I’m really starting to enjoy the writing process though. I find myself typing up two thousand word essays with ease these days. Almost guilty again, good thing I kept this one just under

On to the Article…

Anyways, I had an amusing realization the other day that has completely sky rocked the level of productivity in my business. It’s funny because it is something so simple, yet it has lifted an incredible amount stress and doubt off my shoulders in regards to my business.

Wordpress is awesome. It allows you to set up the infrastructure for an amazing site in literally 30 minutes. This leaves you with plenty of time to focus on the content. But it does have a perceived (at least to me; in the past) downside: it is a blogging platform.

Now, I know modifying Wordpress to use it as a content management system for a “non-blog” website is nothing new, but this takes considerably more time and more planning to execute properly.

In the beginning stages of your site, time should be spent on making it remarkable (content) rather than burying yourself in coding, which can and will lead to procrastination. Likewise, major planning is best done after you have some material and feedback to work with.

Source of Anxiety for Me

I get ideas in my head for websites and businesses all the time. Friends pitch ideas to me all the time as well. And I genuinely want to work on a lot of them. You could say I have “entrepreneur ADD,” and it doesn’t mix well with blogging.

When you have a blog and an audience, you ideally should have a consistent stream of articles being posted (sorry, not going to happen on this blog anymore). They shouldn’t be posted at random intervals, too far apart, or too close together. But a new blog isn’t like an established blog.

A new blog has no audience; a fact we’re going to use to our “advantage”

To begin having people see your site as a legitimate player in your niche, you need unique and remarkable content, and you need a lot of it. But it’s hard to crank that stuff out day after day.

And I don’t know about you, but when I write something good I want to post it immediately. I’m proud of it and excited about posting it. But everyone knows that to have consistent content, and save your sanity, your need to utilize scheduled posting. Don’t flood your readers with posts and don’t put yourself in a pinch of having no choice but to write a good article before the night is up.

This is no fun when you’re starting a new site and want to fill it up with your brilliant ideas. For me, this stifles my drive to create that content since I know I will have to wait to publish it.

So What’s the Solution Already?

Remember, I told you this is very simple and I find it funny that I never though of it before. You ready…? Remove the date on your content!

Are you upset that you read that huge into and I have the audacity to give you such a basic and mundane tip? Nah, you probably just skipped to this part.

I think the intro sets the frame nicely though so make sure you read it and then stick with me while I’ll explain how this has benefited my web property development efforts and how it can benefit yours as well.

For me, having the date on my post caused a variety of negative reactions that just spiraled out of control…

Dismissing Ideas that Could Turn Out Successful

When I got an idea for a new site, I told myself that I was already spread too thin and there would be no time for me to work on it (and post articles) consistently. With the dates taken off and the connotation moved from “blog” to “content site,” I am now free to write on any topic I am interested in, precisely when I am interested in it.

Like I mentioned in my last post about my new business model, I am limiting myself to working in niches that I actively participate in normally. But I’m not interested in all of them every single day. I go back and forth depending on what my mood is at the time and with what interests I develop temporary boredom for. Just like business, I have “hobby ADD” as well.

(I don’t have real ADD, I’m just very impulsive when it comes to what I am interested in. I am someone who wants to learn and do almost everything.)

I used to only wrote posts when they needed to be published. But this wasn’t always when I wanted to be writing posts. Writing them ahead of time was much less gratifying though because I wanted to publish my work right away.

That led to not writing at all. When the time came that I needed to write an article, I wasn’t in the mood, so I didn’t do it. Had I sat down and forced myself to write it, I doubt the resulting work would’ve been very good.

So now, instead of forcing myself to write, and learning to hate a topic, I write when I am feeling the most passionate. You’d be surprised at how fun writing is and at how good you can write when you have passion.

Quitting Instead of Persisting

Many of my websites were given up on too quickly. If I failed at adhering to a consistent posting schedule, I deemed the site a failure and trashed it. It’s actually probably a mixture of thinking the site failed and just flat out hating writing about the topic for the reasons mentioned above.

Another reason I gave up on them was because they weren’t taking off according to my expectations. I wanted to promote them heavily, but I didn’t believe in them because there wasn’t enough content. And if I don’t believe in my website, how am I going to “sell” it to someone else and get a mention? It’s not gonna happen.

By removing dates, you can view your site as a repository of great articles, take your time to write great content, and when you feel confident that it’s a valuable site, start promoting and SEOing it. When you believe in your site, and have a lot of useful content to promote, all kinds of promotion avenues open up… and they actually work. People like to share remarkable content.

