Seriously, one of the big things they claimed with this version was that it loaded webpages a lot faster…  Now of course, they say that all the time whenever any company releases an update to their browser, but the bottom line is that Mozilla isn’t lying!

I’ve been using this version of Firefox for a couple hours now and I can honestly say that I’ve never seen webpages load as fast on my computer as they are now.  I’ve definitely noticed a huge improvement with the new version.  Huge!

Anyways, I was just extremely impressed with Mozilla that I couldn’t help but post that everyone using Firefox needs to update like….yesterday!  Seriously!  If you’re not using Firefox, then well…GO GET IT!

Anyways, this blog is about making money and even though it seems rude or even a little out of taste to be talking about how to make money off a dead guy, that’s exactly what I’m going to do…

The bottom line is there are 100’s of people out there that are profiting off of his death and there isn’t any reason you shouldn’t be either.  It’s a sad and unfortunate event, but if you don’t make money from it, someone else will.

So what are some ways I’ve seen people making money off of Michael’s death?

Michael Jackson Ringtones

Of course, definitely the most popular way I’ve seen that people are taking advantage of all the Jackson traffic that is happening all over the web is offers promoting ringtones for your cellphone of Michael Jackson’s hit songs!

I’ve seen these ads being promoted everywhere!  On the search engines, on the content networks, on facebook, myspace, YouTube, just about everywhere right now!

The bottom line is believe it or not, the ringtone niche is not dead, like so many people suggest…  Ringtones are still hot and still do really well to this day, especially Michael Jackson ringtones!

Ebay Partner Network

Another method I’ve seen being used the last couple days, is affiliates using the eBay affiliate program to launch websites that promote Michael Jackson memorabilia.  I’ve seen this done several different ways, including using software like Build a Niche Store and also just implementing eBay on websites or blogs about Michael Jackson.

There are plenty of services and software out there to make promoting the eBay affiliate program easier and quicker and simply takes a search or two in google to find some!

Buying Ad Space on Jackson Blogs already out there!

The truth is, there are a lot of people that make websites and blogs about their favorite singers or actors or whatever just for the fun of it, just because it’s something they enjoy.  In fact, most blogs and websites about Jackson don’t even contain ads, including ones that get quite a bit of traffic.

It only takes a couple minutes to send out some emails offering to advertise on their website in return for a bit of cash.  Most will gladly accept and you can get some very cheap targeted traffic!

It does take a bit more work with this approach, but it can definitely be worth it if you are willing to put in the time!

Some Questions for You!

What are some other ways you’ve noticed people making a quick buck off of the death of Michael Jackson?

Do you think it’s okay or not to use a celebrities death to make money?

Have you ever used the death or tragedy of someone famous to make money?

At first when I started mentoring and consulting individuals, I thought to myself, well maybe they just don’t realize how important split testing is, but than I realized that just about every single affiliate blog out there talks about split testing ALL THE TIME!  In fact, I’ve talked about it in depth several times on this blog and touching on each aspect of split testing, whether it’s split testing landing pages, or split testing ads, split testing offers and networks, or whatever!

I’ve explained in these posts, why you need to do it, how extremely important it is, and what types of benefits it will have on your campaigns, in fact so have a ton of other bloggers like Chad from CDF Networks in which he wrote a post entitled Split Test Everything!  Jonathan Volk wrote a post on Increasing Landing Page Conversions where he talks about split testing and it’s benefits and why you need to be doing it!

I could go on and on with posts all over the internet that talk about split testing, yet there isn’t a need for me to, simply  go to any affiliate blog and type in split testing, you’ll see that it’s a subject that is talked about all the time, yet very few affiliates seem to be doing it!

Instead, they launch a campaign in a niche like payday loans, it isn’t profitable and they move on to another niche and so forth over and over wondering why they aren’t making money!  Instead, find out why you campaign is failing, whether it’s your ads, landing page, keywords, etc and split test them!  What???  You aren’t tracking each of those things to find out where your problems are?  Then you’re an even bigger idiot!!!

Quit being lazy, quit making excuses and start split testing…  I promise you if you do, you’ll drastically see increases in your profits as an affiliate marketer!

Sorry guys, I love you all, but really felt like I needed to be blunt with this one!  Hugs and Kisses!

First off, Chad over at CDFNetworks wrote a post about Yahoo’s Competitor Spy Feature which is a feature that allows you to the top ads for any given keyword that you have.  This is a great feature as it lets you see what the big dawgs got up in the top spots to help you decide what to write for your ad copy.  I’m not sure how new of a feature this is, as like Chad, I also don’t use Yahoo’s interface too often, instead I normally use a csv file for doing all my changes…

Second, Jeremy, aka Shoemoney, wrote a post that embeded some really interesting affiliates stats that was released by AffStat.  It has some really interesting numbers and just some fun facts.  It’s 40 pages I believe, so enjoy!

