eBay Suspension PayPal Limited Support

Feb 18-25th 2008: Worldwide Ebay Strike

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Donald in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Ebay Has elected to change their policies that will affect thousands of sellers all over the world. It is time to fight back…Join our Crusade Feb. 18 – 25 and ban to NOT Sell or Buy on Ebay. We have a voice!!!

As of Feb 20, 2008 eBay announced a change in the way they do business.

Final value fee will go up 66%
Sellers cannot leave negative feedback to dishonest buyers
Reserve price up from $1.00 to $2.00
Paypal makes a decision to hold your money for 21 day!

Boycott eBay Feb 18-25

No Listing. No Selling.
No Buying. No Activity.

I Moved! Link Partners and Website Stats!

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Donald in Other Leave a comment

I just finished moving to my new place, and so you probably noticed I haven’t posted in awhile. I haven’t forgotten about the blog. I just haven’t had much time for it lately.

Good news though, the site is continuing to grow because of the eBay Suspension Forum. Right now we have over 2500 visitors a day on aspkin.com! And so if you want to get very cheap exposure to your site, we have sponsored links available at $7 each. Two spots are already taken up!

Our good friends at AuctionQuests and IPTect.com have purchased links from us. Right now we have 8 links left at $7 each! Get your link while they’re available and at a very affordable price.

dsfadf

Just a quick post before I hit the hay.

Have a great day!

Ron Paul : Stop Dreaming

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Donald in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Congressman Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”

http://www.ronpaul2008.com

How to Play Chess in West Baltimore

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Donald in Uncategorized Leave a comment

The Wires DAngelo Barksdale offers a realistic translation of the ancient game to the corner boys Wallace and Bodie.

Breaking the Blog Money Making Code!

Posted on January 7, 2008 by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff, Making Money Leave a comment

So you have a blog that cost you more in hosting fees then what contextual advertising can pay you. You had a dream of making money online as a blogger, you read John Chow Dot Com and you’re inspired but you can’t seem to break the money making code?

First things first… most people who are into making money online know about John Chow dot com. His blog is about making money online, and his goal is to generate as much money through his blog as possible. He has monthly income reports that tell you exactly what he does to make money online. The information he gives is priceless! Check out December’s report:

Private Ad Sales: $10,480.00
Affiliate Commissions: $5,701.48
ReviewMe: $5,400.00
Text Link Ads: $2,097.74
Kontera: $1,000.00
TTZ Media: $321.14
Subscription: $40.00

Grand Total: $25,040.36
Read the rest of the report here: John Chow Blog Income Report

How does John Chow make most of his money online? Through private ad sales, affiliate commissions and ReviewMe post. Everything else requires the huge amount of traffic to see at least 1/100th of the value he’s getting out of it.

Example: Kontera advertising. Those in text double links. Every time someone clicks these links, John Chow makes money. But actually John Chow negotiated a salary from Kontera. He’s making a cool $1000 a month through them for a set period of time. Though its better then adsense, you won’t make more then a couple bucks a day without serious traffic. So Kontera ads aren’t worth it.

Another example is Text Link ads. Though John Chow makes some serious cash through Text Link Ads, mostly through their affiliate program, it’s too risky to sell Text Link Ads if you depend on Google’s organic traffic. Google has been lower the quality scores of known text link sellers as a punishment to selling text link ads. Simple look up ‘John Chow‘ in Google, you won’t find JohnChow.com until the 4th or 5th page. Google has slapped his site, as well as tons of other sites that sell TLA. If you have a website that depends on Google traffic, I wouldn’t recommend Text Link Ads no matter what.

Google Adsense is all but dead. Since introducing separate content bids, advertisers have the ability to lower what they pay website publishers and man or man you’ll be lucky if you get 5 cents per click these days. As an advertiser my self, I set my keywords to around 10 cents for content networks or I shut content ads off all together. It’s simple not the targeted traffic I want or need. I’m surprised Google Adsense is still alive and kicking. The way it’s going, it’s not profitable for anyone anymore. What should be done is have site targeted advertising take over adsense. That way the advertisers have more control and publishers make more money. Either way adsense as it is just about worthless to promote.