Obsessing Over Creating Perfect Articles

I had a notion that blog posts were permanent and set in stone. Again, this is how I felt, it is not the absolute truth, but when there is a date on a piece of content, I felt like once I published it, it was done. What a stupid misconception. Some of the best sites on the web are always reworking their pages to make them better and better over time. So why couldn’t I do that with my Wordpress “posts”?

This caused me to hesitate on writing because I wanted to make the article perfect. Instead, now I just focus on making the article awesome, but not perfect, because I know I can change it later on.

Take the date off and it just becomes a page; a page that can continually be improved.

Wanting to Say Everything Before It’s Too Late

Unfortunately, dates make old content lose value, even if the ideas are still relevant. This is just a negative presupposition that you cannot get away from when your content is dated. People are going to have a different opinion about it if they know it’s two years old than they would if they didn’t.

Sure, they can still see dates in the comments (this could be removed too if you wanted to take it to the extreme) but most people will read the comments after the article, and therefore will already have developed their impression on it independent of the date.

By removing the fear of having your great content become dated, you can start a website today and work on it as a side project for a year or two before it is filled with immense value. No one will know it’s a site that was updated 10 times in February, 0 times in March, 30 times in April, and 3 times in May.

Ok, Time for an Action Plan

In my last post I wrote that you must start with only one site on a topic you are interested in. I was worried about being spread too thin. But here I’m going to retract that statement and recommend something completely different in this action plan:

1. Register domains and set up Wordpress for every single topic you are passionate about. Don’t spend time worrying about plug-ins and themes, just get a platform out there for writing about your interested whenever you get the itch.
2. Remove all references to date within your sites. You can keep the comment dates if you want, but all other dates should be hidden. This includes your monthly archives.
3. Write undeniably remarkable content. Don’t write for the sake of making a new post. There’s no pressure to produce content, so only write when you have something worthwhile to say. This will make your site much more valuable than most in your niche.
4. Don’t worry about getting visitors and don’t concern yourself with converting them to readers. Write as though you have an audience even when you don’t, do minor promotion, and people will find/follow you.
5. Develop a growth strategy, but only once you are proud of your site, and you feel that it has over-the-top value to your target audience. Consider incorporating some of the ideas from my new business model.

Sustaining the Awesomeness

You’ll eventually want to produce constant content in order to super charge growth and keep people coming back. But I’m betting that this low pressure strategy will have been fabulously enjoyable to you, so don’t f**k with it.

You will continue to post when you are passionate about the topic. Hire writers to do the consistent posting. And since you are proud of this site, don’t hire any writer who will cheapen it. Screen them carefully and pay them well. They should be writing content that you are glad to have on your site.

At this point, if you do have the content coming in consistently, you can bring the dates back on all the posts, start showing them on newer posts only, or keep them off indefinitely. You can even modify the posting dates on your old articles so that it appears you have been posting consistently since inception.

In closing, go set up those sites for your hobbies and be amazed at how much you will enjoy writing on your own terms!

… and now I’m off to make this website less date dependent.

The experience I’ve gained and lessons I’ve learned over the past 6 or so years in affiliate marketing are very valuable, and I’m pretty financially stable thanks to it, but I feel I could have done so much more. Oh well, there’s always plenty of time to work

Becoming Discouraged with My Affiliate Marketing

I started trying to come up with a new business direction after feeling very discouraged with affiliate marketing. For one, I was at the mercy of Google because it was such an abundant traffic source that I was good at taking advantage of. The problem with this, however, is that recently (as you most likely know) they will not let affiliates play on AdWords easily like they used to.

I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the time and money building a marketing campaign for AdWords (looking back, that was a stupid thing to do, build it just for AdWords) when I had been there five times before and, like clockwork, they all got slapped with low quality scores and traffic came to a halt.

So I got to thinking, “okay, I’ll diversify my traffic sources and make something of real quality so that I can still run it on Google.” But then I thought, “well, affiliate marketing and quality is pretty much an oxymoron, and the legitimate niches just aren’t as easy.”

There have been a few affiliate programs that I’m proud to have worked with. I’ve gladly used them myself and recommended them to friends and family. They consist of various physical goods, online game rentals, online movie rentals, web hosting, internet faxing, online dating, and VoIP, to name a few.

But the thing is, of all the offers I have promoted, most of them were, in my opinion, not worth their cost (to the consumer). Here are a few of my old niches and how I feel about them:

• Free downloads: Smileys, cursors, screensavers, games, layouts, etc… The user is subjected to Ad-ware.
• Mobile subscriptions: Ringtones, mobile dating, horoscopes, etc… The user gets “hidden” charges on their monthly bill.
• Email and zip submits: Best case, they get spam email. Worst case, the user is stupid enough to try out all the offers and they have one hell of a time cancelling them after getting charged for things they didn’t realize.
• Paid software: P2P downloading, driver updaters, registry cleaners, anti-virus, etc… seriously, these programs aren’t that good, there are much better, free alternatives.

