You might think that the Internet would make it very easy for people who are shy or doubtful to really step forward. After all, you may never meet your customers or even your business partners face-to-face.

And yet, there are many online entrepreneurs out there who suffer from a lack of confidence. Their businesses suffer, too. If you’re feeling doubtful or shy about your abilities as an online marketer, it’s time to take charge and conquer those doubts and fears so that you can conquer the Internet marketing world!

Let’s take some time to look at ways to boost your confidence and start making a splash:

· Use visualization as a confidence-building tool. There is great power in visualizing the scenarios you want to produce in your life. In fact, we do it every day. Sometimes you might play out a scene in your head that is negative, only to find that it reproduces itself in real life!

You can do it the opposite way, creating a positive scene and using it as a way to produce positive results. Try this exercise: Picture yourself reaching an important goal in your life. Maybe it’s to buy a brand new sports car. Maybe it’s to run in and finish a marathon.
It can be anything.

Close your eyes and breathe deeply to relax. Visualize this accomplishment. Feel the positive feelings. Feel the way your body responds. Take time to enjoy every bit of it. Visualizing like this is a very powerful way to bring those good things into your life. It helps you focus on the positive.

· Organize yourself. The more organized you can make your work life and your personal life, the better you will feel about working to get ahead. This goes hand-inhand with visualizing because when you get organized, you’re creating a clean canvas to paint your picture of success on.

· Be prepared. Know your products inside and out and have the tools you need to work successfully on hand. Those tools might include computer software, freelance writers or other freelancers that you can call on for help, and a collection of motivational tools that help you feel confident and fired up.

· Focus your thoughts, words and actions on the positive. You’ve heard the phrase “fake it till you make it,” right? There is some value to this saying. In life, as in business, it’s vital to keep your thoughts positive and forward moving. This leads to positive and forwardmoving words and actions. One follows after the other.

· Set goals for yourself that are attainable, but that will make you have to work a bit to reach them. This is one excellent way of creating confidence. Each time you reach one of these goals, you will have gained skill, knowledge and confidence. Then move up to the next goal.

· Keep trying. Never quit. Taking just five minutes a day to visualize will help you see your goals, bringing them into sharper focus. This will strengthen your confidence and send you down the path you’ve already walked in your mind. Don’t give up.

In Internet marketing, you can take things as fast or as slow as you like, but either way, you are still going to eventually want to work on branding yourself effectively, and pursuing joint ventures with other Internet marketers. You might want to take on writing eBooks and you might want to expand your horizons. The way to do this is through building confidence one step and one visualization at a time.

Pitt tells Wilberforce, “We’re too young to realize certain things are impossible. So we’ll do them anyway.”

The movie is based on the true life story of William Wilberforce who did take on the English establishment and persuaded those in power to end the inhumane trade of slavery. He was too young to believe those who said this was impossible.

We see many examples of this today in youth. With adolescence often comes a feeling of invincibility and risk-taking behaviors. While some of these behaviors are dangerous, there’s a flip side to this.

The enthusiasm and unquestioning belief that one can do something, no matter what others say, is an attitude that launches many a young person to great levels of success, from record breaking athletics to highly successful entrepreneurship.

Have you noticed on some of the popular marketing forums that for every enthusiastic newcomer to Internet marketing, there is a handful of naysayers offering reality checks?

“Don’t plan on quitting your day job anytime soon. It’s impossible to make an honest living on the Internet these days. There’s too much competition. You’re going to need a lot of money if you want to make a lot of money.” And the clincher, “Making a decent living online is much, much harder than you think – just read the threads on our forum, you’ll see.”

And yet, the kids don’t see…

Children and teens are making good money online – and they’re starting from scratch – no budget except their allowance. Are they spending precious time reading “reality check” advice? Heck no. They’re too busy being creative and having fun.

It is estimated that about 1.6 million teens are making at least some money online. About half of these kids are writing content for their sites, adding affiliate links and collecting commissions. Many children under the age of 13 are also making good money online.

