Money-Code » learning

If I had to start again today….

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:37:53 +0000

I read “If You Had To Start Over With $0 Budget” at Deneil Merritt‘s blog (great blog by the way), and it got me thinking about how I would start again. I don’t think I would start with a $0 budget, and if you’re interested in affiliate or internet marketing, you should try with a hearty effort, or don’t try at all and save yourself the misery of making $0 on your $0 budget. I think I do have some different opinions now for starting in internet or affiliate marketing.

Start with what you know..?

Seems like the common suggestion is to pick a niche that you’re familiar with. It definitely makes sense, and that is definitely the direction I started a few years ago. If I was to start over now, I would through that logic out the window. I think you should start with what can earn can earn decent commissions. It’s easy to be comforted with areas of interest and feel there is a level of knowledge or expertise related there, but reality says.. it doesn’t matter. It can be helpful, it can make things easier, but not worth the lost commissions.

I would start with products, services and/or niches that earn and learn about them. Spend a few hours understanding categories, trends and values and grow from there. The energy and time devoted here will reward you more in the end.

One site or many sites?

I see this question often, and there really isn’t a ‘right’ answer here. Is it better to have a few or one great site vs. many mediocre sites? Initially, I started with one ‘community’ site, then started branching out from there, tweaking, waiting, tweaking, waiting, etc. If I was to do it again, I would start with my current regiment of a minimum of 2 sites per month. Either creating new ‘test’ sites in new niches, or using the 10 degree separation with sites that are earning. All other down time is spent in blog posts, or tweaking and improving existing sites. I really believe creating new sites is the key to success to finding what you’re good at, what sites produce earnings and enhancing new traffic strategies.

What types of sites?

I’ve always broken down my earning sites into three basic categories. Community Sites, Store Fronts and Blogs. Each are good for different things, but it’s somewhat important to generate all three types, especially when starting out.

Community Sites are sites that are based on a common interest to a group of individuals. Once the site starts and grows, it will basically grow from the content provided by the community itself. Forums is a good example of a community site. These sites are great, once they go, it’s basically set-it-and-forget-it since the content is always evolving and growing without your involvement. You’ll still need to admin the site, etc. These sites are great for AdSense, product placement, etc. But the hard thing is developing a site and getting users and achieving that momentum needed for it to grow itself. Lots of time, lots of effort with very little return in the beginning.

Store Fronts are basically product stores utilizing product feeds. EPN sites and CJ sites using categorization is a example of store fronts. To me, these are by far the most successful. You’ll be targeting buyers vs. readers and conversion is much much higher. I like to promote these sites with PPC to even target better traffic than organic search traffic.

Blogs are blogs. You can blog about products, news, etc. I’ve always been ‘down’ on blogs, thinking the work is to high vs. the return and they’re hard to maintain over the long haul. I’ve changed my opinion on this.

So, if I was to start today, I would focus on getting a network of store fronts initially, maybe start a community site, but a site that I have good confidence that I can gain interested users. I would then work on a few product oriented blogs or review blogs and associate all these types of sites with Twitter. Once I saw some earnings, I would begin light PPC campaigns on the store fronts. Then work on building more sites and diversifying across affiliate networks.

Use Twitter?

Wow, Twitter. This is one of the biggest things that have changed my position in affiliate marketing over the last 6 months. I would DEFINITELY get Twitter accounts for my sites if I was to start today, and I would definitely buy Bird Feeder to grow those Twitter accounts. I cannot believe how useful Twitter is for getting consistent traffic to my product blogs or store fronts. Using Twitter Tools in my WordPress blogs to auto-Tweet posts is a must, and using the TweetMeme plugin for others to re-tweet posts is another fantastic way to get traffic back to your site.

Initially when creating new sites, I would do the normal, submission to search engines, do a few backlinks, post to a few directories, then wait. If I think it’s a hot site, I’ll fire up a PPC campaign, but overall the initial launch is slow going. Now with Twitter, I can get immediate traffic to the site, and traffic that seems to convert. Not super great like PPC traffic, but WAY better than low organic traffic or Stumble traffic.