I have never promoted any of the rebill offers, and I’m not saying I would be above it, but come on, most of them undoubtedly offer negative value to the user. I’m not here to protect consumers, I enjoy making money off of general stupidity and I’ve done it plenty, I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s possible to build a long term business on something that isn’t offering a win-win situation.

If I’m convincing my visitors to purchase or sign up for shitty products, they aren’t going to be happy with me and aren’t going to want to build a relationship. So that makes each and every promotion very short term. Granted, you can make enough money short term to last for years to come, but that eventually gets boring (for me anyways).

What to Promote Then?

One type of affiliate offer that I left out of the that list was information products. Aside from offers like the legitimate ones mentioned above, I like promoting these because even though the information that they contain is available elsewhere, it isn’t available as conveniently. I am very good at researching and learning what I want to on my own and even I have been happy with more than a handful of information products that I’ve purchased.

I used to bring in quite a bit of revenues promoting these things with the standard single offer presell or multiple offer review page (all fake of course). But then the FTC started hating on these types of promotions and AdWords pretty much slapped all of them. So then how are we supposed to promote information products?

We could make a website around that topic! But wait… the information that is for sale isn’t really that great, so how do we publish a good website without giving away what is in the product? We can’t.

And this is where I started to go in circles, moving back to promoting shady offers wherever they were allowed and/or continually trying things that I knew didn’t work anymore. But I thought there had to be a way to make it legit, and then I realized something so universally known and so simple…

People Love to Pay for Convenience.

You already knew that though, right? So did I, but I didn’t apply it correctly to my business. I was trying to market with low quality content in fear that I would give away the secret and my visitors wouldn’t want to pay for anything. My new plan is to simply give away great value for free, but also great value and convenience, from a trusted source, for a price.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get started in a niche without spending the time to create your own product. Eventually, you should create your own products and have your own affiliates, but it is much easier to learn a market by selling preexisting things.

So what I am now doing, in the following order, is this:

1. Choose a Niche

This absolutely must be something you are interested in. When doing bullshit affiliate marketing, you can enter as many niches as you want because you are just making things up. To provide real value though, you must either have a lot of cash to pay other people who are interested in the topic, or be interested in it yourself.

Deciding if the demand/competition level is acceptable is a matter of personal preference. I am currently only interested in very high demand markets. I don’t want to spend my time on something unless it has the potential to eventually bring in over $1000 per day profit. Those new to the game might feel more comfortable starting in a less competitive market.

Unless you have already succeeded more than once, have a process developed, and are doing some serious outsourcing, you have to stick to one niche at a time here.

2. Register a Brandable Domain Name

Forget about putting keywords in your domain name, you want something that is brandable and professional. A really good name will appear much more trustworthy and open up plenty of areas for expansion.

3. Write Extremely Valuable Free Content

The purpose of this is to build your brand’s image, get visitors to come back for more, and attract massive amounts of free traffic. Oh, and of course to provide tons of real value to your readers.

Don’t worry about giving away the “secret” that is in what you are trying to sell. Remember that people will still buy your products even if they have read the information for free, you just need to find a way to sell the convenience (I’ll make another article in the future about ways I’ve come up with).

Create a blog (or whatever publishing medium you choose) with awesome content that will get spread around, linked to, and picked up on social media. Make the content extraordinary and have an angle that is unique from your competitors.

4. Create a Very Valuable Free Product

This is what you are going to “sell” to your paid visitors. It must really be something good though. For the first of these sites I’m making, I put together a huge audio course. I could easily charge for it by todays ClickBank standards, but I’m going to give it away for free.

It was so easy to make too. I recorded the entire thing on my iPhone while driving. Not an entire driving session, but if I had to run to the store, I would make a new section to my course. Then I spent a couple hours editing it with Audacity to make it more professional.

Now that I have everything in audio form (which has more perceived value than text), I can turn it into a bonus eBook and include additional points (or notes, or whatever) to have an even more valuable product.

I’m currently working on a few different landing pages to sell this free product. One for anything goes advertising that is a very hard sell and one that should (in combination with the blog) appease picky advertising platforms like AdWords… more on this in a future post.

5. Build a Client List

How many times have you heard the value in having subscribers? Email marketing, RSS readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans… that’s where the money and longevity is at.