Lissa Daniels, at age 11, built a website by teaching herself html. When she wanted a certain shade of blue text, she’d find it on another site that used it, and then view the code in View > Source. As she built her site, snippet by snippet of code, she created a tutorial, at first for her own reference, and then to help others. Lissa’s site quickly grew in popularity. By the time she was 12, she needed money for more bandwidth. She didn’t think her parents would cover it, so she took the initiative to find an advertiser. Due to her age, several turned her down. Lissa persisted, found one, and was able to pay for the bandwidth to support 500,000 hits a month. By age 17, her site had five million unique visitors each month, and the ad revenues paid for a new car and a nice nest egg for college. Her site is www.LissaExplains.com

Then there’s Ashley Qualls who, having taught herself html and Web design, created a site at age 15 (in 2005), www.WhateverLife.com offering free layout design to other teen girls for their MySpace pages. Ashley bartered design services for web hosting. When her traffic exploded to the point that she needed a dedicated server, a much more costly investment than she could barter or pay for with babysitting money, her hosting company recommended Google Adsense. At age 17 Ashley’s Adsense checks were over $70,000 a month and she bought a house. She accomplished all this  without any upfront money or even encouragement from her family other than to “Get off that computer!” Ashley simply loved designing websites and found a way to make that possible.

Matthew Bischoff, at www.MatthewBischoff.com, was one of the first ten people and the first teen to adopt a then new Web technology – Podcasting. He was 13. Matthew launched his own homegrown radio show “This is Escape from the World,” from his New Jersey bedroom where he talks about the newest and coolest technologies. Prior to the Podcast, Matthew blogged about technology.

At his show’s peak he had over 7,000 weekly listeners from over 30 countries. He’s listed on iPodder.org as a “Podcast Pioneer” and has been interviewed by the L.A. Times and other newspapers for his contributions to podcasting.

At the age of 12, Tom Hadfield started an Internet company from his bedroom in Brighton, England that he called Soccernet.com. A few years later, ESPN bought it for $40 million. “No one ever knew I was a kid online… All I needed to do was spell properly…” Tom told Boston.com

Hadfield has since started several new businesses, managed a global environmental education program, started an initiative to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur, and headed up a philanthropic project in Zambia.

“A lot of people would have said that it was naive when I was 12 to set up an Internet website like Soccernet.com – but luckily I didn’t listen.” And that is the key for all the adults who are reading this – don’t listen.

Don’t listen to the naysayers; don’t listen to your self-doubts; don’t listen to those who tell you to get a “real job.” Instead, take a cue from the kids and buoy up your confidence because, as another risk taker, Henry Ford, once said, “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.”

Add to this the overwhelming amount of information on Internet marketing to sift through. Then there’s the potential distraction of the Internet itself – short side trips to just “check something real quick” can turn into major interruptions, as can email, texting, and instant messages.

Let’s look at some things you can do to get and stay focused on your business so you can get closer to your goals.

Imagine your future. Picture your future as you’d like it to be six months, then one year, then maybe five or ten years from now. Include everything that comes to mind – family, home, income, social, spiritual, things you dream of doing and having, etc.

Write down these desires in a notebook. Write them as if they’re already come about and keep the focus positive.

For example:

Don’t write…

“I will solve my financial problems.”

Instead write,

“My finances are in order and I am prospering.”

Spend a little time everyday working with your list. Some find it most helpful to write or say affirmations, others like to create vision boards, still others can daydream so vividly that is all that is needed. Find what works best for you with the goal being to fire up the feeling that you imagine you’ll have when these things actually happen for you.

This is important for two reasons:

1. The more feeling you put into it, the more your subconscious accepts this as reality, meaning you have now harnessed the power of belief.

2. You will be more motivated to focus on your business.

Also important – your notebook isn’t set in stone. Your desires will evolve and change as you work with it.

Turn your dreams into goals. Starting with the items in your notebook of most importance, consider how you can bring them to fruition, whether that means earning X amount of dollars or achieving a better work/personal life balance.

