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People often ask me for advice on ‘how to succeed’…

I was asked just a little while ago and I don’t have stock answers generally but this time I started thinking about how you could boil success down into a paragraph or two. I know plenty of people do this online, I must have seen zillions myself over the years. So I thought I’d do mine without ‘cheating’ and using any search engines or other peoples’ words generally.

And so, as with many other things you find online, there is no claimed originality or unique insight. Just that sometimes one can hear something from a particular person, said in a particular way and it just clicks where hearing (or reading) it countless times from others, it didn’t. Maybe we just weren’t ready to hear it before.

So here goes. Let’s hope my particular way of saying the same as many others will have said before me, will somehow help you!!

Take action early. Don’t worry about understanding everything before you start. Provided you use common sense, you’re unlikely to do much harm. But action is the best teacher, and learning by watching is second best. Reading or hearing about something is not generally a great way to learn unless you follow what you’re reading and do it alongside.

‘Master’ one skill at a time. I don’t mean don’t move on until you’re perfect. But if you’re learning about submitting articles, practice until you know all the steps and could write and submit an article any time you needed to. If you don’t do that and you go off learning something else, there’s a high chance you’ll have to start right at the beginning again when you come to submit your next article.

Aim to fail as quickly as possible. We learn from mistakes very well. I’m not saying make them deliberately but the point once again is rather than worry about getting 100% prepared before you start (and then find something still goes wrong!), do something as soon as you think you’re close. Chances are that doing it will reveal bigger ‘holes’ than the ones you were fretting over before you did it so you can now sort those out.

If something works and it’s a useful skill, make sure you do it regularly enough that you don’t need to start over if you need to do it again. And if something didn’t work as well as you hoped, don’t give up right away but don’t blindly do it again. At the very least review what happened and if you think it was just unlucky, by all means try again. But don’t do something over and over that doesn’t work over and over!

Make notes and think about what other people you come across are doing. Try to understand their ‘business model’. If you sign up for something for example, make a note of all the steps you go through. If you’ve got reason to believe they’re successful then…

copy copy copy copy copy

Copy what successful people are doing. Learn from successful people.

I don’t mind being asked how to be successful, even though it’s a bit vague. But don’t expect to be handed the answer – there isn’t one.

Soak up information but don’t overdo it. Get a feeling for what you want to do, the skills you’ll need and focus on those and try not to get distracted into learning things that won’t help you right now. But devote 10% of your time perhaps to ‘keeping an eye on’ what’s going on in the world.

Making money online is easy. Anyone can do it. Making money consistently and in sufficient quantity to be worthwhile is much harder and don’t believe a single website that says it will be quick or it won’t need effort on your part.

Build a list. This is the most ignored piece of advice online and must have cost hundreds of thousands of wannabe marketers, millions of dollars.

The only other ways to build a consistent income without a list are to run a membership site and get subscription type incomes or to find a good program with a worthwhile product and a good multi-level pay plan and promote it almost to the exclusion of everything else until you’re making the money you want.

Now why are those last couple of items as close to a guarantee of success as you’ll get?

Because they’re all incremental.

If you have a list, all your effort will grow your list, you don’t start each day with an empty list, you start from where you got to the previous day

If you have a membership site, all your effort will get you more members (generally) and that means more paying members and more income.

If you have a good multilevel business with a product people need and want, each time you refer a new member to your team, you’re growing.

Do you see the pattern and the similarity there? Compare that with trying to make affiliate sales without having a list. Or promoting on traffic exchanges without building a list. Or selling things on ebay. Or..Or..Or..

So that’s my advice for what it’s worth. Take action, ‘master’ core skills and do things that are incremental and learn what residual income is all about.

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

If you’ve tried Google Adwords then you may have come across the frustration of having one or more of your keywords getting a poor quality score. All Google will tell you is that your landing page should be related to your keywords and your advert.

Well there is a way to make sure that your landing page matches your keywords in Google’s eyes – use the keywords Google thinks are right for your landing page!

After all, if they suggest the keywords for your landing page, they can hardly give those a low quality score, can they? This works really well. Of course the keywords might not include the ones you wanted. So instead of trying to add the keyword you want, try editing the landing page so that Google suggests that keyword. Bingo!