You’re client list is going to consist of all these services that help you stay connected to people. And you are going to collect them in one of two ways:

1. Providing amazing content that they do not want to miss
2. Selling your valuable free product for the low low price of their permission for you to contact them

Once you have an audience (no matter how big or small) that you may contact at will, you can start making some money…

6. Sell Products as an Affiliate

There’s no point in spending thousands of dollars and countless hours creating the best products (yes, you should want to make the best, remember we are offering true value) in your niche before you really learn it’s inner workings. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in.

Do some research and you will be surprised at how many different affiliate programs are either directly related to your niche or that most of your audience would also be interested in. Then promote them to your existing audience (also for a future article will be how to do this, it’s too much to add into this little section)

7. Develop Your Own Products

Here’s where the serious money is made. Be sure that you’re offering a ton of value. You can sell anything from a $7 eBook, to an $80 audio course, to a $200 DVD course, to a $500 online boot camp, to a $2000 live seminar. You can create physical products, software products, paid memberships. You can have your own affiliate program. The possibilities are endless, and it’s totally up to you.

One of the best things about being able to contact your subscribers is that you can ask them what it is they want (maybe not so directly though), and then deliver just that.

How’s That Sound?

So there you have it. That’s basically my new online business strategy for 2010. It really goes back to the basics and away from making a quick buck while still implementing much of affiliate marketing’s unique ability to make that quick buck. It’s a mix up of  true website development, affiliate marketing, email marketing, branding, and product creation.

Let me know what you think of these ideas, any questions you have, and especially any feedback. I’m going to use everything written here as a main source of informational posts on this blog, I’ll go deeper into many of my ideas and provide real case studies and insights as my current projects progress.

First of all, I’m still not really feeling Twitter. I have the account for following other people but don’t post on it. I just don’t see the value in updating everyone with my current status. Any advice or suggestions that could help me see how to enjoy it?

Second, something terrible happened just a couple days after making that post, I was one of 3 passengers in a car accident and one of my closest friends passed away. The rest of us are all healed up now, but needless to say, it had an effect on my view of life and my desire to work (which was already low to begin with).

Lately I’ve been feeling like I want to get back into marketing though, but do bigger things besides just being an affiliate. I’m beginning to make businesses that actually have tangible value (products, customer lists, branding, etc). I’m experimenting with more fundamental marketing tactics and with diverse traffic sources. The case studies that I posted on here before were fun, so I’m gonna do more write ups of what I’m doing now.

This blog is also gonna get slightly more personal with added randomness to the topics… and there will be no posting schedule.

Oh, I also have a pretty bad ass tracking software that I’ve been programming and using in-house since April ‘08. Every time I fire it up to make marketing decisions, it gets me pumped to start more campaigns. I’m probably going to be releasing it free as open source, but it’s no where near polished for public use yet. Anyone interested in beta testing?

So that’s about it for my “coming out of retirement” post. Sometime this week I’m going to put a post up talking about my current business plan. It uses a lot of fundamentally sound marketing techniques, mixes in affiliate marketing, has it’s own products, has future plans, and best of all, has real value.

Leave me a comment and let me know you’re still reading

I use my iPhone a lot though when I am driving around or sitting around the house (I bought a nice, large foreclosure a few months ago; maybe I’ll post pictures when I’m done with the remodeling). So, as of yesterday, I have decided to try out Twitter since I can make short status updates whenever I am bored. I’m using it purely for entertainment, for the purpose of getting into conversations with people.

If you want to follow me, here is my profile: http://www.twitter.com/derekbeau

Using long paragraphs and big words doesn’t really work in business conversation, and the same can be said for blogging. Most of your readers aren’t sitting down next to a fireplace with a cup of coffee to read your words as if they were a novel. Instead, they are trying to extract the usable information from what you have to say.

Writing and developing a reader friendly blog does not need to be a painful task. In fact, the guidelines are simple and actually make blogging easier than most other formats of writing if they’re just practiced. Unfortunately, sometimes we all get carried away and forget how simple it should be. This article will give you some tips to get back in touch with the secrets of a reader friendly blog.

