Breaking the Blog Money Making Code!

Posted on 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

john chowHow 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.

shoemoneyGoogle 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!

Google ReferralsWould 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!


Clickbank Success – My PPC Adventures! XConversions

Posted on 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 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.

msnchatAnd 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.


Google Doesn’t Like Scraped Content – Who Knew? :)

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

I just finished doing my bi-monthly daily traffic report for all my sites. Aspkin.com is doing okay with about 736 visitors a day starting this month. I found that making the eBay forums private really slowed things down, all the way to around 500 visitors a day. So a few days ago I made the forums public again, and the numbers of visitors are starting to increase. Before the forums went public I was receiving around 1200 visitors a day to my blog and forum. Not so bad.

statsI also found that Google really doesn’t like scraped content. I’m not a big fan of it either but since I can’t possibly write all my own content, I have to find methods to feed my sites fresh content. Most of my sites have unique content, but there are a few I’ve been testing with different kinds of scraped content. My best sites, averaging 2-3 thousand visitors a day are custom made websites with 100% unique solid content. My worst sites have barley 10 visitors a day with 100% scrapped content using wordpress themes.

Google doesn’t necessarily care if you use the same platforms as others use (wordpress), but they seem to give you some sort of bonus if you use some unique scripts to handle your content. And also they don’t care much for scraped content; which I pretty much knew already, but had to test it out for my self.

blackhatI’m experimenting with RSS content with some sites, and I’m having good results. Some sites are staying the same traffic wise and others are increasing slightly; which is a good step away from ugly scraped content.

I also found that if you domain names have highly sought keywords in them, Google will look at these sites more often for spam, and if you’re using scraped content with these sites, Google won’t hesitate to ban you domain. I’ve had two AWESOME domain names banned for scraped content. I’m trying to get them back by using good content and high ranking inbound links, but time will tell. I was able to get one site back about 6 months ago, and now that site gives me around 400 unique visitors a day. Nice!

654I’ve found that mixing up your content with some unique and scraped content works well. Especially if your scraped content is targeted to keywords you’re looking for. But scraped content websites all by it’s self doesn’t work.

One last thing… using the same exact content in multiple sites doesn’t work either. I have 6 sites based on the same topic and using the same content. But only 2 or 3 of those sites get decent traffic. The other 3 gets crap for traffic! Just a heads up.


Matt Cutts Does it Again – Halloween 2007!!

Posted on by Donald in Intresting Stuff, Other Leave a comment

Matt Cutts is an interesting guy. He’s a Google software engineer and currently heads their Webspam team. His blog Matt Cutts is quite popular because of his insights into how Google ranking works.

I’ve been following his site for about a year now, and there are a couple things I really like about his blog. For one, he’s been known to give helpful advice about Google. Just recently with Google’s latest Page Rank update, he gave insight into Text Link penalties. Basically if you sell text links ads to manipulate Page Rank, Google’s going to slap your site in rankings. I also like his random quirky post. Just recently he updated his current Halloween situation.

Here’s his 2007 Halloween custom: The T-shirt is hand-made with an iron-on. The only thing you’re not seeing is his tail in the back, and the back of the shirt says “K THX BYE.” He’s a freaking cat!

halloween 2007

In 2006 he decided he wanted to go as a search engine. What’s better to be then Zombie Jeeves:

jev1jev2

He wanted to be Silent Bob… but decided against it. Personally I liked Silient Bob better:

silentbob

In 2005 he picked up the blade of the six-fingered man to become Inigo Montoya:

ingo

Then in 2003, he colored his hair and went as punk rock Matt:

punk rock

Sometime in 2000 or 2001, he went as Google’s chef Charlie (the one who once cooked for the Grateful Dead):

matt-cutts-charlie.jpg

It’s been interesting following Matt Cutts Halloween post. I can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next year!


EBay Suspensions Invalid Phone Number Q&A

Posted on by Donald in eBay, How-To, Intresting Stuff 1 Comment

Another FAQ for the eBay Suspension Forums.

EBay Suspensions Invalid Phone Number Q&A
Lift your limited eBay account after invalid phone suspension.

Does eBay care if your phone is invalid or not?
Yes, they are limiting and even suspending accounts for not having a valid phone number. What usually happens is once eBay detects your phone number is invalid; they will immediately stop your current auctions and limit your account until they can verify your number. It’s an easy fix.

Why eBay limits your account for verification:

  • If you change certain account information like your password, eBay will sometimes limit your account for phone verification. If you do this with a new IP, you can almost always expect eBay limiting your account for verification.
  • Customers can complain that your contact information is invalid, and eBay will limit your account.
  • It’s also been mentioned using (AOL) proxies will sometimes limit your account for more information.

phoneHow to lift suspension and get a new phone number: All you do in that case is update with a Privatephone or Aim Phoneline number or any number that actually works and eBay will call it and leave a pin on the voice mail. Then you go back to eBay, enter the pin to prove your number works and you get right back on.

