I’ve got more than 15GB of ebooks, videos, and audios in my HD on the topic of internet business, leadership, internet marketing, network marketing, blogging, ebay, and all the many different ways to make money online. And you guessed it right, I have not read all of them!

I just get a kick out of collecting them with the hope of maybe using them in the future.

But there are some that I do read. And sad to say, more than 80% of the materials I have are a total waste of time and (pity to those who actually bought them) money.

But then there are the really good ones. Or should I say exceptional ones. Those that I would definitely recommend. Some you can purchase but surprisingly the best ones are for free.

So here are the top 12 must read internet business free reports…if you are serious about building an internet business.

1) Blog Profits Blueprint
This is one for aspiring probloggers and written by Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey. It gives you a very detailed idea on what it takes and what you should do to become a successful blogger. You can download it free from Yaro’s site by subscribing to his email list.

2) Authority Rules
Brian Clark of Copyblogger released a free report that speaks about the value of authority in internet business. This report is a very quick read yet full of hardcore wisdom. Learn why authority can propel you and consequently your business to greater heights.

Download here.

3) Internet Business Manifesto
Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits wrote this free report way back in 2006. Dubbed as the "Guru’s guru", Rich writes exceptional free reports he sends out regularly to his subscribers. This is just a first in this list. The Internet Business Manifesto will open your eyes to the world of running a real internet marketing business coming from the point of view of someone who knows how to build a "real business".

Download here.

4) Internet Business Manifesto: The Missing Chapter
The second installment of Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto. If you loved the manifesto, you will love this even more. Now even more strategies in building a thriving internet business awaits you.

Download here.

5) Internet Business Manifesto: The Final Chapter
The final installment of Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto and one that shows you even more the strategies to build an effective internet business.

Download here.

6) Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
Originally a paid product but the author Mike Filsaime decided to give it away for free last year. This manuscript will walk you through the different strategies used by successful internet marketers to automate their online business. It’s the small things you do to your marketing that will increase your wealth.

Download here.

7) Maven Matrix Manifesto
Mavens rule every business online or offline. Learn how you can be one for your Internet business by following these 11 steps from Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham.

Download here.

8) How to Build an Internet Business..and Make Your First $1,000 Online
Yaro Starak teaches us the most important lessons of his life in building a business. This is full of insightful wisdom from a very successful blogger. A definite must read. You can get your copy of this free report by subscribing to Yaro’s RSS feed.

9) Attention Age Doctrine 2
One of my real favorites and written once again by Rich Schefren. This speaks about the most prized item on the internet–attention. You will learn why having it can mean the difference between a growing business and a dead one.

Download here.

10) How I Got 100,000 Subscribers in Two Years
Success stories are always inspiring and here’s one that truly is. Learn from Zen Habits owner Leo Babauta as he retells his story to the world about how he became successful as a blogger in 2 years.

Download here.

11) Roadmap to Become a Blogger
A teamup of Gideon Shalwick and Yaro Starak and one of the great initial resources for beginning bloggers. It shows you how to think strategically for your blog. The x-factor section here is really great.

Download here.

12) 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
The real workbook is for sale at Problogger. But this one is really a series of Darren Rowse’s post at Problogger where he teaches his subscribers how to build an effective blog. You can view the original posts here. But if you need the more updated one I suggest you get the workbook itself.

Get the 31DBBB workbook here.

I guess this list will keep you busy reading for a couple of days. And in case you have some free ebooks to share just add on the link at the comments section.

Enjoy!
Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. How Do You Start Your Internet Business?
2. Mistakes to avoid in starting your Internet Business
3. Internet Business Lessons from a Parking Lot
4. Internet Business Lessons: How Blogging Changed a Man’s Life
5. 4 Habits of an Effective Blogger

Anyway sorry for the initial rant. I just have to get that off.

Now on to our topic for today and it’s a continuation of my 31DBBB experiment which I started at the beginning of this month. Day 2 is all about making a list post.

I love list posts. And here are 8 personal reasons why.

1. They look neat and organized
2. They are easy to digest in one reading
3. You don’t have to read the whole thing if you want yet you still get the idea of the post
4. They appear very well thought of (even if they don’t)
5. There’s a clear beginning and an end in each item on the list
6. At the end of the post you can easily pick out what you like best
7. You can also easily pick the one you don’t agree on
8. List posts often have less blah blah. They go straight to the point

Okay if you don’t have an idea of what a list post is, you are reading one right now. Tell me how you felt reading the last 8 items above? Ain’t it cool?