What things can you do in your Internet marketing business to move toward these goals? Write these ideas down. Then zoom in on one of your shorter terms goals, breaking it down into steps. Once you’ve accomplished a few of these, you’ll feel more confident and be better able to focus on the longer-term goals.

Create a specific plan of action. Of the things that you feel are needed to achieve this first goal, what things can you begin this week? Write them down. For example, if your goal is to increase your ROI to X amount by doubling the size of your list through social network, part of your game plan could look like this:

Double the size of my subscription list by _(insert date)_ by networking on Twitter and Facebook.

* Twitter – Create a good profile and posts that attract like-minded followers by____.
* Learn how to write a winning profile.
* Learn the etiquette of Twitter posting for success.

Be realistic when setting dates for completion. Consider your other commitments. Do you devote time to fitness? A relationship? Children? Maybe you have a part time or full time job, value a clean house, have hobbies, etc. There’s only so many hours in a day, and you need your sleep to stay healthy and thinking sharp. It’s time to prioritize. Can you let go of a hobby until your business takes off? Assign the time-consuming house cleaning jobs to someone else?

After working this out, estimate how many hours a week you can devote to your business. Is there anything you can outsource that will allow you to focus on the aspects of the business you do best? Figure this in.

Then, keeping your time allowances in mind, set the completion dates for your first goal and the various steps to achieving it.

Mark your calendar. Some people do their best marketing in long blocks of time, while others prefer short but more frequent work periods. Keeping in mind your most productive method and your other commitments, block out your marketing time on a calendar that you see daily.

Stay focused, within reason. Remove distractions that can be ignored – maybe this means setting your IM to “away” and closing your inbox. Buffer yourself from whatever distracts you that doesn’t need immediate attention.

Figure out a way to let family members know you’re working, perhaps by wearing a special set of headphones or closing the home office door. If you don’t achieve the day’s milestone, that’s ok. But do make room for it the next day. The main thing is to keep your priorities straight. Taking time out for a child or good friend is not the same as casually chatting with the neighbor for an hour.

When you’re working and get stuck on something, take a short walk outside or do some stretches. Exercise and “green time” are proven to help with focus.

If you continue to dream your dreams, work on your goals, keep your priorities in order and reasonably stick to your goal calendar, you will find that you have accomplished what stumps most people – you will be focused and make money online in 2010!

Indeed, where DOES the time go?

When you hear that, do you immediately start trying to think of your significant achievements over the past year? I do. Sometimes I get a little nervous and wish I had a better “handle on time” because it seems to slip away so fast.

So here you are one year older, hopefully wiser, and have you thought about what you have accomplished this year?

Ultimately, what you did in the last 12 months is in your unchangeable past, and what truly matters is, “What will you do in the next 12 months that will put you closer to achieving your dreams?”

Or maybe the real question is, “Do you even have any dreams for your life?”

I’ve heard it said that a life without dreams is a life not worth living. I believe we are here to experience the grandest version of who we can become, based on our wildest dreams – as far as our imagination can take us. I believe that anyone can realize a dream, purely by having an unrelenting burning desire and then allowing its creation to manifest.

As Jiminy Cricket sang to Pinnochio, “When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme” or, as James Allen, author of As a Man Thinketh, wrote, “Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be,” there are no limits when you find a dream you are passionate about. None!

Beware of mistaking desperation for passion. Dreams fueled by desperation or lack cannot be realized, for lack can only create more of itself. Many jump from this opportunity to that opportunity, all the while focused on a status of being broke rather than a dream of being prosperous.

If you want to know where your thoughts have been focused, look at your life. If you don’t like what you see, change your thoughts. Envision your own dream of an amazing life, whatever that means to you, and let your desire to live that life influence your every thought.

This Holiday season, instead of lamenting about where the time went, give yourself the gift of a dream you feel passionate about.

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2010!

Jerry Mcvictor

Every day, clever young (or old) minds come up with newer and better ways to help you achieve success. There are hundreds of tools already out there that can save you time, improve the quality of your site, contact new clients and much more.

