again is a big drop of 643 from the month of January.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 1.42 pages.

Search engines accounted for 48.56% of my traffic. 30.18% of my traffic was from referring sites. 21.26% was from direct traffic.

Money Money Money!

Adbrite = $0.40 (+$0.13)
AdsDaq = $0.06 (-$0.06)
Adsense = $5.01 (+$4.22)
Adtoll = $0.05 (+$0.05)
Infolinks = $0.34 (+$0.28)
Kontera = $0.02 (-$0.08)
Reviews = $35.00 (-$39.94)
Smowtion = $0.16 (-$0.22)
TLA = $10.27 (-$1.98)
Tradedoubler = $0.56 (-$0.54)
UnderDog = $0.01 (-$0.07)

Total = $51.88 (-$38.23)

Top Five Search Terms

I like this part of the monthly income report. It is amazing how people find my blog on search engines.

1. bloggerwave scam
2. bloggerwave
3. I need discipline
4. specticles
5. my plans for the future

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. December 2009 Blog Income Report
2. 19 Blog Review Networks
3. Add Your Image To Blog Comments
4. Blogitive – Nice To Add To Your Collection
5. Lessons That I Have Learnt From 2009

5 Top Site Referrals

The top five sites that sent the most visitors to this blog.

1. forums.digitalpoint.com
2. problogger.net
3. forum.smorty.com
4. moredofollowblogs.blogspot.com
5. intensedebate.com

This blog, and me earning money online, would not be possible if it was not for those awesome folk over at BlueHost. If you are looking for quality, reliable and cheap hosting then I urge you to check them out today.

Post from: I Need Discipline

February 2010 Blog Income Report

I stumbled across a neat little piece of software today. Something that I believe could help me (and you) gain some extra traffic from Twitter and it has nothing to do with setting up multiple accounts or spamming thousands of people.

When you post a tweet on Twitter there is normally a link under the tweet that says from Tweet Deck, Web, or what ever program you are using to send the message. This means that lots of companies are getting free traffic from piggybacking on your tweets.

That is where TweetBrand comes to the rescue and helps you take back those free links.

What TweetBrand does it is removes this link and replaces it with a link that you can decide upon. For example you can have a link to your own site and also anchor text of whatever you want.

It is free and it runs on Adobe Air which is also free. There is a very informative video to help you through the process which took me about 4 minutes to complete.

I am trying it on http://twitter.com/indblog so why not have a look and see if it is something that might interest you?

Post from: I Need Discipline

Get A Link From Every Tweet

I have been using Google Adsense on my blogs and web sites for the past three or four years now, it is normally one of the first things I insert into my design when I launch a new blog or web site. At times it has even become slightly more important to me than the actual content.

If you type something like ‘increase Google Adsense Clicks’ into a search engine you will be confronted by millions of pages which promise to offer you secrets that many people will not have heard of. A lot of what you will find will not make a blind bit of good in helping achieve your goal.

But in amongst the rubbish bits of advice you will find one or two little gems. Gems that could help increase the amount of clicks you receive form your visitors.

1. Combine Colours With Blog Colours – I have found that by making the colours on the Adsense banner the same as the colours on your blog you blend the ad into your blog and they do not look like typical default adverts.

These days you can even change the text font of the ads as well to make them blend into your blog even better.

2. Pick The Right Ad Unit – Picking the right ad unit for the right place on your blog is very important. Not sure if many are aware of this but some ad units give off better results than others. I’ve found 728×90, 350×250 and 160×600 to be the best working ones for me.

Not only is picking the right ad unit important but deciding where to put them is even more important. The general rule of thumb is that you want to place you Adsense ads above the fold of your blog. That means they should be placed in the top half of your blog.

3. Keep Your Theme Clean – This may not sound like good advice but if you keep your theme and blog nice and clean then you will find more people visiting your blog and therefore more people will probably click on your ads.

If you have used a tip, that isn’t listed here, and found it has worked for you then why not leave a comment and let us know what it was?

Post from: I Need Discipline

3 Tips To Increase Adsense Clicks

If you leave comments on a regular basis on blogs then you will no doubt have seen that some blogs have little pictures of themselves next to some people’s names. Not only does this sort of thing make your comment stand out but it can also add something to your brand.