This is not a great secret but a lot of people haven’t been made aware of this really simple and cool way to keep your Adwords campaigns in great shape.

I just received an email from Jonathan Leger and as I’m in content mode at the moment, I went straight and watched the video.

Boy, am I glad I did. This software sets the bar very high indeed. At least based on the video preview – I would love to be reviewing this product for real right now but I guess I’ll have to wait.

There’s a link to the video at the end of this review.

I have never used Instant Article Wizard 1.0 so I don’t know how that performed but it gleaned its content from free articles. Version 2.0 uses the web at large! And the preview shows how to use it to generate really readable articles that look like they were written by one person.

I would like to make a suggestion both to anyone intending to use it and maybe to the great Jon himself: modify every sentence slightly rather than using it verbatim. Maybe the software should only let you retrieve the content after it’s been modified a small amount. Nothing too onerous but change a few nouns, insert superlatives, do something to each sentence.

Why?

Because good as this is, Google could easily detect these articles. Not saying it would now. But if Google didn’t like this concept, it could detect them. I may be wrong but if I’m right, you read it here first.

What are the odds of two people writing the exact same 10 word sentence? OK, if it’s on a specific topic it’s of course feasible. What if 3 or 4 or 5 people have that exact same sentence? Now while the article may well look extremely unique taken as a whole, if (and it is a very presumptive if) Google finds the exact same sentence used in multiple sites, Google can now simply look for that sentence and any site with the exact same sentence will be penalised because it’s a near certainty it was scraped.

Will Google care? Maybe not. There is some value in an article that ‘summarises’ lots of other articles. But if the big G does care, I’m guessing it could switch on detection in a heartbeat.

Change a couple of words in each sentence and it would dramatically reduce the chance of big G spotting it.

This is not to knock the product, far from it. It’s great and I would recommend it. But if it’s overused and if people are too lazy, it may lead to lots of sites getting slapped.

So be smart. Like any tool, use it wisely, not lazily – you might thank me one day. Then again, I could be talking rubbish.

What do you think?

Here’s the video

TS25 is a great traffic exchange but one can get even better performance if you use it with with a downline builder. As with many traffic exchanges, there’s a real benefit to you if you can get referrals i.e. introduce other team members into TS25. These members are known as your downline or your team.

TS25 has a really powerful feature that makes it different from many of the other traffic exchanges. In many traffic exchanges you can build a downline to earn ‘referral credits’ i.e. you earn a percentage of the credits earned by those members in your downline. This is great if those members in your downline are somewhat active surfers. Each one that isn’t an active surfer isn’t benefiting you.

This is where TS25 is different. With TS25, there is still some benefit to introducing people and I’ll explain why in a moment. Instead of earning referral traffic credits from your downline, you are going to earn traffic credits from a ‘syndicate’ generally (but not necessarily) formed from people that AREN’T in your downline.

Here’s the thing: one can earn the right to be part of a higher (more active) syndicate by doing more personal surfing. surf more sites and your surf points will be compared against all the other members in a ‘points ladder’ to decide which syndicate you will be in. As you keep surfing, you’ll keep popping up to the next higher syndicate (full of similarly active surfers).

By the end of the week, the extra credits you earn will not be those credits from your downline! Your extra credits will be the shared extra credits from the syndicate you worked your way into.

In this unique way, you can leverage your own efforts enormously and you’re not reliant upon the surfing activity (or otherwise) of the people you bring in.

Note there are minor differences depending on whether you’re a paid or free member.

Remember I said that there is some benefit to introducing other members, even though your weekly bonus credits are not worked from them, they’re earned from your syndicate?

When you have a downline, the number of personal referrals you have earns you a ‘starting value’ of credits. This means that even before one starts surfing for the week, you have credits. This makes it easier to get in the higher syndicates with less surfing. So the more people you’ve personally introduced to TS25, the higher up the points ladder you start the week. In time one could be in beginning near the top every week. To make this happen, you need to be using a downline builder.

As with using most traffic exchanges, you need to focus on developing a downline and the best way to do that is by utilising a downline builder like VitalViral with your traffic exchanges.