I’ve spent the last couple hours thinking about where I want to be at the end of this year. Last year was a tough year for me as the business grew faster than I was able to keep up with. This has caused me to have to regroup and rethink my next moves.

1. Customer service has to be at the front. There is nothing I’ll ever do with my business that will be more important than customer service.

2. Never ever stop. There are times when I want to through my hands up and walk away; those are the times I need to work my hardest.

3. Never lose my cool. No matter what the problem always remember that no one is getting out alive. It’s all just a game.

4. Simple is always better.

5. Plan, strategize, and organize before making any moves.

6. Answer every email in person; never try to automate an opportunity to communicate.

7. Never try to sell anything, just be a friend.

8. Target a market and go after it, do not try and conquer the whole internet.

9. Always remember that internet marketing is nothing more than common sense and persistence will always win.

10. Never play for the money; it’s all about the business.

11. Track everything

12. Work at making my website stupid proof.

13. Network more.

14. Start an affiliate program.

15. Write a contract for every job.  

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.

I decided to try my hand at affiliate marketing. I signed up for an affiliate program and did a little keyword research. I did not have a domain name related to the topic so decided to use an old name to work around any age filters.

I figured anything lost in a keyword rich domain name would be made up in the age of the name. I took a list of about 1,500 keywords as a base to start with and sprinkled them out between 2 sub domain names and the main site. Now the site is still being set up so it has a long ways to go. I have to set up and write original text for 1,500 pages.

But I had a friend and SEO expert tell me that if I changed the topic of the website it would go into a filter and take months to rank.

The old back links want help for ranking on the anchor text but they should still pass pr onto the site and help ranking for the current text and information being put on the site. They should also help with internal linking.

The site is here rubber wristbands and the content and pages are being added now. The spiders want be able to spider the left menu. It has some pretty neat mouse over affects but got broken when I was adding pages and needs to be fixed.

At the bottom of the page or near the bottom are five links. These five links link from page to page throughout the site and throughout the sub domains names that are also being added.

I am adding text as well as adding internal links to each page from outside sources. If the sub domain names start ranking and the main site does not then it would indicate some type of filter in place that keeps a site content from changing.

And if this is the case I have to wonder how much of a change would set off the filter. But I'll need at least a month to see if there is such a thing.

If there is I will lose a lot of time on this site. Which brings up a thought about rather or not redirecting the current site to a new domain name would let me bypass the age filter.

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.