Believe it or not it is incredibly easy to set one of these up for yourself for when you leave comments on blogs.

1. Go to gravatar.com and create yourself a free account.

2. Once you have created your account follow the instructions on how to upload your chosen image.

That is it.

You should remember that your image will only appear on blogs that have Gravatar activated and that you must make sure when you leave a comment you enter the same email address that you used when creating your free Gravatar account.

How easy was that? Now why not test it out and leave a comment to this blog post and see your image appear.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Add Your Image To Blog Comments

To be honest I wasn’t going to do a monthly blog income report for January as I had done pretty much nothing with the blog for most of the month. But I thought that it would be unfair to only document the months when I actually do well so I decided to post one.

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

The unique visitor count for January stands at 866, which is a drop of 33 from the month of December. Which is not too bad considering I only published about three posts during the entire month.

The page impression count for January stands at 1,184, which again is a drop of 302 from the month of December.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 1.37 pages.

Search engines accounted for 22.86% of my traffic. 18.59% of my traffic was from referring sites. 58.31% was from direct traffic. 0.23% of my traffic was from ‘other’ which I have no idea what that is.

Money Money Money!

Adbrite = $0.27 (-$0.60)
AdsDaq = $0.12 (-$0.89)
Adsense = $0.79 (-$4.96)
Adtoll = $0.00 (-$2.12)
Infolinks = $0.08 (-$0.48)
Kontera = $0.10 (-$0.25)
Reviews = $74.94 (-$30.06)
Smowtion = $0.38 (-$0.10)
TLA = $12.25 (No Change)
Tradedoubler = $1.10 (+$0.13)
UnderDog = $0.08 (-$0.03)

Total = $90.11 (-$54.71)

- Linkworth paid me the money they owed me, BlogAdvertisingStore now owe me $96.00, just $4.00 more and I can cash out.

- 4d18ent seem to have shut up shop, which is a shame as I was doing well and had got over $30 before they went missing. This is one of the hazards with dealing with new companies though.

Top Five Search Terms

I like this part of the monthly income report. It is amazing how people find my blog on search engines.

1. blog review networks
2. lessons will be learnt
3. i need discipline
4. specticles
5.my plans for the future

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. December 2009 Blog Income Report
2. 19 Blog Review Networks
3. Blogitive – Nice To Add To Your Collection
4. Look What Hobbies You Can Have When You Work From Home
5. Get Paid To Have A Merry Christmas

5 Top Site Referrals

The top five sites that sent the most visitors to this blog.

1. forums.digitalpoint.com
2. intensedebate.com
3. forum.smorty.com
4. problogger.net
5. affiliateblogonline.com

This blog, and me earning money online, would not be possible if it was not for those awesome folk over at BlueHost. If you are looking for quality, reliable and cheap hosting then I urge you to check them out today.

Post from: I Need Discipline

January 2010 Blog Income Report

At some point late yesterday evening Wordpress released the 2.9.1 update patch which has the fixes to the bugs that were found in 2.9, and trust me there were a hell of a lot of bugs found in 2.9.

It fixes a lot of problems but the most important ones are the blank page when leaving comments and the scheduling bug (scheduled posts not publishing when meant to).

It also contains security solutions that were spotted in the original release.

I’d advise everyone to upgrade as soon as possible.

Download 2.9.1 Here

Post from: I Need Discipline

Wordpress 2.9.1 Updatee Released

2009 has come and gone, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and I was sitting at my desk wondering what lessons I have learnt from the past twelve months. Even the most experienced bloggers will have learnt at least one thing a year.

Here is what I have learnt.

Don’t Rush Into Buying Sites

A couple of months ago I bought this blog, along with a collection of others, and to be honest the sale almost didn’t happen.

Earlier in the year I bought a web site from somebody who had written false information about the stats of their site and I believed them and rushed in and handed over the money for it. I haven’t made a profit on that site yet.

When the opportunity came along to buy this blog I was very cautious and went over every single aspect of the stats that the owner had given me, just to be extra sure it was all true. I was almost too cautious and someone else almost took the collection of blogs from under my nose.