1. Create Catchy Headlines – The first thing a reader sees, often even before they make the decision to click that mouse button and proceed to your blog, is the headline. Write them descriptively, but keep them just alluring enough to draw the reader’s curiosity and the click that follows.
2. Explain Above the Fold – Tell your readers right upfront what you plan to elaborate upon in the rest of the post. Don’t make them have to scroll down just to figure out what they’re going to read.
3. Save The Eyes – Our eyes are sensitive, especially when reading from an electronic screen. Keep your blog eye friendly by using a large enough font (or at least one that the reader can scale up), proper contrast, and lots of white space – no more than 4 brief sentences per paragraph.
4. Establish Scannablity – Help guide readers to what they really want to see. Use bold headlines to break up a post at the transition points throughout. Think of this tactic like an ongoing table of contents.
5. Paint the Picture – I don’t mean you have to actually use your own artwork (even though it’d be cool if you’re good at it), but sometimes illustrations help the reader understand what’s going on. A picture might not always be worth a thousand words, but I bet it’s usually worth at least half of that!
6. Chat Up Your Readers – Whether writing for a blog or the web in general, it’s accepted practice to write in a chatty, friendly, and conversational tone. When writing, just picture your target audience and begin talking to them through your keyboard. Blogging shouldn’t be stuffy.
7. Don’t Create Distractions – If there is just one caveat to the tactic above, it would be that it is easy to get carried away while ignoring traditional rules of grammar. Use your blogging liberty where you’d like, but try to revert back to what you learned in school the rest of the time.
8. Spell It Out – And for goodness sakes, with spell check and a quick proofreading, there’s just no excuse for incorrect spelling unless it’s for expressive purposes. And even that’s a stretch…
9. Break It Up With Bullets – Use bullet points and lists whenever possible. A blog reader is much more likely to finish an article that cuts straight to the point and just presents the meat rather than struggling through paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff.
10. Use Even More Whitespace – When in doubt, space it out! If you’re using bullets or a numeric list style format, make sure there’s enough space between the lines so it doesn’t all just blur together in the viewer’s browser. Plus, it makes it easier to read between the lines. Also, try increasing your line height to increase the space between each line of text.
11. Let Your Readers Share – There’s nothing worse as a reader than reading to the completion of a great blog post and wanting to share a few thoughts, then finding out that the blog doesn’t allow comments. Let the reader share their piece!
12. Punctuate For Readers – Don’t be afraid of the … or the — They help web readers understand tone that is usually lost when translating spoken word to written text. Also, put some emphasis on your words with question marks and exclamation points… using nothing but periods can get boring.

Writing your blog for your readers is more than just telling them what they want to hear. It’s also about writing so they can read it easily!

I’m sure you have heard the saying “success breeds success,” but you probably aren’t taking advantage of it. If you commit to doing something towards making money online, and really take action, even the smallest successes will give you a boost in confidence. This, in turn, will lead to more ideas, more trials and errors, and more successes. You will eventually get to the point where you know what you are doing and are able to adapt on your own to the rapidly changing internet.

And being able to adapt and form your own conclusions is one of the biggest advantages you can have. Many people aren’t going to be sharing what is working for them right now. They might be sharing principles that are tried and true or exact strategies that worked in the past, but to really get an advantage, you need to have the ability to think for yourself.

Now, when I say get out there and do it, I’m not just talking about affiliate marketing. It’s ridiculous how many things you can do on the internet to make money. Some of them might be beyond your skill set, but what is stopping you from learning those new skills and applying them to multiple areas of your internet business? So here is what I propose that you do today to ensure that you are making money online in the immediate future.

1. Choose One or Two Strategies

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin by working on too many ventures at once. You can always automate and outsource them once you get them up and running, but for the crucial times when they need your attention, you must stay focused. However, just choosing one may not be enough for some people. There will usually be periods of waiting or burnout, so being able to concentrate on two ventures will add some variety.

Some viable online business strategies would be blogging (obviously), PPC affiliate marketing, user-generated content sites, free service-based sites, paid service-based sites, resources sites, communities/forums, e-commerce stores, paid membership sites, product development (ebooks or software), freelancing (writing, design, programming, etc), eBay selling, consulting, and probably many more.

Choose one or two strategies that seem appealing to you and commit yourself to making them work. Depending on your own motivational factors, you could set high goals that are just beyond reach to really push yourself or you could set small goals that are constantly achieved to boost confidence.

2. Get Something Up and Running

Even if you don’t quite know what you are doing yet, it is important to just get started. Think of it as a learning process. One of the great things about the internet is that the cost of business is extremely low and everything is very flexible. There is nothing stopping your from rapidly changing your business plans and structure.

If the task at hand is too far beyond your skills, you could hire someone to do it for you, or you could consider taking on a partner that compliments your skills. Whatever you do, you can’t let anything stop you from moving forward. Make sure you are always making progress, even if that progress is simply learning new skills.

3. Always Continue Your Education

We focused on getting something started before learning how to do it because education can paralyze you. Books, training courses, and classes are great for gaining new knowledge and learning how to do new things, but they themselves do not help you make any money. I have seen countless people get stuck in the trap of learning, learning, learning, and while they are gaining a ton of knowledge, they aren’t making any real world progress.