Use Tools?

This is something I was a little behind on. For some reason, I could never justify the expense for buying tools. I’m also a web developer by day, so I always felt I could write some of these things. Now, I’m starting to value my time more. The time it would take me to write a plugin costs more than purchasing the plugin itself. The time I would be spending writing a plugin or platform, I could have spent on writing new sites, reviews, researched new niches, etc.

I’m a total believer of software tools now. The amount of time these tools save and the amount of work these tools accomplish throughout the day is incredible. If I was to start over again, and after getting some earnings coming in first (I like to roll my earnings back into the pot for tools, domains, etc initially). I would buy the following tools for sure:

ReviewAZON product review plugin for Amazon products
WPReviewSite Review plugin for ranking across your blog
BirdFeeder awesome tool for getting targeted Twitter followers
SEO Elite excellent suite of tools for determining where you rank, find backlinks, research competition, etc.
Blog Comment Demon excellent tool for finding WordPress blogs related to keyword search. Great way to find quality sites for potential comment backlinks

In conclusion, I think the most important thing is consistency when it comes to production. Make sites, keep making sites, keep improving sites, keep moving forward. The earnings will trickle and drizzle in, but it’s important to create the foundation of sites where you can always research with analytics and determine what sites work for you. The other item to pay attention to is diversification, remember to diversify across different niches, affiliate networks and sites. Things change ALL the time so you want to make sure your eggs are not all in one basket. Lastly, remember to be flexible and learn to adapt to situation. Don’t let your network crumble because of a ‘change’ to policy or TOS, learn to take the punches and adapt with the new trend, and be ‘okay’ with letting something go if you need to.

Well, I hope this was useful to someone. I really wish I could have a time machine, I would definitely do some things differently, but at the same time, the path I took gave me the experience I needed for where I’m at today.

Blogger Unleashed

admin — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:23:03 +0000

I’ve read alot of affiliate / internet marketing web sites over the years. Some are good, some are bad, but usually there is something useful to be found in all of them.

A friend of mine recommended that I read BloggerUnleashed.com, and holy cow.. it’s great. The amount of useful tips there is amazing. Vic is running at high level, and is very generous with his techniques and tips.

I would recommend reading his archive and working your way to present. He has fantastic ideas regarding SEO and getting organic traffic, and some of these techniques I’ve been using with my sites currently.

He is controversial, some say he gives bad advice while others say he’s the man. So far, I would say he’s providing some very interesting advice, and advice that I’m willing to try on my sites.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this site.

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My thoughts on the big 3 – Shoemoney, ProBlogger and Chow

PPC to Offers and Leads

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:30:33 +0000

I’ve been doing PPC to EPN and CJ based store fronts for some time, and I would say I’ve been fairly successful over the years. Nothing to brag about, and something I would like to improve further. Recently, I’ve been wanting to start up a few campaigns and promote offers and leads. I personally think this is where the big dough is, and I want to get more and more diversified. I’ve had a few attempts with Neverblue Ads and CJ offers, with limited success, basically breaking even. I recently joined up with Hydra Network and I’m already impressed with their selection offers and quality of customer service.

I found a offer that looked good. It pays $5 per sign up (first page). There were a few things I wanted to see in the offer.I personally want it to be a ethical product or service. Something I feel that I can stand behind. I look at their lander and form submit. If it looks professional, I feel like I can promote it better. After selecting the offer, I wanted to create a landing page for it. I already have a ‘generic’ .info domain that I thought I would use. I like to use subdomains for managing offers to domains so I made one that works. I would check with TOS on the offer, some business (ie: eBay) will only allow names after the 3rd slash, so a subdomain with ebay in it would violate that.

I was going to outsource the landing page, but I wanted to get my feet wet first before throwing more cash at this offer. If this works, I might outsource additional landing pages. The reason I want to outsource is strictly to save time. I created a landing page that somewhat matches their theme on the form page. I don’t want to throw visitors off when they go from my lander to the form submit or destination site.