It seems there’s always a new site, tool, or strategy you need to learn to keep pulling in profits. You can maintain the momentum of your success by continuing to learn new strategies and techniques.

When looking through the latest and greatest in technology, make sure that you are truly selecting items that are relevant to your business model. There are plenty out there, but some will and some won’t work for you.

Right here at MCVICTOR.COM you can learn new things that are related to online business success and making money online. One thing we all know is there is no resting on your laurels once you start profiting – you have to stay ahead of the competition and continue capturing the attention of your niche audience.

Let’s go over some ways you can further your own growth in the business world without spending a fortune (and a lot of time).

Learn New Business Strategies

In the online world, you have the endless opportunity to recreate yourself. You can target any niche, build an empire around it, and move on as an expert in another field. You can also use various approaches to learn what works best for each target audience.

However, you may find one day a business strategy that has been working well for you for many months (or even years) is suddenly outdated or unappealing to the masses. When this happens and your financial growth becomes stagnant, you need to learn from the online community to see what strategies are working well for others – or even pave the way for new success stories by developing your own new practices.

Learn How to Reduce Refund Requests

Refunds are a fact of life when you do business on the Internet. It’s hard to get people to entrust their financial details to you if you don’t offer a guarantee of some sort. They have no name or face to go by, and it can be a scary situation for many online consumers.

Some of the most successful websites have had instances where their business started to garner too many refund requests. Sometimes, it can seriously put your entire business in jeopardy.

If you have an information product on ClickBank, for instance, and they start to see too many refund requests, they will email you and threaten to pull your product from its marketplace.

You always want to have a Plan B waiting in the wings in case your service, product, or membership site begins to show signs of distress. The first thing you want to do is find out why the refunds are occurring.

What you find out could mean you have to completely revamp your product or offer, or it could be something as simple as tweaking a headline in your sales copy that promises something they didn’t find in the eBook.

Learn How to Offer Better Customer Service

Customer service is possibly the most important aspect of any business. It’s always beneficial to learn new techniques dealing with everything from an angry client to expanding and organizing your databases.

Even if you think you’re a people person that doesn’t mean your customer service is up to par. Make sure you’re communicating with clients in a timely fashion. Sometimes emails get pushed to the back burner or we respond like robots, forgetting there’s an actual human on the other end of that communication.

Learn How to Write Better Sales Copy

What the public hears and sees is a great tool to expanding a business. You pay a lot of money for advertising. Learning how to write, what works and doesn’t work or even learning how to outsource are fantastic ways to make sure that you look and sound as professional as possible. 

When looking for tools on sales copy, research the writer, the tools and cost against what you are really looking to get from your advertising dollars. Sometimes it’s less expensive to outsource your copywriting needs when you consider the time involved in writing for yourself.

But some of you may be able to read a good book on copywriting for an online audience and hand-craft compelling sales copy that has a unique style all your own. A little bit of self-education can go a long way in helping you tweak your onversion rates.

Learn How to Create a Better Product

Although you created the product, there are a variety of ways to streamline it. Online continuing education can not only help you come up with new ideas, but can even help you to improve on your current product.

For instance, let’s say you write an information product on How to Use Autoresponders. Your sales started out fine, but now they’re dwindling, or refund requests are gaining speed.

You need to develop a better product. Maybe it needs more features – a better selection of bells and whistles. Or maybe you need to add more media to your product, such as a video tutorial or audio file walking your customer through the initial setup of their purchase.

Learn How to Build Your Business

Research how to build your business. This can entail everything from software, hardware and even learning what sales techniques work according to basic demographic information.

When you find your niche, you want to build an successful business. That means covering every topic within that main category, as well as providing everything your customers could possibly need.

For example, if your line revolves around eBay, then you might have products teaching how to set up an account, how to increase sales, software tools they can use to track their eBay venture, follow-up tactics, etc.