Third, CPA Affiliates wrote a blog post talking about affiliates that try to rule every affiliate niche out there and that they are constantly launching campaigns after campaigns after campaigns trying to find that magic one that works for them.  Instead he suggests that you focus on a couple niches and expect to lose money at first and build it up into a profitable campaign.  It’s an interesting thought, can’t say I agree with every point he makes, but overall I like it!

Lastly, things are a little hectic right now in my life with all that’s going on with my wife and me being seperated, I’m hanging in there hoping she’ll want to work it out, but as of right now, she is saying she wants a divorce…  I’m still hanging in there and I believe that it will work out.  I love you Joy!!!

Most affiliates are told by other affiliates (often time other new affiliates) that they should avoid these niches because there is too much competition in them and they are too saturated! This is completely and utterly false, thus my reason for this post today…

Long Tail Keywords actually have Volume!

Big niches are more saturated and there is more competition, but there is also a ton more volume and keywords that work in these niches.  In smaller niches, if you start getting into the long tail keywords of 3 or more words, you very quickly realize that you’re just not able to get any decent volume, while in bigger niches, you are able to go into these long tail keywords and still rake in the volume because there are just that many more people searching for these products or services!

There are also several other big advantages to bigger niches that most affiliates don’t take the time to think about…

More Offers to Split Test

Another great feature of bigger niches is the fact that there are tons more offers to split test within that niche.  The reason that this benefits you as an affiliate is that it allows you to have more companies that are competing against each other and really trying to make sure their offer landing pages convert really well.  Because of this, it’s very easy in these bigger niches to have Offer landing pages that convert extremely well!

In a lot of smaller niches there may be only a handful of offers and normally out of that handful of offers, there will be one big player and a couple small players in the niche.  This means that normally you’re running the same offer as most affiliates (the big player) and they have no real competition thus they aren’t constantly working on their landing pages to increase the conversion rates and stuff!

Higher Payouts!

Because most bigger niches have more advertisers wanting you to promote their product or service, the payouts tend to be quite larger than smaller niches.  This isn’t actually an advantage but what it does is that even though bid prices may be higher in “saturated” niches because the payouts are larger, it normally works out pretty decently, now I’m not saying it allows you to jump right into the short tail keywords and walk away profitable, but it does give you as good of a chance as anyone else entering the niche!

Long Term Earnings

Another nice feature of bigger niches is the fact that most of them have been around for a while, and they are going to continue to be around for a while!  Smaller niches come and go and sometimes they come and go very very quickly!  Bigger niches also tend to be a little more stable in terms of the profit they make then smaller niches for the most part!  Jonathan Volk actually wrote a little post about this today, so instead of talking about it a lot, I’m just gonna link to his post about how niches that have been around a while are longterm.

Conclusion:

So while, a lot of affiliates recommend to new affiliates to stay away from the big over-saturated niches, I say go for it, in fact, in my one on one mentoring sessions that I occasionally do, I almost always recommend new affiliates to jump into a couple big niches as their first niches!  I know you’re shocked…aren’t ya?

One of the first impressions that visitors will get when they visit your site comes from your logo.  Your logo plays such a huge role on your website or blog, however, most webmasters don’t even pay much attention to it or even worse they try to make one themselves when they actually have very little or no design experience at all!

This is where LogoMyWay comes in, they are a service that allows you to put up a prize ranging from $200 dollars to $1000 dollars in cash + a 10% fee of the prize money that is paid to LogoMyWay (for example if you put up a prize of $400 dollars you’d actually pay $440 dollars to LogoMyWay).

After you put in all the details of what you are looking and pay LogoMyWay (They kinda act as a sort of Escrow, requiring you to put up the payment first so that the winner receives it from them.) you then have tons of designers that start submitting designs for you to judge.  After the time is up, you choose which one you like best and LogoMyWay pays the designer the prize money!

One of the biggest problems I face when I’m looking to get a logo designed is the fact that I myself have absolutely no design skills whatsoever!  In fact, normally I don’t even have the slightest idea as to what I want the logo to look like or include.  This becomes a huge problem for me when it comes to working one on one with a designer.

This is where logo contests have played a huge role in my business.  95% of the websites I create, I hold a logo contest offering money to the designer that designs the logo I like and choose.  I receive so many different options that I’ve yet to ever hold a contest and not find a design that I liked!

So what makes LogoMyWay so great?