I looked into keyword tracking, mainly tracking 202, but decided to roll my own for now. I think I’ll look into that in the future, but for now, I just wanted to get something up. I wrote a simple function that would parse inbound keywords from Bing, AdWords or YSM and add it to the sid from Hydra on the redirect.

All that was left was crafting the ads. I decided to promote this in YSM initially since I’m most familiar with YSM Yahoo Search Marketing and already have other campaigns rolling there. The ad text used were basically provided by the offer company for emails. I figured they’ve been working on their ad text, so I would start with those. I made five ads. Keywords were then selected to match my offer and submitted. I initially bid the keywords at .40, but later up’d that amount to .60.

To date, I only have one conversion, but oddly, hardly any clicks for the keywords. I believe it is due to the high competition related to the offer. I’m currently working on more keywords and long-tail keywords to help my ad position. PPC with offers is definitely different than with the storefronts. The next step will be to jack the keywords higher to see if clicks increase. I will also try to promote on Bing.

No matter what this is a great learning experience, and I’ll need to keep pushing forward. I’ll be sure to post any updates on my PPC to offer efforts. If you have any tips or suggestions, please feel free to comment!

The 4 Hour Workweek

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:45:52 +0000

Today, I wanted to talk about “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. I’ve heard this book tossed around over the last year, but never paid too much mind to it. A few days ago, Shoemoney mentioned listening to this book and he was able to take a few things away from this book, so I thought I would take a more serious look at it. Another book that Jeremy mentioned in the past that I was very pleased to read was “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to QUit (and When to Stick)” by Seth Godin. Since that was a real eye opener, I thought this would be the same.. and I was right.

The 4-Hour Workweek is a great read or listen. There is some fluff and hype, but the core concepts are very ground breaking yet simple. In a very small nut shell, this books discusses the idea of freeing your time by removing the distractions in your day to day work life. How to prioritize tasks, and how to deal with fears that you’re purposely avoiding.

This book hit so many nails on the head it was unbelievable. There were a few concepts that I really took to heart. I’ll be paraphrasing, but the concept of creating tasks solely to avoid tasks that you don’t want to do, or are afraid to do. Another concept is the idea of picking up tasks to “stay busy” versus being productive. I’m definitely guilty of all of these things. It also teaches you to “unplug and reset” your brain. Since many distractions are related to our need for information and communication, it stresses the idea of going “off line” so to speak. Reading email on a extreme limited basis, avoiding meetings, etc to free up your time to do the “hard” things in a timely manner.

This book isn’t about being lazy and working only 4 hours a week and being wealthy, it’s about prioritizing time and maximizing your time to be extremely productive, which in turn will FREE up time for fun stuff.

As a affiliate or internet marketer I thought this book was very informative and informational. I’m starting to realize how some of the solutions listed in the book can greatly improve my situation. Some are scary or difficult, but I will definitely give them a shot. I was pleasantly surprised by how inspirational this book is. Seeing things in different view point (talking about the ‘new rich’ vs. the old rich), is a perfect example. If you’re look for some motivation, I would recommend this book. “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” by Timothy Ferriss.

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Keeping focused and staying positive.

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:03:27 +0000

Keeping focused and staying positive. These are two areas I really think about often to keep my head in the affiliate marketing game. At times, this can be difficult, but it’s a definite must.

Keeping focused. If you’re not focused you’re wasting time and are very unproductive. My focus is contingent on a lot of factors, including sleep, diet, emotional state, etc. Identify why you lose focus at times, and identify how you get it back is critical for managing it. Focus is directly related to production, and production is related to earnings. I like to produce. This can be sites, ads, PPC campaigns, SEO work, directory submissions or entries for this blog. If I’m focused, I produce, and when I produce, I earn.

Staying positive. Affiliate marketing can be a very tough area to be successful in. Not to mention that it’s not ‘quick’ but slow. Work you do today will pay off months down the road at times. This can sometimes give the illusion that you’re not earning after you’ve committed hard work and energy in projects. The important thing is to not wait for the instant gratification (even though that can be nice and fun) but to stay focused (see above) and continue to be positive, even if your earnings are coming in right away.