So John Chow makes the big bucks from Private Ad Sales and Affiliate Commissions. That’s huge!

Would you rather make $1-$2 a day with Kontera or Adsense advertising? Or would you rather make $20-$100 a day with affiliate sales and even more with private ad sales? Replace you adsense with affiliate programs and you might be surprised! You could also try Google referrals, which is basically Google’s answer to affiliate sales.

Private ad sales – I’ve yet to do this, but I found a very nice piece of software that can help you with your ad sales. I plan to buy it when I get the chance and try it out on a couple sites. It looks like its very easy to use and something that’ll make you big sales for years to come. You can download a copy here: OIOpublisher

So that’s it! Contextual advertising isn’t the way to go. It’s all about Private ad sales and affiliate commissions. Be sure to check out OIOpublisher to get started with your private ad sales, and start looking up some affiliate sites like CJ, NeverblueAds and Clickbank. I’m doing pretty well with Clickbank, and working my way into other affiliate networks. If you’re new to affiliate marketing or just making money online in general, one resource that has helped me a lot are the Digital Point Forums. They’re basically a huge internet marketing forum which talks about Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools. If you’re serious about making any money online, this is one resource you won’t want to pass up.

Hope this helps with your money making adventures!

Have a great day!

Making the Perfect Landing Page

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Donald in How-To, Internet Marketing, Making Money 1 Comment

Your landing page is anything that you send targeted traffic to in hopes to convert visitors into sales. The more professional your landing page looks and the more doubts it squashes. The better chance you’ll have at converting targeted traffic into sales. And with all the competition in popular niches, you’ll want to have the best converting landing page to stay ahead of the game.

I have about 20 landing pages right now. It’s taken tons of time to optimize them but they’re all starting to pay off now. I almost doubled my sales overnight with simple changes like:

Using Verdana font size 11 pixel
Getting rid of content that wasn’t positive.
Adding content that shows more benifits
Adding trusting elements to the page.
Limiting options in the page, to focuse on call to action
Using black text with H1 headings.
Using bold text to strengthen the eye path.
Using selective images to draw attention to the call to action
Having a strong header message that lets visitors know they’re on the right site, and urging them to continue with your message

Just a few changes and I doubled my sales for one of my sites, and I’m already increasing sales with another. A landing page that looks professional is key. Using blogs as landing pages works, but not if you’re on a wordpress or Blogspot free hosting. There are trust issues using free hosting sites. It’s all about trust. When someone trusts you, they’ll listen to anything you have to say. Also the more professional your message is, the easier it will be to convert visitors into sales. Sounds easy enough right? If it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.

Don’t worry though; I came across an awesome website today. It’s a type of landing page research website. They do test on what works and what doesnâ€™t work with landing pages and report their findings. I found it a great read. MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory with a simple (but not easy) five-word mission statement: To discover what really works. I highly recommend going through some of their articles to work on your landing pages.

Also just to let you know I’m still learning all about prefecting my own landing pages, I’m not an affiliate marketing guru yet! I’m learning just like you are. But I hope this helps.

Have a good day,

Because Internet Marketing is So Easy! WebHost Affiliate

Posted on December 25, 2007 by Donald in Internet Marketing, Making Money 1 Comment

If I could only do one thing to make money online, it would be affiliate marketing. Why? Because in the short amount of time I’ve been doing it, I’ve made more money, faster then any other business adventure I’ve worked with. I’ve created tons of content websites that takes months to get going. I’ve started shopping sites selling my own product, that works well but again it takes tons of time to get started. I’ve sold on eBay, which does pretty well overall, but we all know eBay isn’t a long term business. I haven’t yet created my own unique product. I know if I created an eBook on eBay suspensions which is in the works; it would make some serious cash. It’s just that it’s taking a long time to create.