If You Don’t Put In Effort Your Income & Traffic Will Suffer

I guess this is a bit of a simple thing to understand. But when I first started it was something that I thought people only said and that I never really happened.

There have been a couple of gaps where content has been very slow coming out of me and it shows in the traffic stats and, more importantly, in my PayPal and bank accounts.

What I’ve started doing is stock-piling articles for the days when I can’t write anything. That way, hopefully, there won’t be as many of these gaps as before.

The MMO Niche Is Full Of People Willing To Scam You

I have only been in this niche for a couple of years but it was not until 2009 that I really found out just how many people in this niche are happy to scam you, rip you off and generally talk a lot of rubbish.

They all have the same agenda: to sell you their product and wares. That is why I have had to scale down plugging my personal Twitter and Facebook profiles because people would add me and them spam me in the hope I’d buy their new e-book or product.

What have you learnt from 2009?

Post from: I Need Discipline

Lessons That I Have Learnt From 2009

I hope everybody enjoyed their Christmases and also any new year’s eve parties they might have gone to. For a lot of bloggers the Christmas period is a time in the year where they will see a slump in income and traffic as people are busy or on holidays.

OK, so let’s get straight down to business.

Page Impressions & Visitor Count

As I said, the holiday periods tend to see a drop in income and traffic, but for some reason this made me even more determined to increase those two fields. I spent more time blog commenting, posting on forums, publishing posts and generally creating a bit of a buzz about the blog.

The unique visitor count for December stands at 899, which is a very nice jump of 214 from the month of November.

The page impression count for December stands at 1,486, which again is a healthy jump of 258 from the month of November.

This means that each unique visitor looked at 1.65 pages.

Google’s search engine accounted for 21.47% of my traffic. 47.24% of my traffic was from referring sites and 29.03% was from direct traffic.

Money Money Money!

4d18ent = $7.57 (New)
Adbrite = $0.87 (+$0.09)
ADSDAQ = $1.01 (-$0.17)
Adsense = $5.75 (+$4.57)
Adtoll = $2.12 (+$0.55)
Info Links = $0.56 (New)
Kontera = $0.25 (+$0.21)
Reviews = $105.00 (+$30.50)
Paid Tweets = $5.48 (-$1.33)
Smowtion = $0.48 (+$0.04)
Social Spark = $2.40. (-$1.68)
TLA = $12.25 (No Change)
Tradedoubler = $0.97 (+$0.61)
UnderDog = $0.11(New)

Total = $144.82 (+$31.51)

- I know I said I was getting rid of Kontera but just as I was about to do it they started coming up with decent click amounts and this month I have received the most I think I’ve ever had with them. Might put them on my smaller blogs and see what happens.

- The review company that I mentioned last month are still holding onto around $80.00. Linkworth are also dragging their heels slightly on the $65.00+ that they owe me but they promised that by the 10th of this month.

- 4d18ent is a new advertising company that I’m using. They may have a silly name but they do seem to pay well. Although they do tend to insert audio ads and pop ups from time to time.

- Info Links is the replacement on my main blogs for Kontera, as you can see I have earned almost double in one month what I have earned with Kontera in about a year.

Top Five Search Terms

I like this part of the monthly income report. It is amazing how people find my blog on search engines.

1. earn money paid to tweet
2. my plans for the future
3. ? need dofollow site
4. ptc advertisers
5. need for discipline

Popular Posts Of The Month

1. Poll: Would You Pay For Extra Blog Reviews?
2. 19 Blog Review Networks
3. Get Paid To Have A Merry Christmas
4. Fancy Writing A Guest Post?
5. Blogitive – Nice To Add To Your Collection

5 Top Site Referrals

The top five sites that sent the most visitors to this blog in November.

1. forums.digitalpoint.com
2. problogger.net
3. intensedebate.com
4. dailyblogtips.com
5. forum.smorty.com

This blog, and me earning money online, would not be possible if it was not for those awesome folk over at BlueHost. If you are looking for quality, reliable and cheap hosting then I urge you to check them out today.

Post from: I Need Discipline

December 2009 Blog Income Report