Learn How to Brand Your Name and Image

Think about the company names, jingles, commercials and songs that are stuck in your head. This is what branding is all about. The more people are talking about you and your product, the more they will go to you first with their needs. With the online world, reputation means more than a jingle. You build a solid reputation by over-delivering to your customers. Watch how other successful people do it when you’re continuing your education in this realm.

These important learning tools help you build your business and stay competitive in a growing online universe. Instinct plays a huge part in decisions about actual tools and strategies you focus on, but be careful not to just jump on the bandwagon – make sure it’s something truly useful to you before you invest time and money into it.

That’s not to say someone who is newly emerged on the scene can’t contribute to the equation. It’s very possible a breakout star will hit one out of the ballpark – but as a rule of thumb, try to partner with someone you can learn from throughout the venture.

You’re bound to come across potential partners that don’t respond. For instance, if you start out emailing the top best-known ‘net marketers with an offer, you have to realize that their inbox is flooded with more of the same, so they may not even respond to you.

Instead of getting angry and demanding an answer (read: burning bridges), stay calm, and one day they may approach you for a Joint Venture opportunity. Continue trying to find the best person to partner with.

Ask around at forums to see if anyone has the talents or tools that you need. Whenever you get a name, be sure to Google that person and read up on his/her reputation. The last thing you want to do is partner with someone whose reputation has the potential to tarnish your name. When you find the right contact person, draft your letter of opportunity. Make sure you include all of the pertinent details to turn their doubts into affirmatives.

If your product complements their own, be sure to discuss the benefits to them of providing their own customers with access to it. If money is the bottom line, discuss the potential profits involved.

Rumor has it that someone once sent a prospective Joint Venture partner $500 cash in the mail. The offer said something to the effect of, “I’m so confident we’re going to make money on this, that I’m giving you your first $500 commission TODAY!”

If you can’t figure out how to contact the owner of a website, try going to http:// www.nicforce.net/whois/ and entering the site’s URL. This will usually tell you how to contact the administrator of the site.

Wash, Rinse Repeat.

When you successfully generate one Joint Venture opportunity, make sure it goes as smoothly as possible, and learn from any mistakes. You want the process to go over well – not only so you can repeat a future Joint Venture with the same partner, but so that word will spread of your success and more opportunities will come your way.

You can get testimonials from your Joint Venture partners (and give reciprocal testimonials as well) to entice others to give your suggestions a try. Make sure your website allows other people to contact you as your success grows.

You may or may not want to proceed with a formal agreement. It’s usually better if things are spelled out in legal format to protect both parties involved. However, some JV partners forego the legalese and simply shake hands on their partnership.

Whatever you feel comfortable doing, make sure each party understands his or her own responsibilities in the deal and what the monetary share will be when and if the project becomes a success.

One big problem many Internet marketers create for themselves is having their hands in too many cookie jars. They get a great idea, launch and fiddle with it for a week or a month, and then get bored and try something else if the money isn’t pouring in and flooding their bank account. Truthfully, this describes the vast majority of Internet marketers.

As every successful entrepreneur knows, you have to give your all to one venture and help it get off the ground before you divide up your attention. You could give 25% of your time and effort to four projects at once, but none of them would ever amount to what they could have achieved had you given each of them, one at a time, 100% of your dedication until the peak performance of each project was automated and passive (hands-off success). Read that sentence again, because it is a concept that most would-be entrepreneurs do not grasp.

Priming Your Success With a Blueprint.

Whether you’re just now learning about online selling, or you’re an experienced marketer, you need to map out the road you intend to take on your journey toward increased profits and financial independence.

It happens time and time again – a newcomer gets so excited about the potential to earn that he jumps in headfirst without a plan in place, setting himself up for guaranteed failure. 

You don’t have to write out a task list for every single thing you do, like answering emails or processing payments. But you need the major projects organized so that you know what step you need to take next toward reaching your goals.

For instance, what major steps need to be taken to launch an information product? You have to brainstorm an idea, write the product, compile it, write the sales copy, design and launch a website, and submit it to search engines.