With affiliate marketing, you find a niche you want to promote. You create a nice landing page comparing competing products and you promote you site using PPC advertising. SO EASY! I can easily create a simple five page site in less then a day, and setup PPC adwords campaigns in less then a couple hours. If my landing page is professional enough and I have good content answering exactly what the visitor is looking for, it will convert into sales. I’ve done it before and its working well.

I haven’t been an affiliate marketer for long, I’ve only created one successful landing page so far, but I’ve been researching new niches. One that sparks my interest is web hosting. The payout is HUGE and the cost to the buyer is minimal! If I were to sale a $5.95 hosting package with one host, I could receive up to $95 in commission! Web hosting is a huge business too. It’s not going to die overnight like other affiliate programs. It’ll be around as long as there’s an internet. So the sooner I get started the better the business will be in the long run. And everything I do is for the long run.

So! My next project as an affiliate marketer will to become a web host affiliate. Since I know there is tons of competition in this market. One competing affiliate marketer I’ve talked to suggested I offer my services to install or transfer websites as a bonus. Sign up for a hosting service I promote. And I’ll transfer your files or install simple scripts. That’s my angle! I love creating websites, and most of you know I have tons of websites already. I host most of my sites at The Planet, but I’ve used GoDaddy, Pair, Lunarpages, BlueHost, NetworkSolutions, DiscountASP, and other host I’m forgetting. So I know what I’m doing in that area. I’m also quite skilled in basic troubleshooting. I can usually figure things out quickly.

We’ll see how it goes. Oh and Merry Christmas everyone!

Clickbank Success – My PPC Adventures! XConversions

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, How-To, Internet Marketing, Intresting Stuff 5 Comments

I have a love and hate relationship with Clickbank. They’re my first affiliate network I’ve worked with and to this day my most successful one. I also use CJ.com and NeverblueAds.com. But I’ve mainly focused on Clickbank this past week.

I wanted to prove a point that I can use PPC advertising to make money promoting Clickbank products. Before this week I’ve only used my content websites to promote. Which works well, but what happens if Google one day kills my content sites? What if I want to get into something but don’t have content websites to support it? I needed to Master PPC advertising. I wanted to have alternatives.

So I tried many different things to try to gain a quick buck with adwords. I tried direct linking to the merchant’s landing page, I tried 301 redirects, I tried email campaigns and I even creating my own landing page.

The only thing that worked for me was sending email campaigns to subscribers and creating my own comparison landing page; basically comparing top 3 or 5 products in a niche.

Having my own landing page was half the battle. What I needed to get good at was using adwords. There are tons of adwords guides out there, so I’m not going to repeat what most people have said already. But here is some key advice:

Use phrase, and exact matches as much as possible. Don’t use broad keywords in the beginning. You want to increase your CTR to lower your bid price.
Create small ad groups with less then 30 keywords pre group, and keep your ad variations on topic. Using keywords that highlight your ad variations in search increases your CTR, which lowers your bid price.
Use good tracking! I used software called Xconversions. It’s the best software I’ve found that turned my campaigns into winners! I had trouble at first, I was converting but I was losing a lot of money. Since Clickbank doesn’t tell you what keywords converted into a sale, I didn’t know what keywords to keep and which to dump. Xconversions basically tracks all that for you. You make a sale, and it tells you which keyword made that sale for you. So you can focuse on keywords that work, and dump the ones that don’t. Xconversions is very easy to use, database driven and it self installs! I had it installed in less then 5 minutes without downloading anything. I highly recommend it.

That’s about it.

Have good tracking, using tight ad groups, use phrase and exact keyword matches and have a kick ass landing page!

Check out my stats on my week old campaign and landing page! adwords

clickbank

I had some up and down days. Mostly because I was playing around with my landinge page. And I didn’t have good tracking until a couple days ago. Again I highly recommend XConversions tracking. It’ll change your crap compaign into a winner.

