I’ve seen a lot of people post on forums about duplicate content and I disagree with the information being posted.

I’ve got a blog about lawn mowers and since I know nothing about lawnmowers I went to some free article sites and got free information and stuck on my blog. Those articles rank on the major search engines and bring in traffic. I created another site about silicone wristbands and again used free articles for the information. Those articles are starting to rank and bring traffic into that site.

Duplicating an entire site when you are also duplicating the code would be a problem. However if you are posting an article onto an existing site then your code and links are different and the site is not duplicated. Not only will that post rank but if you put enough links to it will out rank the original article. I’ve seen it happen and I’ve also seen one article rank right behind another.

This means that when you write an article there is no reason to write one for your site and another to submit to the search engines. You only need to make sure your site has more incoming links going to the article.

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that one of the hardest things to do with any business is in dealing with employees and customers. It seems that enough time can never be spent with either.

Wanting to figure out new and better ways to work around these problems have caused me to try almost everything. None have worked to my satisfaction.

There are things I want to do in life that have nothing to do with running a business. But it seems almost impossible to do any of these things as long as my business is in play.

One thing I've never tried is affiliate marketing. I've never been very big on selling someone else's product and having to rely on their site to make the sale. Another problem with affiliate marketing is that I have to wait a month to get my money. Who wants to wait all month to get paid?

But recently my problems with affiliate marketing seem small compared with the problems of running my own business. I've got a client that sells silicone wristbands and I've decided to give his affiliate marketing a try.

I've got a lot of sites, some of which get decent traffic. Every since I started making my living online I've always herd it's about the traffic. But now I have to wonder. Would a site about lawn mowers convince a site visitor to purchase a silicone wristband?

I don't think so. This means the site has to be in line with my targeted market. For testing purposes I decided to create a blog and see if I can make blog post about silicone wristbands and drive traffic to my blog. But I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to build a website about silicone wristbands?

Since these silicone wristbands can be customized I could actually create my own silicone wristbands and send them to the page on that site to purchase them. But this would require a lot more time and who knows if I am even able to make the whole affiliate marketing thing work.

In the past I had gotten fairly good at driving traffic from social media sites but this traffic is not going to convert as well as I would like. But I think it would convert. I guess step one is in seeing if I am still able to drive traffic from social media sites to my silicone wristband blog.

But should it be a blog or a website. I think the website would convert better but would take longer to set up. However in the end if it made me more money it would be worth the extra effort.

I guess there is a lot to think about before I can even get started with this new adventure.

I get asked a lot for my thoughts on Social Media Marketing. So…I've decided to let Gregg start making some videos to post our thoughts on online marketing. 

This is the first of many to come.

I’m going to show you how to make money online.

I’m going to use a new domain name, market the site while running a web design business and being 36 weeks pregnant and best of all I’m going to make the site make money in a 3^rd world country. Where we can not accept credit cards online, PayPal will not allow us to open an account and it would take us 3 months to ship something to the U.S. And most people do not know how to use a computer, much less the Internet.

The site I’m going to use is http://www.dejatever.net/ and the domain name was bought on 26-Jul-07. That makes the domain name 10 days old.

I want to use the site to sell a product but because of the laws in this country the product will need to be sold here. I can’t ship merchandise out of the country and even if I could the time it would take to get the merchandise out of the country would be to long.

I need to design the site, set up a shopping cart, figure out what I’m going to sell, how to get the money and how to get the people to the site.

I’ve decided the best thing to do is set up a social media site that will allow people in Colombia to join and talk with one another. This will make it easer to keep people on the site and will allow them to purchase merchandise from the site. It will also help in building trust for the site. I am off to work on the design and will be back soon to post my next steps.