It’s no wonder Darren Rowse as well as other “gurus” of blogging place this as one of the ways to make great content and a key to becoming an effective blogger.

You can read the full article of Day 2 here.

Now on to my own list post.

Yup this post doesn’t count!

Charlie

Check out these related posts:

1. 31DBBB Day 1: Write An Elevator Pitch for Your Blog
2. The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Experiment
3. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports
4. What is a blog?
5. 4 Habits of an Effective Blogger

And Day 1 says Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog. Wikipedia defines it this way.

An elevator pitch is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (for example, thirty seconds and 100-150 words).

Now I have heard of this concept before while I was doing a training on how to improve your communication skil ls or was it the art of negotiation. I totally forgot, but nonetheless this should be an easy one since I have thought about this a lot in terms of a mission statement for my blog.

Darren recommends coming up with a long and short version of this so here is my try at it.

Long Version

Cajammed is all about helping people live a better life beyond their “BOX”. We do this in four ways…

• We inspire people to dream again, and dream BIG.
• We lead people to discover their real passions in life.
• We guide people to reach their fullest potential.
• We help people build a home-based internet business to sustain their dream.

We do this at cajammed “because everyone deserves a better life”.

Short Version

Cajammed is all about helping people discover and live a better life beyond their “BOX”.

So what do you think about this? Any suggestions on how to improve?

Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. 31DBBB Day 2: Make a List Post
2. The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Experiment
3. What is a blog?

You can watch it here…

I thought to myself, the principles he taught there are as effective for an author as it is for a blogger. Especially beginning bloggers like me. And one of the biggest struggles beginning bloggers face is to get into a flow that they do on a daily basis that can later propel them to stardom.

It’s easy to hear these things from other, more successful bloggers, but doing it is not something that is easy to do.

And so I write this for you as well as for myself as a constant reminder of the four habits I need to do everyday to become successful as a blogger.

Habit 1: Read everyday

Unless you learn something new, there is not much to write or teach your readers about right? The saying, "You can’t teach what you don’t know" holds true in this case.

As bloggers our responsibility to our readers is to consistently add value to their lives and how can we do that unless we start adding value to our lives first by learning more everyday. In the end, to become a successful blogger, you have to be consistently learning new things everyday.

Habit 2: Write everyday

One thing I have learned in an effectiveness course I heard before is to always ask yourself, "What is the one thing I can do right now that will take me closer to my goals?"

And for bloggers, the answer to that is simply "WRITING CONTENT"

No content = Dead blog (That is pretty obvious I guess)

Leo Babauta, a world reknowned blogger, in his blog ZenHabits describes this habit when he was starting out and it made all the difference. Because when you have great content posted consistently, people will always want to come back.

Habit 3: File everyday

As a blogger you will always have a consistent flow of ideas popping in your head as content that you could create (you should). And no matter how sharp your memory is, you will always forget something, some bright idea that popped in your head as you saw something.

Do not lose those ideas!

Keep a notepad handy and write down thoughts, things you see, and items you want to share in the future to your readers. Sooner or later you will notice that you have more ideas to write than the actual time to write them.

Habit 4: Market everyday

Now this was not part of John Maxwell’s principles but I needed to add this because it is very crucial.

It is not enough that you have great content on your site. You have to know how to make your readers find it too. And that involves marketing you blog.

This is the formula for a successful blog, remember it well.

GREAT CONTENT + INEFFECTIVE MARKETING = NO readership
BAD CONTENT + EFFECTIVE MARKETING = WASTED readership
GREAT CONTENT + EFFECTIVE MARKETING = SOARING readership

Marketing is as important as the content you create. Don’t be fooled by people saying "just write great content and the readers will come."

Just like any magazine, book, movie, or any content being circulated, you have to get them in the hands of people. Or better yet you’ve got to make people want to have them and the key to achieving that is simply, MARKETING!

Hope you learned something here today. So now let the comments flow!

Be free!
Charlie Aquino

Check out these related posts:

1. Want to be a better blogger?
2. 12 Must Read Internet Business Free Reports
3. 31DBBB Day 2: Make a List Post
4. What is a blog?

