The rule of 72 is a quick equation used to determine the doubling time of investments. IN other words, if you had a savings account at 5% interest, how many years would it take to double your money?

Divide 72 by 5(%) to get 14…14 years to double your investment at 5% interest.

The rule can be manipulated several ways. I have not checked the math on this, but recently learned how to apply this to marketing to double your income in a year from your current projects.

First determine the number of different factors that lead to your income. In my case, I used this list for my Build a Niche Store sites:

Number of sites
Number of unique articles on each site
Numbef of backlinks from article directories
Number of backlinks from blogs

So that’s 4 factors, and some of them are interrelated, but all of them are needed in order to continue getting traffic and profits.

Now you take 72 and divide it by 4 to get 18%. If I make an 18% improvement in each area, I should double my profits in the next year.

I currently have 7 sites making money on Build a Niche Store…18% is less than 2 sites. So in the next year (probably next month), I plan to put up 2 additional Build a Niche Store sites

I went through each site adn determined how many unique articles I had posted ON the site. Guess what? Only about 3 per site! I tend to get bored and move on to the next one. So…18% of 3 is way less than 1, so just 1 new article per site will get me toward my goal…that’s pretty easy.

Same story with backlinks and blogs…just calculate 18% (or whatever %age you came up with) of your current efforts adn make a plan to implement those changes.

Can I make those changes in 1 month instead of over 1 year? Sure can!

I’m not a financial math wizard, but hopefully you can see from tehse examples that it’s not too hard to DOUBLE your business by planning ahead and making small improvements across your marketing efforts.

So today I took some success focused action, posted 2 articles to ezines, put a new page of unique content on one of my sites, created a “store” page with that kewywrd and interlinked them all. EZines doesn’t seem to have a problem sending traffic to a BANS content page, only to a thin bans front page or store page.

You can apply these prinicipals to ANY model of affiliate income…

So what are YOU planning to do?

1) Be passionate about what you are selling. Whether it’s a blog, adwords, affiliate promotion via opt-in squeeze pages, etc, if you are not passionate about it, it will show through in your marketing & follow-through

2) Be persistent. Success does not come overnight, but if you are passionate and consistent about your websites, the RSS feeds and email signups will come.

3) Be generous. I recently began to dabble in screenplay writing. I asked a friend…what if I use up this good character in a screenplay that ends up being a total flop? His response…”There’s more where that came from!” Don’t be afraid to really put your heart into your blog posts…there’s more where that came from. If you are pasisonate, the ideas and blog posts will come, and the RSS and email subscribers will follow!

4) Be innovative. Don’t follow the pack, do something (slightly) different, stand out from the crowd (in a good way, mostly). Many of us can do this with unique blog designs that stand out from the common Word Press templates. Me…I’m still working on this. But since my blog is all about discoveries, I plan to share with my readers as I learn…and I’ve already noticed a following of people who want to discover in the form of RSS subscriptions, Diggs & Stumbles!

Does the title of this post mystify you? If so, this post is written for you! I just started using WordPress less than two weeks ago and wanted to offer this tip to save you some time and headaches. And if it’s too late for that, we’ll I’ve got a solution for you too!

Before you make your very first post, go to your WordPress Dashboard, Click on Options->Permalinks, and select one of the options that includes %post name% in the link. Don’t ask why for now, just do it and you’ll save your self some headaches. The reason that this is not selected by default has to do with some technical issues with server software and settings, you can read more about it in the Codex as well as see the entire list of variables that can go in your permalink title.

Confused yet? OK, let me back up…

Permalinks are the links that another blogger would use to direct a reader to an individual post on your site. For example, ProBlogger linked to my very first article “Where to Start?” in his “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” using this permalink:

http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/archives/7

You’ll notice there are three parts to the link. Part one is my domain name, “www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com”, Part 2 is the virtual folder “archives” and part three is the internal “post ID” number from the database. I say “virtual folder” because the folder “archives” does not really exist on my website. I discovered this when I tried to manually save all my old posts. Silly me…wordpress creates the links “on the fly” as they are retrieved from the database.

While this permalink structure does it’s job of getting a reader from ProBlogger to my site, it does nothing for me. When I log into my Google Analytics account, all I see is a post number, and I don’t have any real idea of where my visitors were on my website.

Permalink Migration Plugin Saves the Day!

I decided that I wanted my post name in the permalink structure so that I could make use of the Google Analytics Reports. But lo & behold, when I changed the structure using my WordPress Dashboard, my link from ProBlogger was BROKEN! ACK! Nearly all of my web traffic so far has come from ProBlogger, so I really didn’t want to shut that down by changing my permalinks, but I also knew that the longer I waited, the worse the problem would become as more and more posts grew on my blog.

Some quick searching led me to the perfect solution, in only three clicks. That solution is Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin. You add the plugin in the usual manner, then set your old structure and your new structure, and now all of your old permalinks are working again! No lost traffic from posts that are already linked to other bloggers or on search engines.

Download Dean Lee’s Plugin right from his website.

Now you’ll notice that when you click on the permalink from above:

http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/archives/7

You’ll be redirected to a pretty looking permalink that tells you right where you are.

I’d like to propose a starting point for your ventures in internet marketing.

I would like you to create, in writing, a low-stress, harmonious outline of your internet marketing week. I want you to create a basic structure of the time you realistically have RIGHT NOW that you could repeat 40 weeks of the year, or 9 out of 12 months. For some of you this may be 1 hour on a weekend evening. For others it may be 20 minutes each day during your lunch hour. If you are employed part-time, you may have even more time available. The idea is to get down in writing a plan that causes you no additional stress in your already harried lifestyle. Afterall, the ultimate goal is to create MORE time for the things that are important to us.

This outline will create your basic week. In the beginning your time will be filled with aquireing new information and knowledge about the internet, marketing, online tools, etc. But keep your schedule in mind. If your harmonious outline says 20 minutes at lunch hour, stick to this limit. Otherwise you will only end up creating more stress on not only yourself, but all the other interconnected components of your life.

Now quit reading this, turn off your computer, and go get some fresh air!