Here are a few options for a temporary for number.

  • Aim Phoneline (free incoming calls, works, To listen to your voicemail you need an AOL or AIM e-mail address, a computer with an internet connection, a web browser, and speakers. To answer calls, you also need AOL 9.0 or the latest version of AIM, and have a microphone or PC headset.)
  • Privatephone (It’s free and you can set up a voicemail so that when eBay sends the PIN number for to verify, it will record it for you. You can then access it by checking your voicemail by phone or just logging in and playing it thru your PC.)
  • GrandCentral (works, may have limited numbers)
  • Skype (not a good idea to use this as its part of eBay, Works right now… but for how long? It’s only time before Skype shares information with eBay and Paypal.)

Other options: Arrange to use a friend’s non-landline phone number for verification.

How to Prevent Future Suspension: Try to stay in contact with your customers so they won’t have to ask eBay for your contact information. Use Privatephone or AIM Phoneline when you are limited.

It’s best not to wait until you’re limited to change your phone number to a real one. When eBay finds you’re using a fake number they will remove your current auctions until you can verify your account.

Important!! Remember when listing your phone number; make sure not to use a phone number you’ve used before with a suspended account. This will cause your accounts to link and be suspended.

New Information about phone verification: Verify your identity by phone – This option allows you to sell immediately on eBay. Enter your telephone number as indicated (land lines only) and select whether you want to receive the call now (you’ll receive the call within 20 seconds) or in 2 minutes. You will get an automated call with a 4-digit verification number at the telephone number you specified. Enter the 4-digit verification number on eBay and continue your registration.

To learn more about eBay Suspensions and how to keep selling on eBay, visit the eBay suspensions forums today!


Using Your Email List to the Fullest

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Intresting Stuff, Recommends Leave a comment

The first thing you should do when working online, selling or promoting products is to start an email list. With an email list you’re able to promote your product and others over and over again, instead of just once on your website or through other mediums.

getrThink about this. Whenever a visitor finds your website, they read the information they came for and if you’re lucky they’ll click on your adsense or buy something from you. What if they don’t do either? Most people visiting your website will come and go without making you money. What you need to do is capture as many of these prospects in an auto responder such as GetResponse and promote for the long run.

The best way to capture a visitor’s email is to offer them something for free! It can be anything! But remember this, if you simply ask for visitor to signup for blog updates or news updates, you won’t have as much luck as giving something away for free.

The best things I’ve seen people give away are 7-week courses on a specific subject. At the end of that course you have built up enough trust with the prospect to promote a product you believe in. People make tons of money online doing this. An example is giving away a 7-week course on eBay suspensions. After the seven weeks are up, offer them a product that’ll make you money. This can be your own product or someone else’s.

stat

The good thing about having an email list is whenever there is another great product related to your 7-week course or product; you can promote this and make even more money. You don’t want to promote just any old product though, if a prospect feels you’re just using them to make money online, you’ll lose their trust and they’ll filter you out.

The best thing about this is the more people you have in your email list, the more money you’ll make in the long run.

Just a quick tip on what I do to make some extra cash online.


Blog Update – Clickbank, Kontera, Adsense, and other Crap!

Posted on by Donald in Clickbank, CPA, eBay, Intresting Stuff Leave a comment

I think I have too much going on. I have two forums, 60+ websites, several of which generate my main source of income, hordes of affiliate projects, testing, maintenance, updates and more! I don’t consider my self a workaholic, but geez… it seems the more traffic a website gets, the more it takes to maintain it. Which I guess comes with the territory. Other then working online, I workout at Golds Gym as much as possible and spend lots of time on my other hobbies, cars! I’m a Webmaster, Affiliate Marketer, Internet Marketer, and I guess a soon to be writer. (working on an eBook).

Which brings me to, what do I call my self. As a job title, I would like to say I’m an Internet Marketer. But whenever people hear that, they think I work for some crap company, trying to sell some crap product. At least that’s what I would think. Calling my self a webmaster seems a bit much. What am I so good at that I’m the master of?

What about Affiliate Marketer? That goes with Internet Marketer I guess. I’m finding more and more Affiliate Marketing is becoming a big chunk of my monthly income. It’s about 1/5 right now… which is nice! I should call my self a writer! Even though I consider my self a poor writer, I seem to write more then anything else. Internet Marketing requires being a decent copy writer.

Affiliate Marketing and other ways to create money is what I want to focus on from now on. I still love talking about SEO, and ways to build websites, but I think people want to know about making money online. I know that’s what keeps me going to my favorite blogs.