As I stated above one of the greatest things about LogoMyWay is that you get to choose from tons of designs from tons of talented designers giving you a great mix of styles, ideas, and types.  This allows you to really get a good feel of what and where your site could go!

Another great feature of LogoMyWay is that you get to choose the price you are willing to pay in order to get your design from the range of $200 dollars to $1000 dollars.  I actually like that the minimum required is $200 dollars because this allows you to get some really top notch designers on the site.

Also, you get to start seeing designs coming in within a couple hours and you can provide feedback and constructive criticism to the designers so that your logo comes out perfect in the end!  If you see a design you like, but you’re not quite digging the colors, simply state that and most often the designer will submit a revision to your liking!  So now instead of one designer submitting you multiple revisions (and most only allow so many) you now have tons of designers submitting you as many revisions as they want in hopes of winning the contest!  Talk about awesomeness!

So what’s some of the bad stuff about LogoMyWay?

I have to be honest, I read about LogoMyWay before they approached me about doing a review for them, and I had read a couple other reviews on some others blogs including John Chow’s blog and Tyler Cruz’s blog, and one huge point stuck out to me when I was reading Tyler’s Post about LogoMyWay and also it stuck out when I was reading the pricing guidelines on LogoMyWay.

That is the fact that you can only give a prize amount up to $1000 dollars.  I think it’s absolutely crazy to put a cap on the amount that a person can put up as prize money and I honestly think it needs to be removed asap!  There have been several times when I’ve offered $1500 – $2000 dollar prizes for logo contests because I really needed and wanted something that was extremely top notch!  Also, it may of included not only a logo for the website, but a t-shirt design and business cards to go with it and to me it just wouldn’t make sense to run three separate contests as normally you want the logo to kinda go hand in hand with each product.

Also, this isn’t really a negative for me, but for some people it may very well be…  That is the fact that you must choose a winner once the contest is over.  If you don’t get a submitted logo that you like, you still have to pick one, however, I’ve never personally held a logo contest and not liked one and I also understand why LogoMyWay does it, although if you are extremely picky when it comes to choosing a winning design, this could pose a problem for you!  However, I don’t recommend that LogoMyWay changes it!

Bottom line:

The bottom line is that in my opinion, holding a design contest is one of the best ways to get a logo, business card, or t-shirt design done!  In the past this was mostly done on forums till these types of sites came around, and honestly, these type of sites have made the process so much quicker, easier, and better!  So if you’re looking for a design, I highly recommend giving LogoMyWay a chance!

Now, let me be completely honest with you guys, on this blog, I myself don’t actually focus too well on building loyal readership.  I have several other blogs which are ones that make me money and are part of my main stream of income…whereas this blog has never really been about making money, thus, I haven’t put as much effort or time into building loyal readership or monetizing it!

Now, there are multiple ways to build loyal readership to blog, however, in this post I specifically want to talk about giving your readers many different ways to keep in touch with your posts and to keep them in your face.  If you have any other suggestions or ways that work for you, I’d love for you to add them in the comments below!

Most blog owners have an rss button somewhere on their blog, and that’s the extent of what they do to allow their readers to stay connected, however, believe it or not, most people on the internet do not actually use rss feeds or an rss reader!  In fact, most of the blogs I read, I simply have them bookmarked in a folder on my favorites toolbar!  I know crazy right…  Well, that’s your readership!

Twitter

Twitter is a great way to allow your readers to get updates whenever you post a new post on your blog.  There are several ways to do this, however, I’m just gonna share two that I use.

The first way you can do this is to use a service like TwitterFeed which you supply your twitter credentials to and they’ll automatically check your blog every so often (you specify how often) and if you have submitted a new post, then it will automatically submit it to your twitter stream.

The second way you can do this is to use a wordpress plugin called The Twitter Updater, which will automatically update your twitter feed when you publish a new post.

Aweber

Another great way to keep people coming back to your blog when you make new posts is to use a service like Aweber.  Aweber is a newsletter/mailing list program that allows you to build a mailing list.  You see this service (aweber specifically) used on most of the bigger names in the industry like John Chow, Shoemoney, etc.  There are multiple reasons for using a service like Aweber, however, in this post I specifically want to talk about it’s benefit for keeping your readers coming back!

There is a great feature in aweber that will allow you to send out a weekly email to all of your subscribers that has a list of the most recent posts on your blog that you’ve submitted!  This is a great way to get visitors that signed up to come back and also it may help readers that may of missed an excellent post or two during the week as it also gives a snippet of what the post is about.