I’ve had it! Building a blog is not as easy at it seems especially when you are trying to juggle a lot of other responsibilities.

Here are some frustrations I had to face over the last months since I started cajammed.

• Information overload
• Too many things to try but so little time to do them all
• Running out of topics to write about
• Pressure to earn
• Not knowing how to best market my blog
• Finding the tools I need
• And a lot more…

There are many days I get stuck trying to find out what I need to do and what’s the next step I should take.

Should I update my site design? Should I write an article? Should I market my blog? Should I do social bookmarking? Should I do article marketing? How about twitter? Facebook?

Arrgh! It’s so frustrating at times that I just hang in there, staring blankly, thinking of what to do. And I end up having thought a lot but never accomplishing anything.

And you know what’s worse. I keep on reading other people’s blogs and feeding myself more information, as if there was never enough. :)

Okay today I STOP! Reassess everything and come up with a clear strategy to go about this. And so I got this book 31 Days to Build a Better Blog by Darren Rowse of Problogger. And here’s my idea…

I’m going to run an experiment with this blog and try to apply all the 31 principles until the end of this year and see how it develops. I’ll document all my learnings along the way so that you can benefit as well from what I do.

I hope this will really turn out well. To begin with I’ll set my baseline data here

• Date: September 23, 2009
• Pagerank: 0/10
• Yahoo Linkdomain: 427
• Yahoo Pagelinks: 1
• Alexa Ranking: 1,299,149
• Internal Links: 179
• External Links: 16
• RSS Subscribers: 18

Visits baseline from Sept 1 – 23, 2009

• Visits: 206
• Unique Visits: 92
• Pageviews: 515

Now let me try out this stuff and hope it works.

Check out these related posts:

1. 31DBBB Day 1: Write An Elevator Pitch for Your Blog
2. 31DBBB Day 2: Make a List Post
3. What is a blog?
4. 4 Habits of an Effective Blogger

As you know Wordpress (WP) is one of the fastest growing blogging and Content Management System (CMS) platforms today and even a lot of pinoys love this platform for blogging.

This site, Cajammed is made in wordpress. And man do I love wordpress.

Now I know some of you might be new at this but if you are interested in learning about wordpress as a blogging platform there’s an event organized by Wordcamp Philippines and its called Wordcamp 2009.

This is basically a wordpress seminar where speakers, mostly pinoys, will talk about blogging and how to use wordpress as a blogging platform. It’s good for those who want to learn more about blogging and using wordpress.

The event is on Sept 19, Saturday at Asian Institute of Management, Makati. You can register here. I believe the fee is 12USD inclusive of lunch and freebies.

I’m thinking about joining for the main purpose of meeting fellow bloggers, and of course learning too, but I have a class and that’s probably the only reason I might not be able to attend.

But anyway, it’s still roughly a month to go. But if you are free, I suggest you go and check it out.

Check out these related posts:

1. Want to be a better blogger?
2. Wordpress 2.8.1 Released
3. Wordpress v2.8 Baker Released
4. 31DBBB Day 2: Make a List Post

If not, here’s a quick explanation of what it is. Well the term itself says it all actually :)

LINK EXCHANGE – happens when two websites link to each other

Now you may ask for what purpose? Here’s the fun part for those who are really new to this concept. Link exchange helps your site display more in the front page of search engines like Google or Yahoo.

The more other websites link to your site the more likely Google or Yahoo will prefer to list your site on their front page and if you are listed there it simply means more people will visit your site. I guess that’s what you want to happen to your website right?

The idea behind it is really simple. Google and Yahoo want to serve their customers well and since they are search engines it follows that to serve their customers well they have to display websites that people are really looking for when they search. Makes sense?

Now for Google and Yahoo to do that they have what we call “spiders” (not the literal spider) that crawl all the different websites on the internet searching for “keywords” that are relevant to each site. Now with the help of these spiders Google and Yahoo will be able to rank your website based on the content it finds as to be helpful or not.

You are still following okay!

Now whenever someone searches a specific “keyword” in Google or Yahoo, they will try to display the sites now with the most relevant content based on what the “spider” were able to extract on the different websites. And that is how sites get listed on the front page of these search engines.

But of course there are a lot of things happening on the background that the search engines use to rank a site but one of their criteria is the number of other websites linking back to a site.

