Money-Code » tips

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.

Great post on PPC at DigitalPoint

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:52:52 +0000

I was at DigitalPoint today, and came across a great thread “Adwords and ebay?How necessary?“. I personally don’t like to use AdWords (I prefer Yahoo’s YSM), but I wanted to get some basic tips for PPC in general… since I’m always wanting to learn how others are doing it.

Anyway, manx posted the following post, which I thought was extremely useful. I wanted to put in here, so I could easily reference it in the future… but some of you might find it useful as well. It’s basic, but the basics get easily lost when you dive into PPC.

“I have found that if you use extremely targetted keywords/keyword phrases in the ads with the destination url going to the exact product, you can make a profit with ebay & adwords.

For example — doing a “handbags” ad or even a “designer handbags” ad has not worked for me, but if I do an ad something like this:

“brand name” handbag
Looking for “brand name” handbags?
Huge selection at bargain prices.
Display URL: yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag
Dest. URL yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag

Then the keywords you would use would be:
brand name handbag
brand name handbags
Buy brand name handbags
bargain brand name handbags
brandnamehandbag .com

AND, use broad, exact and phrase

Or you can take it a step deeper with
“brand name” red handbags

BUT! Before you even decide to advertise a product that is on eBay, you should also do research on whether the thing actually sells.

To do this, login to ebay. Go to Advanced search, Enter the Keyword in the Search box, Check the box for “completed listings only” then click search.
The results will show you All the listings in the past 2 weeks (I think) that completed. The ones with $’s in Green were “won” or sold. The ones with
$’s in Red were NOT sold.

If the product had a lot of listings, with alot of “red” dollars — it means the product hasn’t been selling well.

NEXT! Just because a product sells on eBay — doesn’t mean people are searching Google for it! Alot of people just go directly to eBay to buy products.

So, you should use Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (although it can be very inaccurate) to check and see if the keywords (products) you are targetting are actually being used in searches.

If the product passes the above two “tests” it is recommended you start your bids at .10 cents and go no higher than .15 or .16. If you have to bid more to get impressions/clicks — then you have a problem, because very rarely will you get an EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) from ebay higher than $20.
If you bid higher, then you will just break even or lose money.

So, there you go — One way to make money with eBay and Adwords.

Hope this helps”

With the recent change to ePN, I’d be pretty weary about jumping to PPC with eBay store fronts. I’ve been contemplating pausing my campaigns at YSM, but feel like I need the traffic to help determine if I have linkage/tracking problems at eBay. From my record month (March was a fantastic month) to a totally crappy month for April… this sucks. I’m staying optimistic, and focusing on other revenue streams (like I always preach).

End the stop and go effect

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:29:35 +0000

Lately I’ve been talking to a good blend of internet marketing rookies as well as seasoned veterans. These discussions let me see trends, habits and thinking from various sides of affiliate marketers. One thing that I’m learning, either by talking to the vets or noticing it in my own perosnal experience, is to end the “stop and go” effect. This is the idea of building and or promoting, then stopping to see what comes from it… or taking a break. Then after you see improvement, you start up again. As a few of you might notice, is that I preach the “be productive” moto, and this can be easily applied to this. The stop and go can really slow down your rate of success, during the period of not doing anything.. or waiting, you could have pushed out more sites, or worked on traffic generation. I always see the posts on forums referring to not making money on x number of sites, and now I want to try again. When I see posts like this, I’m always saying, if you continued to work on the site or created more sites, you’d be doing much better, and now you’re basically starting over again.

To avoid the stop and go, you need to have a plan, goal and determination. This is extremely simple. Start with a goal. As I stated earlier my goal was to create four stores a month, so this forces me to make stores at a fairly rapid rate. I want to find new niches and new techniques to get a few more commission dollars, and I don’t want to do the old “paralysis through analysis” game, so I like to create some testers and see what’s out there. Between store launches I focus on traffic generation along with PPC, again constantly staying in motion. As you look back you’ll notice a strong growh of sites and or traffic. By pushing hard, you’ll see profits increase, and your tester sites should be giving you good data on niches worth pursuing. Now, I’m including Squidoo lense creation and some new PPC campaigns either with landing pages/offers or additional tweaking of existing campaigns.