But, you should always be learning, just do it as a supplement to the things that grow your business. If there are particular tasks within your ventures that you are having trouble with, spend a lot of time on, or have to outsource, consider learning them yourself. You will gain a better understand of the requirements, which will help you when delegating the task, and you might even gain the ability to do it faster.

Outsourcing is great, but it takes time. You have to submit a project, get bids, choose a bid, communicate, wait for delivery, go over revisions, and repeat those last two step. It can be much faster if you or a partner can do the work on your own. I only outsource things that I don’t have the time to do or simply don’t want to do, I never outsource something that I can do quickly and effectively for myself.

4. Monitor What Works and Keep Doing It

Continuing with “success breeds success,” when you have an online venture in progress, you are continually trying new things and getting your own feedback on what you did right and what you did wrong. Use this information to train yourself how to be successful. This concept is very simply but is often ignored. When something does not work, ask yourself why it didn’t work and figure out how to adjust it. When something does work, ask yourself why it worked and figure out how to repeat and apply to other avenues.

This is where the real learning occurs. This type of learning is on a very personal level because you are analyzing tings that you yourself have done, not things that other people are saying they have done. With enough experiences, you will develop a very strong sense for success and will be able to explode your growth. You can’t properly tell other people (contractors and employees) what to do until you know exactly what works. If you don’t know for yourself what works, and are spending money based on what you have heard, there is a good chance you won’t recover your costs.

5. Never Stop Working Hard

This last step is the most important but is also the most difficult. It is way too easy to start a business on the internet. These days, with software like Wordpress, anyone can have a new business (website) online in 15-30 minutes. The hard part is sticking with it for the long run.

As you probably know, the beginning growth stages are usually very slow and mentally tough. This applies to all of the make money online strategies above. It takes time to build brand awareness, authority, market confidence, contacts, traffic, and ultimately, revenue. However, if you consistently work hard on your business, you will see incremental results in the beginning which snowball into exponential results with time.

Start Now, Don’t Stop, and Keep Reading

I know I said in the opening paragraph that you shouldn’t be reading blogs, forums, and ebooks with the hopes of learning exactly how to make money online. I didn’t meant stop reading them all together. Getting inspiration from the experience of others is extremely valuable, it just isn’t as valuable as actually taking action and making your own experiences.

When reading tips and advice online, take them as just that, tips and advice. Don’t keep searching for a step by step strategy that will guarantee your online success because your are the only element that can guarantee that success. Read the words of others to gain ideas, strategies, and inspiration for your own, existing ventures. To do this, you must already have an existing venture in place, otherwise you are just wasting your time.

Only 6 Posts In October?

I actually wrote 9 posts, but chose to remove three of them because their subject matter had also been removed. Much of my time in October was spent either working on a tool for linkbait or dealing with the repercussions of releasing it. I was also recovering from a month of extensive writing in August. Luckily, there was plenty of informative posts from the previous months for new readers to dig into without feeling like they had arrived at an empty blog.

But I must admit that 6 posts is pretty pathetic and there really aren’t any excuses for it. Hopefully I can get back on track in this new month and continue giving out solid information.

Blog Growth

The growth that occurred in October was very enjoyable and can largely be attributed to one thing… linkbait. I didn’t produce much article content, but I created a certain tool (which I will not discuss) that was generously linked to by many friends and acquaintances in the “make money online” blogging space. This resulted in a good amount of direct traffic, viral traffic, and new RSS subscribers. Here are the statistics from October:

• Technorati ranking dropped from about 30,000 to about 23,000
• 3-month Alexa ranking fell from 84,412 to about 50,000
• PageRank finally updated and DerekBeau.com was given a 4
• Yahoo! is now showing ~6,400 back links, up from ~4,000
• RSS feed subscribers increased by about 300, putting the total at over 600
• Visitors and pageviews increased by 2x over August to ~10,000 visits
• Search engine traffic is not growing, bringing in only 20-40 visits per day

The most notable (and most valuable) growth that occurred in October was in respect to the number of RSS feed subscribers. At the time of writing this, there are currently 616 people subscribing to the DerekBeau.com RSS feed.

I believe the reason so many new visitors decided to stick around and subscribe is the fact that I have spent a lot of time writing detailed and useful articles. New visitors that arrive at DerekBeau.com can see the kind of information that has been offered and subscribe with the hopes of getting more (which I intend to deliver). I am very pleased with the conversion rate of new visitors to subscribers.