Knowing this then, it makes sense to have a lot of websites link back to you and one of the most common ways it is done especially for start-up sites is though “Link Exchange”. I hope you get the concept now.

So for the purpose of this post, how about us doing a link exchange? Are you open to it?

If yes then I have a special thing for you. If you click on this link I’ll show you a concept I’m trying out in cajammed and it called the Featured Friend concept. I feel there is a better way to do link exchange than just simply links, and the featured friend concept is something I’d like to introduce.

If you are open to it then I’d be glad to add link to your site too from here.

So check this page out and let’s take it from there.

Helping you get out of your box,
Charlie

Check out these related posts:

1. 3 Principles for a Successful SEO Campaign for Your Blog

You can view the complete list of changes in the Wordpress Blog site.

If you have not yet upgraded your site to v2.8 it’s a good time to upgrade now.

Do check out my post on Wordpress 2.8 here for a complete picture of the upgrades since v2.7.1

Charlie Aquino
Internet Entrepreneur

Check out these related posts:

1. Wordpress v2.8 Baker Released
2. Wordcamp 2009
3. 31DBBB Day 2: Make a List Post

How many of you wants to become a better blogger? Or let me rephrase that. How many of you wants to become professional bloggers earning money from your blog?

Unless you have been away from the online scene for a very long time you know for a fact that ever since the first blogs was introduced our lives have changed. Blogs have become the primary source of information online today.

Readers love it because they can easily find what they are looking for, written in down to earth, easy to understand language and not another bunch of technical stuff like you find in other sources.

Search engines love it because blogs have frequently updated relevant content that they can deliver to their searchers.

And many professional bloggers love blogs because they provide an alternative stream of income that is sometimes even enough to replace a full-time job.

I have been attracted to blogs for the last reason (really) but I also find it fun to be able to write about something you love and the thought of being able to monetize on it simply just makes it even more exciting.

But I have learned through months of blogging that blogging to earn requires an entirely different kind of mindset than just blogging for fun. Although some bloggers would say just blog for fun and then the income comes. (That’s a good rhyme!)

Blogging to earn requires a different strategy, it requires a certain sense of focus and commitment that you normally just brush off if you are just doing it for fun. But this really makes the journey even more exciting, because becoming a better blogger requires learning, testing, failing and ultimately earning.

Now I am no expert at this yet but there is one blog that I follow that has always been a constant source of valuable training for me in my blogging journey and it’s the blog by Yaro Starak, the curly haired guy from Australia, who really gives valuable tips on blogging (I hope to be able to duplicate his success, or even surpass it, lol). You can find his blog at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com.

And while you are at it, check out his newest post, a training program with Gideon Shalwick in Becoming a Better Blogger it’s got free videos and a free e-book to get you started.

I just downloaded my own copy of the e-book. I’ll be printing it and read it tomorrow. The X-factor stuff is something really exciting to watch out for.

Have a nice day!

Charlie

Check out these related posts:

1. 4 Habits of an Effective Blogger
2. Wordcamp 2009
3. What is a blog?

Blogs have been around for almost 10 years already having started sometime early in the year 2000. A blog is the short term for weblog. There are numerous definitions of blog on the internet and there’s a good compilation of definitions done by Darren Rowse in his Problogger website.

You could think of a blog as an online “logbook” where entries called “posts” are generally entered in a chronological arrangement from newest entries to the oldest ones.

Way back in college at the University of the Philippines me and my friends often have this “logbook” that we leave at our tambayan (hang-out place). This is where we normally write to each other, make announcements of upcoming gimmicks, post compelling thoughts, or just simply saying hi or greeting someone a happy birthday.

This was before the generation of the cellphone and text messaging so this was the only way we can communicate to one another since we normally have different class schedules.

Now a blog is just an online version of that “logbook” plus a bit more. With blogs you could do about anything from posting announcements to writing about certain topics you are interested in to even selling items. The chronological nature of blogs make it appealing in delivering up-to-date and relevant content to everyone who gets to read your blog.

And the internet has even made starting your own blog very simple. You could start one for free within a couple of minutes. Two free blogging sites come to mind where you can start.

• www.blogger.com
• www.wordpress.com

Lee Lefever from the Commoncraft show made a wonderful video that explains what blogs are in very simple terms. Watch the video above to see what I mean.

Check out these related posts:

1. The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Experiment