I know a few of you are saying, who has the time? Who has the money to create sites? Frankly, that’s BS. If you’re saying this…you are in the wrong business, and should stop immediately. I currently have my own web dev business where I work 60 hours a week, easily. So time is where you can find it. If you’re watching TV, you just wasted time. You can always find wasted time to devote to this. As far as money, all my expenses have been paid for by my affiliate marketing. I don’t use any money from my pocket and roll profits back into promoting more sites or purchasing more domains. Read “takes money to make money” post where I address this as well.

The hard part is staying determined. The easiest remedy of staying focused is getting excited about success. Once you start seeing potential or a few dollars come in, it gets much easier. For the rookies out there.. it is IMPORTANT to get some early success. Money coming in either by AdSense or CJ or whatever is important. Try to develop a consistent “base” of income. Once you’re at a point where you can say, “I make $5/day no matter what” you’ll be at a good place to start expanding. From there, you start to figure out how to make $10 then $100, etc. Lately I’ve been talking to a good blend of internet marketing rookies as well as seasoned veterans. These discussions let me see trends, habits and thinking from various sides of affiliate marketers. One thing that I’m learning, either by talking to the vets or noticing it in my own personal experience, is to end the “stop and go” effect. This is the idea of building and or promoting, then stopping to see what comes from it… or taking a break. Then after you see improvement, you start up again. As a few of you might notice, is that I preach the “be productive” motto, and this can be easily applied to this. The stop and go can really slow down your rate of success, during the period of not doing anything.. or waiting, you could have pushed out more sites, or worked on traffic generation. I always see the posts on forums referring to not making money on x number of sites, and now I want to try again. When I see posts like this, I’m always saying, if you continued to work on the site or created more sites, you’d be doing much better, and now you’re basically starting over again.

To avoid the stop and go, you need to have a plan, goal and determination. This is extremely simple. Start with a goal. As I stated earlier my goal was to create four stores a month, so this forces me to make stores at a fairly rapid rate. I want to find new niches and new techniques to get a few more commission dollars, and I don’t want to do the old “paralysis through analysis” game, so I like to create some testers and see what’s out there. Between store launches I focus on traffic generation along with PPC, again constantly staying in motion. As you look back you’ll notice a strong growth of sites and or traffic. By pushing hard, you’ll see profits increase, and your tester sites should be giving you good data on niches worth pursuing. Now, I’m including Squidoo lense creation and some new PPC campaigns either with landing pages/offers or additional tweaking of existing campaigns.

I know a few of you are saying, who has the time? Who has the money to create sites? Frankly, that’s BS. If you’re saying this…you are in the wrong business, and should stop immediately. I currently have my own web development business where I work 60 hours a week, easily. So time is where you can find it. If you’re watching TV, you just wasted time. You can always find wasted time to devote to this. As far as money, all my expenses have been paid for by my affiliate marketing. I don’t use any money from my pocket and roll profits back into promoting more sites or purchasing more domains. Read “takes money to make money” post where I address this as well.

Develop different “types” of sites for greater affiliate returns

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:06:04 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this lately. In affiliate marketing, I believe it’s important to not think one dimensionally on how to generate income with your affiliate empire. Notice.. I said empire vs. site. I’m still working on this theory, but I’ve started to identify points of success in my empire or network.

First off, is a 1000 sites better than 1? It all depends how crappy your thousand sites are or how great your single site is. What I believe, it’s important to create multiple test sites to see what has potential. I’m NOT talking about niches people! What I’m talking about is creating different types of sites. Currently, I’ve been developing community sites, store front sites, landing pages, blogs and forums. Each type of site has different income potential. Each type of site work in various niches, etc.

This is another play on the “don’t put all of your eggs into one basket”. Instead of having 100 BANS type sites, learn to diversify the structure and the goal of certain sites. Some sites work really well with AdSense, others have great potential for paid banners, so on and so on. Each type of site has issues to understand though, since they are not all created equal.

Community sites have massive potential, but take the most work. I like community based sites because the content is often created by the public. Community sites can become viral easier than the other sites, since it’s all about the interaction of the community. Community sites have interesting revenue potential, specifically with AdSense and paid banners. I LOVE paid banners. Getting a few businesses or sites to pay $30+ dollars a month sure helps out with the bottom line with very little work on your end.

Community sites are harder to develop since there are not a lot of good ‘free-out-of-the-box’ software to do this properly. I generally create my own sites and moderate them. Community sites are combination of blogs, forums and resources, and are well liked by Google, etc. and usually can get good traffic fairly quickly depending on your niche. Community sites are also a great way to link your other money-making sites if they apply to the topic. Generally, I like to start a community site, get it going, then start developing eBay store fronts, etc around that topic, then link from my community site.