Reader Poll Results & New Poll Introduction

The second DerekBeau.com reader poll has been online for quite some time now, and I think it has run its course. The results were interesting, but not too surprising:

• 39% are still trying to make money online (68)
• 30% take advantage of PPC marketing (53)
• 13% are most focused on blogging (23)
• 8% do freelancing work for online profits (14)
• 5% make money online in some other way (9)
• 3% develop their own products (5)
• 1% sell things through eBay (2)

A new poll has been released, this time asking how many blogs you own. The answers to this question wont really help me tailor the content to your needs, instead, it is just an interesting thing to learn. Head over to the sidebar and cast your vote!

Favorite Posts From Last Month

As I said in the beginning of this post, there are only a total of 6 articles that were published in October. Instead of choosing them all as favorites (which would be stupid), I will choose my one favorite post from October that I think you should read.

Autobiography: How I Became A Professional Affiliate Marketer – I wrote this post late one night and got kind of carried away with it, making it much longer than I originally intended. When it came time to publish, I actually hesitated because I was unsure if people would get any value out of it. As it turns out, the response was better than I had expected and many people told me that it was a great source of inspiration. So while it doesn’t contain any direct affiliate marketing tips, I guess it is an entertaining read and a possible source of inspiration.

Plans For November

I just started another blog (not make money online) that I plan to write to on a regular basis as well, so we’ll have to see how writing exclusively for two blogs works out. One thing I will say is that I am more dedicated to DerekBeau.com and therefore it will receive more of my time than the new blog.

There are still a lot of topics that I want to cover through articles on this blog, but I would also like to start doing some more commentary posts in regards to what other people are writing about as well as some industry news posts. I’m not sure how often this will take place, it would have to be something that really gets my attention, but I feel that if it’s done right, it can provide some good value.

I’m also going to set another posting goal for November. It won’t be ambitious as my previous posting goal, but will help me stay on track and keep producing content that should help you out. So, my goal for November is to write 10 posts (not including this one) that are at least 1,000 words and are intended to be educational. Hopefully I will write some shorter posts too, but they won’t count towards this goal.

Selling Advertising Space

The last thing that I need to announce is that I have decided to start selling advertising for the month of December. On the 20th of December, DerekBeau.com will be 6 months old and will have gained a decent sized readership. I think that makes it appropriate enough to start monetizing.

I look at it as everyone will benefit from the deal. Advertisers can gain some more exposure and hopefully generate some profits, readers get the benefit of my increased motivation and possibly some giveaways, and I get to use the additional revenue exclusively on DerekBeau.com for things like promotion and contests.

The following spots are available for sale, at a very, very low introductory rate. I will increase prices in the following months based on the demand that I observe. Please reference the statistical recap above for site stats. If you would like to inquire about reserving a spot for December 1st-31st, please contact me.

• 468×60 banner (unavailable)
• (4) 125×125 sidebar buttons (3 available) – $8/month
• (3) RSS feed text ads to over 600 subscribers – $5/month
• (5) Nofollow sitewide text links – $3/month

That’s It

And that’s it for October’s recap. Thank you to everyone who has mentioned DerekBeau.com to someone else and thank you to all of you who continue to read!

Because of the recent actions by Google (penalizing sites for “selling” text links) and due to administration reasons (I don’t have time to contact 50 people, place 50 text links, and remove 50 text links a month later) I am going to make some changes to the contest. I have chosen 10 winners rather than 50, and the prize text links will contain nofollow.

The drawing was performed by making a list of every single entry (as defined by the terms of the contest) and then mixing up that list. I then used the random integer generator from random.org to give me a list of numbers and simply matched those numbers to the list of entries. I was not allowing the same person to win twice, but surprisingly, that never happened anyways.

And The Winners Are

• 1st Place: DormEarning.com
• 2nd Place: Dave from RetiredPay.com
• 3rd Place: Jonathan from MacroKing.com
• 4th Place: David from DavidAirey.com
• 5th Place: Bjorgvin from StockVault.net
• 6th Place: CanIMakeBigMoneyOnline.com
• 7th Place: Hock from Marketing-Tools-Review.com
• 8th Place: Tim from eMonetized.com
• 9th Place: Vijay from TeachMeToMakeMoneyOnline.com
• 10th Place: LurksterAz.com

In addition to the link/ping above, I will also send an email to each of the winners to let them know they have won. Your prize ads will be effective until December 1st at 12:00 AM EST, so the faster you contact me, the longer they will be in place

I originally planned to let the winners choose what ad spots they wanted, but that would take too long because I would have to wait for a response from each winner before I could move on to the next. Instead, I will choose based on estimated value. So here are the prizes:

• 1st Place: 468×60 banner, 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, post-level text ad, RSS feed text ad
• 2nd Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, post-level text ad, RSS feed text ad
• 3rd Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link, RSS feed text ad
• 4th Place: 125×125 sidebar button, sidebar text link
• 5th Place: sidebar text link
• 6th-10th Place: one text ad on a post of your choice

What’s Going On With These Ad Spots Next Month

This contest did not get as much response as I had hoped, so next month I will simply be selling the ad spots. DerekBeau.com has been online for almost 5 months now and has experienced some great growth, so I think advertisers will be interested and will get plenty of bang for their buck.