I personally believe a positive “can-do” attitude leads to better focus and production.

Wealthy Affiliate University features and benefits

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:01:24 +0000

I often get asked what the big deal is with Wealthy Affiliate, and if it’s right for them. Wealthy Affiliate has many things to offer and is not just a single ‘thing’. That’s the first item to understand. It can provide many benefits and those benefits are combined with some solid affiliate marketing techniques it teaches, to me, make this program a very useful and profitable program.

I wanted to break down some of the features and benefits. I’m sure their promotional video might show more, but wanted to give me opinion on a few of these items.

Forum
Their forum community is fantastic. A excellent blend of rookies to seasoned vets. To me, the forum is worth the price of subscription on it’s own. Since it’s a ‘pay’ site, you get rid of all the riff-raff, and you provide a venue for individuals that are trying to succeed and stick it out in the affiliate marketing space.

Share Zone
Here is a place where the community publicly posts resources. Individuals can rate resources. You could spend days in here.

Site Rubix/Hosting
This is FREE hosting for landing pages, etc. If you wanted to experiment with sites, and not want to immediately purchase hosting, etc. You could use your Site Rubix account. I played with some PPC to landing page type hosting here. Site Rubix allows you to easily create some simple sites. I don’t particularly use that tool.. but I do use the hosting.

Rapid Writer
I just started looking at this tool. I’m not the world’s greatest writer, so I didn’t look at this too much. But this is great. It’s a simple article editor. It allows you to research keywords (showing quoted results, etc). It’ll also check your keyword density. I ended up writing some content and bringing it into here for some tweaking. I also start here to see what keyword competition is like. I know SEO Book has some similar tools as well.

Spaces
Spaces is fun. It’s basically like a little social network where you can ‘buddy’ with people. You can update your profile with photo, bio. Profile also has a blog feature where I sometimes promote blog entries for this blog.

Jobs
I just wrote about jobs, but this is a great resource where you can hire people to write content or do PHP programming, or vice-versa and offer your own services to make a few dollars on the side. This is a FANTASTIC tool. I like the ability to outsource some of these tasks (ie: content writing).

My-Linker
This is basically a link cloak and link click tracking tool. Basically you add the target link, and it gives you a link that acts as a middle man.

KW Tool
Keyword Research Tool is something I’m learning more and more about. Along with my PPC efforts, I’ve been trying to pump up my natural organic results. Learning about keywords, competition and density can be extremely useful for PPC and/or SEO work.

8 Week Action Plan
This is the step by step plan where they prep you into affiliate marketing. This is great for complete new-comers to the system. The draw back is that the plans are laid out in weeks, so you can’t jump ahead. I guess, that really isn’t a draw back, it’s a way to pace yourself and digest the material it throws at you. It starts off very simple with basic assignments to familiarize yourself with their interface and portal, and then off to solid techniques of content writing to SEO, etc. This is fantastic for beginners and a great refresher course for veterans out there or a way to give a vet a new point of view.

Affiliates
Wealthy Affiliate also offers a nice affiliate program where you can earn income from sign ups. If money is tight but want to subscribe, immediately promote this program on your blog, etc. Your monthly subscription could be free with only a couple of sign ups. It’s quite simple.

There are many more features like NicheQ, Research Center, Marketing Matrials, Accreditations, Learning Center, etc. The place is massive with a large community and plenty of materials to read and learn. I highly recommend this program! If this sounds interesting, please sign up! Register at Wealthy Affiliate!

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My Halloween Failure

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:30:20 +0000

So we’re about half way through November, and I’m slightly disappointed about the initial numbers. I think we’ll finish strong at the end of the month, but the beginning, and a big part of it is the Halloween hangover syndrome. This is where buyers need to take a break after the busy Halloween push.

But what I wanted to talk about was my personal experience with Halloween marketing. I’ve been getting further and further in the PPC arena, and thought Halloween would be a fun one to do some testing. Over the last couple of months, my PPC campaigns have been showing good profits, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to spend and learn.

