(With apologies to ‘Five Fingers of Death’) Every time I read a self-professed guru talk about his five or six or seven figures of income, I get suspicious. Unfortunately, if he’s not outright lying (and that’s a very real possibility), then he could be talking about net instead of gross. Is this a problem? I once read that grocery stores work on 3% margins. That means for every $100,000 of sales, they make only $3,000...

A few days ago, Technorati announced it was going to delist WordPress blogs it felt were spammy - not spammy themselves, you understand, but because of being hacked from outside. Here’s what they are saying (emphasis mine): we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised As to the exact criteria of a ‘compromised’ blog, it seems that invisible links to spam sites is the main thing. The problem is that...

Keep doing something, and you’re bound to profit from it. Sounds good - but how? I’m going to tell you about my ‘rule of 78′ for making money grow. It’s a rule about how to make money doing something consistently: Do $X a month, add $X a month to it, and you’ll make 78 times $X within a year! Here’s an example: say for instance you make $1,000 in sales one month, and you’re confident...

Many, many people will tell you about passion, and how important it is for blogging. And although can write just about anything you want (or even don’t want) online, having a passion can make it easier. • It can make you write when you don’t feel like it. • It can make you promote when you’d rather not. • It can keep you focused because you’re doing something you love. That said, it’s possible to blog without passion...

Here’s what you ALWAYS must blog about to make money: Focus. It’s one word, and the ONLY word you should worry about. Depending on the site you are creating, WHAT you talk about can vary - but the FOCUS of what you talk about should rarely vary. You’ll see blogs out there that go on about their last dinner, or what they did last night, or their feelings at the moment... ...and you can too...

I spent the weekend moving some sites around (and which will be discussed in an upcoming ActiveBlogging Report) and I realized that occasionally a bad domain name comes in handy. You know the ones I mean. You thought the name was cute at the time, but aren’t using it, and can’t let it go. Or a four letter domain name that seemed so obviously valuable when you bought it (and since all of them are...