There is one downside to using Aweber, and that is the fact that it’s not free, it costs 19 dollars a month to use and the more people you have signed up on your mailing list the more you’ll pay, however, I’ve always made more from my mailing lists then what it’s cost me to pay for Aweber.  It’s definitely worth it, as Aweber can be used for a lot more than just keeping your readers up to date about posts on your blog.  The more loyal readership you have and the more people you have that keep coming back to your blog, the more you can sell direct advertising for, and the more money you make!

Conclusion

So, when you start looking at building traffic to your website, remember that while it’s important to get new visitors to your site, it’s also just as important to make sure you keep as many of those visitors coming back to your blog as you can!

First off, realize that you aren’t going to become a millionaire overnight, in fact, you most likely won’t even make money for your first couple months of trying affiliate marketing…  I know that there are tons of products and services out there that promise to make you 5,000, 20,000 or even 50,000 dollars a month if you buy their product or service, but the bottom line is that most people will never make anywhere near that kind of money because they expect it to happen overnight.

When you are first starting out you need to sit down and make a plan, you need to make an ad spend budget and you need to stick with it.  You need to do some research, find out what others are promoting, talk to some affiliate managers, etc.  Basically get to know what it is you are going to be doing, because believe it or not, most people will simply sign up for a popular network like Market Leverage, pick an offer and try to promote it by throwing a ton of money into Adwords, Yahoo, or MSN.

Don’t fill up your ad accounts with credit cards, you are taking a HUGE risk by doing so, skip some of the extras in your life (five dollar cups of coffee) and use that money instead!  Once you actually get a niche making some solid earnings, then that is a different story!

You need to realize that you are probably most likely going to lose money for your first couple of months and you need to plan accordingly to that!  You need to come up with a budget of how much you can spend, even if means you can only spend a 100 bucks a month.  You have to start somewhere and build up!

You also need to make sure you understand and know how the niche you are promoting works.  How can you promote a product or service if you don’t even know what the heck it is or does???

Pay attention to what other affilaites are doing in a niche, if there are a billion affiliates using review style landing pages to promote weight loss and one affiliate using a fake blog, why in the world would you start with a fake blog as a landing page?  Pay attention, jot down what you see, and make a plan!

The bottom line is that unless you come spend some time figuring out where you want to get to and how you are going to get there and do some research and then make a plan, you will probably fail horribly in this business…

For some reason, I thought that once we started the counseling that we had to get all of our problems fixed asap….I was dead wrong, by trying to push Joy to talk about all of our problems outside of counseling, I actually pushed her away and now she is back to wanting a divorce.

As I said, we are both meeting with the counselor still seperately for personal reasons that we each have that we need to work through…

I’m totally uncertain as to what’s gonna happen and to be honest it’s killing me!  All I know is that I have finally realized (hopefully not too late) that I love my wife more than anything else in this world and I would gladly do anything at this point to prove it to her and to get one more chance at saving our marriage.

So, if your religious, pray for me, if your not…pray for me anyways!  I’d appreciate it greatly and I’m trusting God to make a way where there seems to be no way!!!

PS: Thanks to everyone who has shown concern and have kept me in their thoughts and supported me through this.  I appreciate all of you as my readers and I hope to soon be able to post as regular as I was in the past once I get through all this!

Now this is a very awesome word!  How many times do we go throughout life never feeling that we have accomplished all we have, or we look back in regret at mistakes we’ve made, or continue to try to crazy things just so we feel content.  So feeling content must be an awesome feeling.  Being completely happy and satisfied with what you got not wanting anything more…

Now this is also a very bad word!  While we just said that contentment is a good thing, it can also be a very bad thing.  You see, while it’s great to feel content with what you make and what your business brings in, it’s very easy to allow that to make you stop working as hard on your business as you did when you were first getting started.  The problem with this is that you’ll very quickly start seeing your income drop!  While you can create an online business that runs semi auto pilot, the bottom line is that just like any other business, you must continue to work on your stuff and keep it going!

Also, while you may think to yourself that you’re happy making 3,000 dollars a month from affiliate marketing, there is no reason to stop there.  If you can get up to 3,000 dollars a month, then you can just as easily get up to 10,000 dollars a month in this business.  There is tons of opportunities out there to do so!

I think the problem is that society puts in people’s heads that if they continue to strive to earn more and more money that you aren’t content.  However, I don’t believe this in the least bit!  I believe the problem comes when you start to put money over more important things in your life, like your health (a lot of us internet people do that!), family, friends, etc…

I believe that when you start to put money and your business in front of these things, then you are bordering on the line of greed, and if you do it long enough…you’re definitely jumping head first over the line smack dab in the middle of greed!

So, contentment can be your best friend, your worst enemy, a life fulfiller, a business killer, a motivator, or it can turn into greed…what is it for you?