Forums are the next step. They’re much easier to get going. I always recommend vBulletin for a forum software since it’s well designed and maintained well. It costs money though, but if you have a good niche, you should be able to monetize that quickly and return your investment. When dealing with forums, it’s important to get good moderators right away, or you’ll be busy maintaining it on a regular basis.. we don’t want that. So find some active posters, and allow them to feel some personal ownership of the board, and have them moderate it.

Using software like OpenAds, you can easily integrate paid banners or affiliate network banners. I feel that forums are not the best place to make PPC/CPA cash since ads in forums are common place and users are generally blind. With paid banners, this is a non-issue since click through is not that important (only to the advertiser), they’re basically paying for exposure. Another great option with forums is the ability to have paid subscription boards. If you’re topic is great and is a hot topic, you can actually charge people to access the boards. I’ve not been able to implement this yet, but have been thinking of how to get into this game.

Blogs and Store Fronts are something that most people are doing, and are generally hit and miss. Normally you need to use PPC traffic to get people there. I like to create blogs just for SEO love and link to store fronts.

As you can see, creating different types of sites, can greatly increase the revenue streams coming in. I feel it’s important to create a variety of sites, see what works and expand on that. If you have a store front that is successful, find out why, and possible expand that by creating a forum site or community based site.

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!

Using Google Alerts

admin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:01:59 +0000

Today I want to talk about a tip that you don’t see discussed too often. That is the use of Google Alerts. If you’re building a blog or store front and working for a niche, Google Alerts can be a handy tool to help give you content to write about!

As we know content is very important to get that needed organic search traffic, but coming up with content is not the easiest thing to do at times, especially if you’re super busy. It’s hard to feel the pulse of a certain niche you’re working in, even if that niche is something that you’re very interested in, etc.

With Google Alerts, you can enter a keywords to be alerted on. Let’s still run with my ‘Star Wars’ theme as my paging example the other day. When you enter the phrase ‘Star Wars’ in Google Alerts, you can be notified by daily digest or ‘as-it-happens’ (I personally like to receive instant notification — so it can fuel my ADD througout the day). You can also select a type of web content to be alerted on. They are:

News
Blogs
Web
Comprehensive
Video
Groups

Now after you’ve selected your type you should be good to go (obviously you need Google Account set up). When Google runs across your term, you’ll be sent a email notification with a link or links to the site that has your alert term. This can be useful in a couple of ways. Number one, this can get you nice NEW info to blog about. And secondly, it can send you to blogs where you can comment on. Please don’t do stupid comment spam, but provide useful contribution to the topic and other comments, but you might be able to add a trackback or provide a URL back to your site for critical backlink development.

This tip is nothing new, but rarely see people talking about it for some reason. I’ve been using alerts for about 4 months, and seeing some good backlink development from it, but most importantly, it’s giving me ideas and directions for article writing on web stores and blogs.

Paging eBay RSS results

admin — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:56:56 +0000

Here is a an extremely simple way of returning a RSS result from eBay and splitting it up into pages. Some people don’t want to show 100 results, at a time, but also not be limited to show 10 results, etc. If this is the case, then paging is the key.

I’ll break my examples into pieces, and at the end offer the completed script so you can see it all in one piece.

First we need to create some function that will need to be used to retrieve our RSS file and parse the elements from it. There are a ton of ways to do this, and this was hobbled together from various scripts throughout the year (so sorry I can’t give credit on the some of the functions). We’ll be using cURL to sent the request and return the CML and use various callback functions to parse the XML file. I primarily work in PHP4, and what I understand this process is further simplified in PHP5. I believe that these functions will still work in 5, but please let me know if they don’t.. I need an excuse to jump to PHP5 anyway.

