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It’s very easy to lose your focus when you market online. There are literally tons of options for anyone who is looking to get customers to their websites. But most of the traffic you’ll buy is worthless, and you end up realizing pretty quickly that you need to focus on driving the targeted traffic that converts to your site. The rest just takes up resources.

If you try and attempt too many projects at once, you again run the risk of bogging down and losing focus. When this happens, you begin to notice a decline in numbers, not the required increase. At this stage of the game, it’s time to re-double efforts and get back to the basics.

When internet marketing is the problem, keeping the eagle eye of focus steadily on your task is the answer.

Theoretically you could always earn more money online. But few people will have a straight-line of growth. Most will experience peaks and valleys. The danger is that the downtrends become more prevalent than the uptrends. If that becomes the case, you are in big trouble.

Temporary fluctuations in your earnings are no big deal. You need to understand what causes them. If it’s seasonal, oh well. Otherwise there might just be actions you can take to improve your situation.

In the end, the only way you can break through a plateau is by pushing harder, and mixing up your efforts.

The plateaus may be purely mental for all we know.

It’s strange that the availability of ad-blocking software doesn’t hurt a company like Google more. Ad blocking software is relatively available, yet it doesn’t seem to have a material adverse affect on business online. It seems as if the issue is a big deal, but experience shows it never amounts to much.

Several studies I could find online said Ad blocking software was installed on about 10% if people’s computers. So, the number of people is in the many millions.

So what will happen if more people install such software? It will be up to the advertising networks to come up with more ingenious technology to bypass the rules.

In the ends, it’s a cat and mouse game that’s being one by the advertising companies and the companies that profit from selling ad blockers.

We’ve made our way to the final month of the year. It’s hard to believe. It seems as if 2007 just started, but instead the year is winding down. The good news for us internet marketers is that December tends to be a strong month to earn money online. The Christmas rush means advertisers are paying top dollar, so now is the time to get paid.

For most companies, the end of December ends their fiscal year. For them, it’s time to let loose on their budgets and try to make as many sales as they can before the curtain calls. I’m hoping a number of companies are ready to advertise without restraint.

This month is also a great month for traffic because so many people are now indoors and online. In the summer the nice weather competes with the attention of people. But in Winter, more and more people are indoors and online. That can only bode well for a great December for all of us.

One old maxim for investors is to let your winning stocks run. The same principle applies to websites. You will always have a few websites that earn much more than others that you have. In these cases, devote your attention to the front-runners. This way you’ll enhance your earnings, almost guaranteed.

If you devote too much time to your small and slow-moving websites, you won’t notice your improvements paying off. But if you focus on the best websites in your roster, the payoffs are much more noticeable.

Now this doesn’t mean you can ignore your secondary website. It simply means give them a realistic amount of effort, and place your main emphasis on your most profitable websites, which are growing. This strategy has made a big difference for me in the last year.

SEO is important for every website, but the field has its’ limits. It’s natural to get excited about how much free, organic traffic SEO can bring to you. But you need to be realistic about what the discipline of SEO can do for any website. It’s not something you practice in isolation.

SEO can benefit you in several ways:

1) It can help all the pages of your website rank in the search engines
2) It can increase your spiderability and the speed at which pages are added to the index
3) It can help you gain rankings for certain keywords which generate traffic.

But SEO cannot make up for the inadequacies of a bad website. If your website needs work to make it more competitive, then by all means work on it to make it better. SEO can get people to your website, but it’s up to the website to keep them around.

Keep it simple.

A common complaint from webmasters is about the fact they gained traffic to their website, but lower CPM caused them to remain about where they were in earnings. I, too, have experienced this phenomena. I’m not convinced that it’s because of a conspiracy, but rather it’s just “the way things are”, unless you specifically targeted higher paying keywords and that is what resulted in your traffic gains.

I see the situation as most of your new traffic is lower paying than your old traffic. That is the most logical reason for a drop in CPM. If it does happen to you, you can target higher paying keywords to make up for it.

As you add in pages about higher paying keywords, you should see a rise in traffic and a rise in overall CPM. Make sure to give it a try before suspecting a conspiracy.