John Chow Dot Com and ShoeMoney.com

These guys have some great blogs that are updated a heck of a lot more then my blog (they make thousands off their blog a month). I wish I could focus more on my blog, as it’s producing better and better stats everyday, but until it starts producing real income, besides adsense and Kontera ($100-$200 a month), I can’t spend all my time on it and not on my real money makers. Maybe I should find a niche and stick with it! Lol. I talk about too much stuff with this blog and I can’t target any good affiliates with it. Even though this Blog is blowing up because of my eBay suspension guides and forums, I hate talking about eBay. Other then in the forums, I don’t want this blog to turn into another eBay hater. I want to talk about alternatives to eBay. And other ways people can make money. I think that’s the better route to take.

Well, another post about nothing. I seem to do that a lot! I guess its better then posting nothing at all?

What kind of value can I give off this post? Hmmm

Well, I talked about Kontera a bit.

Kontera to me is okay. It does a little better then adsense, but the lag time for the text links to be created are a bit much. Kontera doesn’t work well in forums either, it seems to do okay in blog post. So far I added it to about 5 blogs, and it’s had about 500 clicks this week, the results aren’t impressive. I’m willing to wait a few more weeks to see what happens. The good thing about Kontera ads are they don’t take up any additional ad space. And they’re highly configurable.

I’ll talk more about this in a couple weeks when I can give more details stats on it.

Oh, and Clickbank affiliate program is working great still! I almost reached my second goal of $200 a day! The most I’ve made so far has been $187 in one day. The average I’m making is $60-$130 a day; which again is nice considering this is all free traffic through a couple blogs and email marketing. I’m definitely going to keep working on this. It’s more then just making money; it’s the progress I love to see.

Well, until the next egotistical post, have a great day!


IP Burger – Whats Your IP Address?

Posted on by Donald in How-To, Intresting Stuff, Recommends Leave a comment

I just finished creating a simple IP checking website called IP Burger. There are a few of these IP checking sites out there, and well I saw they were doing well, and the fact that I usually recommend people checking their IP address to these sites, why not create my own? Well I did. IPBurger.com

The website displays your:

  • Current IP Address
  • Name Address
  • Remote Port
  • Browser

Go to IP Burger here: What’s my IP address?

Any linkbacks welcome, go to the link page here.

What is my IP Address?


What is a Landing Page? Clickbank and PPC Advertising

Posted on by Donald in Clickbank, Google, How-To, Intresting Stuff, PPC Leave a comment

What is a Landing Page?

In my quest of earning $200 a day from Clickbank I’ve come to a roadblock when it comes to generating sales using pay-per-click. To this point I’ve only been making money using banner ads on my personal websites. It’s all free organic traffic, so I’m making 100% profit. The thing is I want to start making money that I can control with a flip of a switch. The problem with PPC advertising is your sales have to beat out your cost to make a profit. I understand this. I understand the proper way to get going with PPC. I just can’t seem to create a proper landing page.

I was reading this great forum post earlier today, it’s about 17 pages worth of great information on getting started with Clickbank. And in the forum this guy talks about his progress with Clickbank and PPC. This thread is an absolute gold mine!

Here are a few highlighted text I found in the forum! There is a lot of great information here, be sure to read before the this thread to get the whole picture.

  • Well one problem I see time and time again is that people try to sell the product on their landing page.. you shouldnt be SELLING the product… thats what the vendors pitch page is for..your landing page should presell… give an introduction to the product.. let other know how the product helped you etc.. then have a link to the vendors page… a customer doesnt want to read your landing page.. then have to read through the same stuff on the vendors page.. it will only bore them…
  • As someone who’s been in all facets of sales before, the hardest part isn’t getting them to agree on the PRODUCT. It’s getting them to agree to the CONCEPT. Timeshare for example, is neat in concept, but has a terrible stigma (in most cases rightfully so). The hardest part selling them was gettign the people to realize it could HELP – at that point it was just a matter of which product they wanted.
  • I see these pages selling one product, several pages, lots of pictures and big red text, and being savvy, it’s off-putting. But when I see several products it’s like my defense is lowered because I’m not guarding against one big scam, but instead 4-5 products which each may be scams, but are arranged in a format that doesn’t make me immediately think so.
  • An old sales trainer told me to sell the way a predator attacks a horse. Run straight at them and they’ll freak. Wind side to side moving closer each time and they’ll let you get up to their face before running because the slow, steady movements are disarming. Not sure if it’s true, but it was a hell of an analogy.. I think it goes along with the idea that you can’t throw a product in the customer’s face and force them to buy and expect good results. You start off slow – arouse some curiosity, develop some intrigue, provoke some thought.
    Then, you further keep their interest by hitting some of their emotional “hot-buttons” – connect with them, bond with them, show them you’re one of them. Then, making the offer as someone who identifies with them, you offer to give them more information about the product [link to merchant sell page] (instead of shoving it in their face) as something you, as someone similar to them, would honestly recommend to help them out. Thereby, instead of going after them straight away, you “tack” back and forth several times to get the sale.