function startElement($parser, $name, $attrs){
global $xml_level, $xml_curr_path, $tree, $tree_levels, $grouping, $tag_data, $tag;
$xml_level++;
$xml_curr_path .= ‘/’.$name;
if ($grouping){
$tag = true;
}
if ($xml_curr_path == $tree && $xml_level == $tree_levels){
$grouping = true;
$tag_data = "";
}
}

function endElement($parser, $name){
global $xml_level, $xml_curr_path, $tree, $tree_levels, $grouping, $tag_data, $xml_array, $callback_func, $stop_parsing, $tag;
$xml_level–;
$xml_curr_path = substr($xml_curr_path,0,strlen($xml_curr_path) – strlen($name)-1);
$tag    = false;
if ($xml_curr_path == $tree && $xml_level == $tree_levels && $grouping == true){
$xml_array[$name] = $tag_data;
$tag    = false;
}
if ($xml_level == $tree_levels – 1 && $grouping == true && !$stop_parsing){
$stop_parsing = call_user_func($callback_func, $xml_array);
$grouping = false;
$tag    = false;
$xml_array    = array();
}
$tag_data = "";
}

function characterData($parser, $data){
global $grouping, $tag_data, $tag;
if ($grouping == true && $tag == true){
$tag_data .= $data;
}
}

function process_record($record){
global $count, $resultArray, $cfg;
$count = 0;
if(is_array($resultArray) && sizeof($resultArray) > 0){
$count = sizeof($resultArray);
}
$resultArray[$count][‘desc’] = $record[‘DESCRIPTION’];
$resultArray[$count][‘link’] = $record[‘LINK’];
$resultArray[$count][‘title’] = $record[‘TITLE’];
}

function convert_xml($rest, $callback, $format){
global $xml_array, $tree, $tree_levels, $grouping, $tag_data, $callback_func, $stop_parsing;
$xml_array    = array();
$tree = ‘/’.$format;
$tree_levels = sizeof(explode("/",$tree))-1;
$grouping = false;
$tag    = false;
$tag_data = "";
$callback_func = $callback;
$stop_parsing = false;
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startElement", "endElement");
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout    = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $rest);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = @curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
xml_parse($xml_parser, $file_contents)
or die(sprintf("XML error: %s at line %d", xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)), xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
}

$rss = ‘http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=SearchResults&siteId=0&language=en-US&output=RSS20&from=R34&satitle=star+wars&sacat=246′;
$count = 0;
$itemsPerPage = 10;
$format = "RSS/CHANNEL/ITEM";
convert_xml($rss, "process_record", $format);
?>

Here we’re passing the URL to a Star Wars RSS search result, this will sent via cURL and a XML/RSS file will be returned. Once we get to the process_record(), we’re taking the parsed values and sticking them into an associative array. This is important since we’ll be paging through the array. RSS results will return a maximum of 100 results, so we’ll be looking at them in chunks.

if(is_array($resultArray) && sizeof($resultArray) > 0){
$count = sizeof($resultArray);
$pages = ceil($count / $itemsPerPage);
if(!isset($_GET[‘page’])){
$CurrentPage = 1;
$start = 0;
$end = $itemsPerPage;
}else{
$CurrentPage = (is_numeric($_GET[‘page’]) ? $_GET[‘page’] : 1);
if($CurrentPage > $pages){
$CurrentPage = 1;
}
}
$start = ($CurrentPage – 1) * ($itemsPerPage);
$end = $start + $itemsPerPage + 1 ;
if($end > $count){
$end = $count – 1;
}

for($i = $start; $i < $end; $i++){
echo "\"".$resultArray[$i][‘link’]."\">".$resultArray[$i][‘title’]."
";
echo $resultArray[$i][‘desc’]."

";
}
echo "Page: ";
for ($x = 1; $x <= $pages; $x++){
if($CurrentPage == $x){
echo "".$x." ";
}else{
echo "\"index.php?page=".$x."\">".$x." ";
}
}
}else{
echo "no auctions found";
}
?>

Next we check to see if a array was returned and that it has elements in it. If it doesn’t we don’t have any results. If we do, we next calculate how many pages there are. We divide the auctions returned with the number per page we want to display. The next section is to see if we have any paging information being passed to use through the querystring. If there is a page passed, we need to verify that it’s inbound of our pages (does not exceed our maximum page). Once we have this we can calculate start and end points of the loop.

Finally we loop through the array using our start and end we set above. This will change as we move through the pages. And to finish it off, we need our page links at the bottom. Simply doing a for loop from 1 to the end of pages will do the trick.

As I said, this is fairly simple and can be adjusted to fit your needs. This example does not add your rover code, etc. Also you could do some fun stuff with preg_match instead of using the functions above to help parse even further. That’s another topic altogether. I like to pull images and item IDs out now for further customizations.

You can download the code here, just change the name to index.php to see the example work.