Those are just the necessities to get it off the ground. There are many other tasks that can be done within each item on your list. In the “design and launch a website” category, you might have tasks such as compile a keyword list or generate Meta tags.

Considering Your Next Move.

When you find yourself moving on to another project, stop and ask yourself if the previous project is able to run itself with minimal input from you. If it’s a service business, then you may have to devote 100% of your attention without ever moving on to another project unless you first decide to let the services go.

Another option may be to minimize your services and only offer them part time while you focus on your next money-making endeavor. For instance, if you’re a writer but want to pursue Internet Marketing, you might begin turning down projects so that you can concentrate on writing your own eBook and launching it for a more passive income.

Maintaining One Project’s Success While Moving on to Another.

As mentioned before, a common pitfall many ‘net marketers fall into is starting too many projects at once, or too soon. It doesn’t matter if your goal is money, time, or prestige – you want to make sure the current project is as perfect as you can get it before you move on to something else.

Let’s consider the possibility that you have an information product. You created an eBook, launched a mini site, and set it up in ClickBank. Then you heard about someone making a lot of money with an AdSense site in the health niche.

Instead of waiting to pursue that project, and continuing to get your information product off the ground, you put the eBook on the back burner and started designing your AdSense site and creating content for it.

What happens to the first product?

There was much more you could have done to foster the growth of its success. As it stands now, it won’t get ranked high in the search engines, it has no exposure, and no one promoting it. You’ve abandoned it so it is guaranteed to fail.

What else should you have done before you moved on to the AdSense site?

You could have created an affiliate center and toolbox to entice others to promote the product for you in exchange for a percentage of the sale. You could have created viral articles and teaser eBooks to get people interested in it.

Press releases would have been useful to increase the coverage the product received. You should have approached eZines and Joint Venture partners to see if they would allow you to introduce your product to them. Pay-per-click campaigns could have generated a flow of traffic, and the list goes on.

Only after you have exhausted all of these efforts should you move on to something else. Great ideas about future business ventures can always be filed away for later use. You can come back to it once your current efforts are underway.

Knowing When to Say When.

Would you rather be really good at one or two things, or be average at several? It’s better to position yourself as an expert in whatever field you choose to target. While multiple streams of income are a positive aspect of the many opportunities available with Internet marketing, it doesn’t mean you have to continue inventing new projects.

Instead of moving on to something completely different, why not interlink your projects together? If the eBook you launched was a health topic, then an AdSense site on the same subject matter, with hyperlinks pointing to the mini site, would be financially rewarding in more than one way.

If you have your hands full with a membership site, then it would be a bad idea to neglect it while you work to create a new income stream. You never want your existing project to suffer because of your new pursuits. Not only would your membership begin to dwindle, but your reputation would suffer, making any new endeavors pointless because people would not trust the source of the information.

Know when to stop branching out. If you simply must pursue another project, make sure you outsource as much as possible if you’re already too busy with other work. Use sites like Elance.com, Guru.com or Rentacoder.com to have others do the labor while you focus on current business needs.

Putting these rules into practice will ensure that your reputation remains solid and your income steady until your business can handle your absence while you pursue the next project.

You can do a lot of things to improve or harm your online business, but there is definitely one thing that will end your dream faster than you can say “boo.” It is tempting and clever. Be on the lookout for this danger so you can squelch it at once! The culprit is …

NOT remaining consistent.

You were on a roll and got a lot of work done the week after you started that new business opportunity. You went for the gold. And made some progress. Then the problem starts. The following week you do less. You decide to take it easy because you did knock yourself out last week … and wasn’t having control of your time the reason why you got started this online business? That is a big MISTAKE! Once you have momentum … keep it going … don’t back down!!!

Marketing your business online revolves around the idea of compound interest. That’s the old question of how much cash you’d have if you doubled a penny daily for thirty days. Do the math and you’ll find it totals more than $5,000,000. But if you take each day at a time … at Day 10, the total is $5.12, and it takes until Day 18 to get to a thousand dollars. So it’s difficult to believe that penny grows so much in 30 days.