In September, I put together a Halloween themed web store were I was going to pull in auctions from eBay and promote various costume affiliates (ie: BuyCostume.com). October 1st it went live, and immediately created Yahoo ads. Initially, we had some problems with our ads, but got them up eventually. The clicks started to rain in. One thing that immediately noticed is the percentage of clicks were about 50/50 between eBay and the other affiliates, which I thought was slightly odd, since the other affiliates were only promoted with banners on the site. I also started to notice costs going up, but if you’re in the PPC game.. you know it’s a numbers game. I was fine with this, and I wanted to see it through to understand how Halloween works.

As it got closer and closer to Halloween, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of sales. This usually says one thing to me, my ads are not targetted enough. So we started to create a couple of ad campaigns for split testing. Oddly, all the ads were pretty even in clicks, yet I was receiving very few sales. The other thought was site design. But the bottom line is that I was getting clicks, but not conversions.

In the end I returned a total of $22.14 from AdSense and CJ on the site. Peeeee-thetic! And spent a total of $202.40 in PPC ads. That in turn led to a total loss of $180.26 for the month of October for the site.

So why am I bragging about my ‘bomb’? Simple, I learned a few things, well at least I think I learned a few things.

1. Do not rely 100% on PPC on seasonal promotions. I believe that you get a lot of ‘clickers’ but not buyers. I think it’s fine to run PPC on seasonal promotions, but you should have a good base of organic searches to ease the pain.

2. I think that my BuyCostume.com banners split my clicks too much with eBay, and in the end did not convert well. In the future, I think I’ll try to integrate the costume products of BuyCostume in the store vs. a banner. I want people to click on products vs. going to a different site, and the banner promotes leaving the site. I was very surprised by this, but also thought it was interesting to see clicks going there. I think it’s a good affiliate and one to take seriously for next year.

3. Squidoo. I should have created Squidoo lenses for Halloween and cross linked back to my site. Again, this would be for getting more organic action to the site.

4. Start before October 1. What the hell was I thinking. On the other hand, I should be good to go for next year, and hopefully it will be well indexed by then. I’ll also be spending some time this year trying to optimize it further (integrate other affiliates, remove banners, add articles or descriptive content, etc).

5. This is something I knew, and didn’t get burnt on, but in case you didn’t know. Make sure you have a network of sites to ease the sting of ‘learning’. Sure I lost $180.26 on my Halloween project, but at the end of the month, I still made $300 in CJ profits. Constantly create new sites, spread to different niches, use different revenue streams for those sites. As I stated earlier, it’s a numbers game, so you’ll want to get a consistent profitable base. Then you will have opportunities to spend some money for testing. Just like the saying.. “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer”. I think if you have money, you can gamble. Gambling will help you learn and succeed by taking chances. I’m still in the poor category, but I see the light, and I’m slowly starting to understand.

Here are some CJ charts to illustrate what I’m talking about. This first chart is sales for the year. As you can see I was pretty stagnant from Oct2006 to about May2007. This is when I was building sites and testing affiliates. May2007 is when I started to dabble into PPC with MSN, YSM and AdWords. Aug2007 I started to understand profitable niches with PPC and pretty much ditched AdWords at this time, since it was just costing me money. Sep2007 was a good month where I was seeing excellent returns, and thought I’d make a push for October.

October was the highest month ever! Now, remember, I made $22 for my Halloween site, so the rest of the sales were from other sites. Also notice the second chart (showing clicks). It almost mirrored the Sales chart (specifically for October). The Halloween site had a ton of clicks, so it was not directly related to sales. Again, build your network!

Sales Chart

Click Chart

So I spent $20 on the domain, $0 on hosting and $200 on PPC for my Halloween experiment, but I got some useful data in my opinion. Next year I need to apply what I learned, and see if I can turn this around. I know people make bank with Halloween, but you have to play the game right or you get burnt.

Hope this post was beneficial for you!