Time and time again I hear webmasters complaining about their sites getting slapped. In fact, if you take a look at Google's official webmaster forum then you'll be shocked at the number of new threads where business owners are pleading with the moderators for a reason why their site has dropped 10 pages down the rankings.

It's soon brought to their attention that the moderators have no control over the listings and 9 times out of 10 there's nothing they can do to resurrect their sites rankings other than playing the waiting game.

When article marketing, do you ever find it difficult to write your resource boxes? If you're like me when I started out as an article marketer, then you'll be saying to yourself "Heck, Yes! - They're hard!".

Actually, though, they're really not. But a huge percentage, and I mean huge, just don't write optimal resource boxes and they're leaving lots of cash on the table as a result.

Do you enjoy writing email promotions to your list? If you're anything like me then your answer is probably heck, no! When I look back at my first email campaigns I have to cringe at some of the techniques I used to monetise my list.

A couple of years ago I was in a conference where Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team, was running a Q&A session. One question stood out; a webmaster from the audience queried Matt why his site was ranking lower than those of his competitors even though though he had over 1,000 backlinks - more than anyone else in the niche by many times over.

6 months ago I was on the ropes. I had a month to raise $1,500 to pay the bills or else I'd be in a whole load of difficulty.

I was out of a job, had no source of income and no knowledge of internet marketing whatsoever. The pressure was on, big time.

And there's nothing like a bit of pressure to get you some serious results.

Everywhere I go online I hear about people struggling to make a living online.

Thread after thread, they talk about giving up, losing hope, how they're just not cut out for this "online" stuff so maybe they should just give up on the idea and go back to work.

"I'm too tired, too old, can't build a web site, don't know enough about computers and have no idea how to sell."

When I'm feeling lazy and need an excuse not to do some work on my campaigns, I find myself browsing a few of the internet marketing forums out there.

Today, I saw a thread "The Duplicate Content Penalty is Tragic" and it made me realise that i) you really need to be careful who you take advice from on internet marketing forums and ii) that people get sucked in by all the hype.

It's mighty hard to find anything concrete on Bing's ranking algorithm but certain trends keep cropping up. With Microsoft set to take over Yahoo and Bing becoming Google's closest challenger it seems pertinent to cover some of the fundamentals for effective search engine optimisation in Bing.

Comscore/Hitwise reports that Bing and Yahoo together currently have around 25% share of the marketplace, however a more accurate figure would be 20% because a significant percentage of the search queries recorded in Yahoo and Bing are for internal properties (Yahoo Finance, for example) whilst on Google the majority of search queries lead users to external sites.

Here's the harsh truth of article marketing: Thousands of articles are published on a daily basis. 90% are getting little to no traffic.

Most people write their articles and forget about them. Like throwing mud at the wall and hoping it sticks - once it's published they forget it ever existed. 10 articles a day and you'll be rich in no time?! This might have worked 5 years ago, but now this strategy sucks. It's a great way of wasting your time - there's simply too much competition now.