But that is the uncanny truth of interest compounding … it builds on itself! But the full effect takes some time. For example, you’d never have the $5 million result if you spent that $1,000 on Day 18. And you’d have to get another penny, restart at zero, and wait 30 more days.

Making money with your online business is the same process. The time you invest compounds like interest. If you work for 20 hours in Week 1, 2 in Week 2, don’t do anything in Week 3, and start to work hard again in Week 4, you will have mediocre results. Because although your average was 10 hours a week, you weren’t consistent. You didn’t allow the compounding principle to operate. Not working at your business consistently is almost like spending your money on Day 18! You’ll start over, from zero, repeatedly.

Are you prepared to pay the price to make a lot of money online? You cannot cut corners. An online business can provide your with a comfortable lifestyle, but there are no shortcuts, and you won’t see much success in the first month or maybe even the first year. You must maintain consistency for a minimum of 2 to 4 years!

 Schedule your online marketing time each week. I recommend you aim for at least 8 productive hours in that period … that’s 8 constructive, effective hours. That means planning for your business. Don’t begin the week – or the day – before you map it out in writing!

Start with content. The Internet is an organic information machine. It lives on fresh new content. Google, MSN/BING and Yahoo seek out this new relevant content on a continual basis. Google and other search engines base their searching and popularity algorithms on what real people are looking for.

That’s what SEO is all about. You want to make your website Google friendly. That means you should become an authority site with tons of relevant information for humans visitors and search engine spiders to consume.

Article submission at article directories also provides you with long-term backlinks and content that publishers can pick up. As long as it’s not time-based content, then a publisher could pick it up and release it with a backlink to your site in your signature file years later. This kind of slow growth makes Google believe in your organic authority, which can boost your position in the SERPs.

Another long term strategy is to have a good video campaign that people continue to share with others. Assuming you have an informative,instructive video on an evergreen topic, you can expect to get plenty of natural traffic for years to come.

What would you rather do: visit a site that has a dog training video or a site where you have to read how to train your dog? Most consumers like to see it in action because a) it helps to see rather than read, and b) it proves you’re the real deal. To make that even sweeter, if your instructional video is really good, it will make it onto other sites through embedded links.

Then there are the social bookmarking sites. Social in that many, many visitors have a chance to vote for your site by visiting it and then giving it the thumbs up. This will cause others to visit and vote, comment and backlink – participating in the social aspect of the World Wide Web.

Don’t just think about content. Think about tools, too. Have a techsavvy person create a tool such as a keyword solution or calorie counter or a budget calculator, depending on your niche, that visitors can download and share and see a link to your site in the footer.

Make use of offline traffic avenues, too. You can submit an article to a trade publication or consumer magazine for your niche. Just buy a yearly copy of the Writer’s Market and look up where to send them your  content. They’ll give you a byline and other publications could contact you for a follow-up interview.

Will there ever be a time that you can just let the business run on autopilot? In other words, can a webmaster step back and say, “I have plenty of business, I think I’ll walk away and let live on what’s coming in!” Yes, as soon as you get to the point that your site earns enough money for you to pay someone to do the upkeep, such as article or video submissions, on page and off page SEO, social bookmarking and so on. But the fact remains, like any brick and mortar business, you will need to stay involved with your potential customers. The best way to maintain top rankings in the search engines and keep in touch with your customers is to continue to serve fresh, relevant content.

(Matt lost a bet with his Googlers team and they got to shave his head!)

Mike McDonald from Webpronews.com spoke to Matt Cutts (Head of webspam team at Google)about the Caffeine update.

Matt says “the main objective of Caffeine is to allow for more and faster indexing. It will lay the foundation for any changes we want to do in indexing. Caffeine is re-architecting or rewriting a large chunck of how we index web pages.”

Caffeine is the largest update in four years but currently there’s nothing new to the user interface and most of the changes are going on “under the hood”.

Here’s the preview site: http://www2.sandbox.google.com