Good luck!

Business Opportunities – Adult Toys – And PPC Marketing! Oh MY!

Posted on November 21, 2007 by Donald in Adventure, Intresting Stuff 1 Comment

So I just finished talking with a long term partner of mine. We’ve worked together for 3+ years on numerous things. I always help him out when he needs it and he does the same.

So he starts the conversation with: “Lol I am thinking of making an site selling adult toys..LOL“.

And since the guy is in China, I say: “Lol, you probably have good supply.“

And so a great business partnership is born! We’ve decided it’s probably a good idea to work together. I can build the site, manage it, work will sales and make it search engine friendly. And he’ll do customer service, sales, and product supply.

Like I said I’ve worked with the guy for 3+ years now, he seems trustworthy and he started his business like mine the same time I did. He does the same thing I do now. So he’s a smart guy with the suppliers (virtual currency trader). So I think it’s a great opportunity to work with him and start something new.

SO! If you need some sex toys in the near future, you know where to get some!

I’m kidding…

Would you if you had the chance do the same? Or would you have to pass?

———————–

Also In my random blog bouncing today, I’ve stumbled upon an Affiliate Blog about Making Money Online through PPC. I’ve been working with PPC advertising for awhile now with my own products with great success, and I’ve been trying to do the same with affiliate marketing, I’ve found it to be challenging.

Only recently I’ve started to see success with a few Adwords campaigns I’ve setup. The only difference to campaigns that failed and to the ones I’m making profit from is making my keywords Phrase Match instead of Broad Match. I have narrow campaigns with limited keywords all targeting my Ad Variations, the only problem was since my keywords were broad and I didn’t have any negative keywords… I wasn’t converting at first. But now since making my keywords all Phrase Match it increased my CTR, lowered my total cost per click, and increased my targeting, which means more sales. Today with one campaign I had 3 sales making me $55.18 and it cost me $27.91, a profit of $27.27, which isn’t bad since I haven’t optimized anything yet.

adfaf

What I need to do now is find out which keywords are converting, and which aren’t. Then I need to optimize my landing page, to make it convert better. Then I guess create more campaigns to bring in more traffic. Affiliate marketing is tricky, but rewarding.

Also I know this is small time stuff compared to the big affiliate marketers. To this point I’ve made most of my money from content websites. And thats fine and good, but the only problem with that is if you have a content based website with NO affiliate programs to promote, you’re left with less paying advertising like adsense. Having a high traffic content website is awesome because most of what you earn is your profit. PPC advertising you’re lucky if you break even. Even so I wanted to find a way to make money without a website or limited resources. If you’re good at PPC marketing, you can do that. And so I’m training my self. This is fun stuff.

New Website Ideas – Bargain Hunting Site

Posted on November 16, 2007 by Donald in Internet Marketing Leave a comment

I’m thinking about starting something new. It’s not revolutionary or even something unique, but something that’s been a proven long term money maker. Well, to some people at least. I’m thinking about starting an affiliate bargain hunting site like boddit.com, fatwallet.com or slickdeals.net. I know a few people that are doing really well with their sites, and I have a feeling I can improve in the whole bargain hunting aspect. I took some time this afternoon and wrote some ideas for a site. Which I was about to share, but decided it’s probably not a good business decision. 🙁

Anyway, the basic idea would be for a total Web 2.0 feel which will give visitors the opportunity to give their input on products, ratings and other features all without having to create an account. I want visitors to write the content. Also the site will be crazy Search Engine friendly, have an affiliate system, RSS, XML, latest deals, most popular deals, easy to use features all on auto pilot.

Just something to take over what little time I have free.

I don’t have a name for the site yet, but I’m thinking or something short and sweet. This is a long term project which will take professional programmers and designers to create it. I give it 3-6 months to be completed. Let’s see what happens!

Inspiration: