This post was guest blogged by Alex Shalman, who created the 55 Monumental Ways To Enjoy Life’s Greatest Pleasures, and writes about practical personal development, communication, and relationships.

John Chow put it best when he said “unsuccessful people work hard for money, while successful people have money work hard for them.” Since traffic is the currency between blogs, and posts are what drive traffic, it would only make sense that we have our posts working hard for us.

In my previous post I told you how I’m able to churn out a ridiculous number of articles. However, I didn’t tell you what I do with them because that deserves some special attention, here.

The Reason We Do It

Why bother with making all of this come together? The point that we want to reach is life balance, where we balance Family (relationships), Physical (external), Work (business), and Spiritual (external). It’s clear to me that it is the healthiest overall way for us to live.

We want to be able to spend time with our family and not feel guilty that we should be working. We want to have a healthy body, and at the same time we want to have a healthy mind. It sounds like a lot, but in reality it only takes a few small steps and a bit of planning.

How We Do It - Posts In The Bank

Ever consider the amount of freedom you would have if your personal posting schedule was marked up in your calender for a full 2 weeks in advance? You could potentially take a day off blogging, without anyone knowing you went missing. That’s what I call having posts in the bank. They’re sitting there, waiting, while you can go off and work on other areas of your life.

The other thing we can do with that day off, is to keep writing. On the day that I’m writing this I have already written 2 posts that will be published today on my blog, one I just wrote for tomorrow, and this is the second one I’m writing for John. I’ve only been writing for an hour and a half. However, I have the comfort of knowing that if I wasn’t writing I have 20 other unpublished posts waiting as drafts to go up at any time.

It takes a bit of focus and dedication, but it’s very possible to have posts working for you. Guest posts on blogs which are much more popular than yours bring in more traffic (currency) than if they just sat on your own blog. That is what we mean when we say to ‘have your posts working for you.’ We’re exposing our posts, and more importantly ourselves, to a whole new audience, and making more and more ‘currency.’

So go ahead and make up a posting schedule, write a ton of posts, and give some ‘make money online’ posts to John so he can publish them here!

We’ve seen plenty of web directories before. We’ve also seen an innumerable number of paid wikis. In yet another effort to sell you some web space, the Word Directory has been launched and they’re selling English words at $1 per letter. This review will probably be one of the most straightforward ones I’ve ever done for John Chow dot Com.

Redirecting Words to Your Site

The introduction pretty much explains the entire premise of the site. You can choose nearly any English word and then have that word transformed into a link to a site of your choosing. The Word Directory doesn’t state so explicitly, but the assumption is that you’d own the word for however long the site stays live.

On the main page of the site, you’ll notice that there are certain terms that are featured and then there is also a list of recently purchased words. Each of these stands out as a small gray box and when you click on any given one, it redirects you to some website. Words are sold at a dollar a letter, so “ipod” costs four bucks, whereas “business” goes for eight dollars. Strangely, there’s no mention of how you’d go about getting your word “featured” on the site.

Paid Backlinks: RSTLNE

Like other paid directories, the Word Directory is essentially a repository of paid links. The difference is that details surrounding your particular website are not listed. Instead, all you get is an obscure link buried somewhere in the website. Purchased words are surrounded by a gray box, whereas words that are still available just look like regular underlined links.

Yes, money is already taken, but there are literally thousands of other options still available. Checking out the stats in the footer of the site, I found that only 41 words have been purchased to date. This leaves over 170,000 words that can still be bought, but I’m not sure if any of them are worth your while. I imagine that you won’t get much traffic from an obscure word-based directory and the link juice is probably pretty weak too.

As you’ve probably noticed, the site design is remarkably barren. There are no flashy banners or even any real splashes of color. All you’ll find on the Word Directory are, well, words linked to websites. I understand that the Web 2.0 phenomenon is pushing toward increased white space and I’m not saying that the site should be “loud”, but as it stands, Word Directory is one big snooze-fest.

Launch Your Own Clone

Think you can take the concept and make it better? The developers of Word Directory certainly want you to try. The script that powers the site is available for purchase and it goes for a measly $18.95. You essentially get the same website and then it’s up to you to make a word directory that’s more valuable.

The sales pitch reads: “Sometimes people just think it fun to buy themselves or friends a English word!”

There are at least two grammatical errors in that statement, above and beyond the fact that I don’t think it’s all that fun buying a word. I can’t possibly be the only one with this opinion.

The DoFollow Movement

In the footer of the site, there is a small link to a DoFollow blog search engine. Many of you may already know about the “U Comment, I Follow” movement in the blogosphere where people are removing the “nofollow” from their comment forms. People love getting the free link juice when leaving comments, so a directory of such blogs could prove useful.

Unfortunately, I don’t really see how this search engine works. All the icons at the top point toward Randaclay.com and the only search box is that of Google Custom Search. This does not return dofollow blogs. The only links to these blogs comes as a random smattering of four links under “what’s happening now”, so there really is little value in this search engine… seeing how it’s not even a search engine.

Might I Have a Word With You?

In the end, I don’t see much value in buying a link on the Word Directory, unless you happen to have a few bucks kicking around that you don’t know what to do with. It might be a fresh take on the paid directory and paid wiki trend, but it’s not enough to captivate my interest for long. It’s going to take a long while for the developer to recoup the costs of this review, one dollar at a time.

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I made the cover of today’s The Province newspaper. I am featured along with Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish and super domainer, Kevin Ham. This has to be one of the fastest photo to print interviews I’ve ever done. Both the interview and photo session was done on Friday in time for the Sunday edition.

The Province interviewed myself and Markus as part of a profile of BC’s Dot Com moguls. Kevin Ham did not return calls by The Province but was featured because he controls 300,000 domain names worth an estimated $300 million. I think the main thing you can learn from the article is that there are more than one way to make money off the Internet.

The last time I made the cover of a major media outlet was when the Ming Pao featured me on the cover of their magazine. Making the cover of The Province is an even bigger coup because the paper, along with the Vancouver Sun, is the biggest in BC. You can read the article here.

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This post was guest blogged by Alan Johnson, who has just started to accept private ads over at The Rating Blog.

I'm sure you've heard your share of opinions from people who say that a competitive niche shouldn't be approached, since your chances at being successful are slim to none. I'll spare you the boring introduction and will get right to the point: if you are passionate about something and capable of providing value, go for it!

Just Work Your Magic

Whenever you hear someone saying that you should stay away from a certain niche, as it is way out of your league, you have to ask yourself: why such an attitude? In most cases, people end up believing something like that as a result of some sort of disappointment they have experienced at a certain point.

They may have tried their luck, only to fail miserably and, as such, have ended up believing that competitive niches are a no-go. Or, on the other hand, they may simply be afraid to approach such a niche and are using their attitude as an excuse. While taking what others have to say into consideration never hurts, the final decision is yours and only yours to make.

If you know that you have it in you, never let yourself get discouraged by what others have to say. If I were to have listened to people with such an attitude, then I would have never launched TheRatingBlog.com, thinking that the niche I plan on approaching is way too competitive and that I shouldn't even try.

Guess What: I Didn't Listen

I had confidence in the potential of my project and was not about to let myself get discouraged. Let's just say that I am congratulating myself each day for my decision. I knew I was able to provide value, I knew that I was passionate about what I was about to do and, as such, giving up was not an option.

On the other hand, I knew that my niche is an extremely competitive one and, as such, I was well aware of the fact that I had to give it 110% if I was serious about making it in the long run. In other words, I knew that hard work was the only way to go.

Do It In Style And Stand Out

Just three months later, I have over 50k unique monthly visits, over 200k monthly impressions and over 1.5k RSS subscribers, and the most important phrase I would like to share with you has to be: "when doing something, do it in style and stand out".

When it comes to being an online entrepreneur, simply doing exactly what everyone else is and doing it in the same way will not get you anywhere. As far as my blog is concerned, I always did everything in a way which made me stand out.

For example: initially, I didn't just comment on a few blogs, I commented on over 40. Not only that, but I was the most active member of those communities as well and yes, as hard to believe as it may sound, I was the "top commentator" on over 40 blogs.

Had I just commented here and there, I would have simply gone by unnoticed, but, since I provided value to each and every one of those over 40 communities through both quantity and quality, I did it in style, and I did it in a way which made me stand out.

I then gradually moved on to being a guest blogger and, you've guessed it: I'm doing it in style and I'm doing it in a way which makes me stand out as well. Am I just being a guest blogger here and there? Sorry, not my style!

I am contributing with guest posts on over 10 great blogs, I'm doing it on a regular basis, and this is only the beginning. Obviously, there is a lot of work involved, but I am enjoying every minute of it, and results speak for themselves.

What Are Results Telling Us?

I always prefer to let results speak for themselves and, in as little as three months, I have managed to:

• cross the 50k unique monthly visits mark
• cross the 200k monthly impressions mark
• cross the 1.5k RSS subscriptions mark
• cross the 1.5k newsletter subscriptions mark
• cross the 1.5k comments mark with my blog
• cross the 300 comments mark for a single post (my contest)

All in all, I am the living proof that, no matter how competitive your niche may be, if you are passionate, do everything in a way which makes you stand out and add hard work to the equation, success is just around the corner.

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