I will start the prices pretty low and increase them based on demand. The revenue will most likely go towards promotion and more conventional contests. If you are interested in purchasing an ad on DerekBeau.com for December, please contact me.

Also, now that the personal and business issues mentioned above have been sorted out, you can be expecting a more normal posting schedule once again

Rather than talk about the theories and concepts of testing different campaign elements, this post is going to talk about what I do when I really want to ensure success in a new market. It requires a lot of additional effort, and there is no way to guarantee that it will make a profit, but by finding out exactly what works and what doesn’t work, it’s pretty hard not to.

Build Multiple Landing Pages

The first thing I would do, before even creating the pay-per-click campaign, is build multiple landing pages. If you’ve never seen the test results before, you would be surprised at what a difference design, color, and layout can make. Some markets might respond well to professional-looking landing pages while other may prefer amateur designs.

I would probably start off with two or three different design variations which would be wrapped around the same content. You don’t have to create separate pages if you know how to put together a simple template system. All you would need to do is create the new theme files and your pages would automatically inherit their design.

The variations in design I would use would include overall look and feel (amateur vs. professional), color, and content layout. Anything can make a difference, so try to make use of creative combinations. The only thing you need to be careful of is making too many landing pages because it would be an incredible amount of work and would be difficult to test.

Once you spit test your initial designs, you can introduce more completely new designs, or you can simply start changing things around on your winning design.

Swap Landing Page Copy

After you have concluded which of your landing page designs is the best, it’s time to start changing the words. Try adding a magazine-style headline, or if you already have one, try completely rewriting it. See how the use of textual call-to-actions vs. graphical call-to-actions effects your conversions. Rewrite your paragraph transitions to guide the reader down the correct path.

Many promotions could benefit from the use of pictures. See if you get more conversions with pictures or without pictures. Also try using stock promotional photos vs. homemade photos.

Most affiliate promotions that I do aren’t overly heavy with sales copy, so there isn’t as much to change around as if you were testing a long-form sales letter. Just keep in mind that they way you word things, and the emotions that you illicit, can be a big factor in the visitors decision to take the desired action.

Track Keywords By Group Or Individually

How precise you want to get from the start is up to you, but you are going to eventually want to track your keywords individually. I used to start out with ad group tracking, but lately have been using keyword-level tracking right from the start in an effort to speed up the entire process.

Once you have a system in place, it’s very easy to implement it on any new campaign that you are building. My favorite way to track keywords is to send the tracking data through the destination URL and then append it to a custom tracking id. I then get the conversion reports and process them with a custom script that gathers the information I need. I do this so that I don’t have to rely on affiliate managers placing my “conversion code” on their landing pages. This method takes some extra work, but is much more reliable.

Know When Visitors Came To The Page

In addition to tracking which keywords are producing conversions, I would also track the time of day that they landed on your page. This will allow you to increase your position during high conversion times and decrease your costs during low conversion times. Depending on your market, the time of day can be a big factor in determining how impulsive they are or how prepared they are to make a buying decision.

Write Multiple Text Ads

Anyone who knows anything about pay-per-click marketing will tell you to write multiple text ads so that you can get the highest click through rates and improve your positioning, but that’s not what it’s all about. Your text ads also play an important role in your conversion rates.

As an extreme example, if you write a text ad that appeals to many people and says “Get Free Movies Here”, you will probably get a pretty high click through rate. However, if they come to your page and see that they have to use their credit card, they probably won’t result in a conversion.

Make sure you know which text ads produced sales so that you can figure out which ones are matched correctly with your offer and are putting your visitors in the right state of mind. It makes no sense to have a high click through rate and a low cost per click if none of those clicks are generating a return on your investment.

Putting It All Together

None of this is necessary to make a profit in affiliate marketing, but I guarantee that it will increase both your chances of success and your potential profits exponentially. When I first started out, I didn’t do any of this, and I got pretty lucky. However, the pay-per-click game is a lot tougher now, and it makes sense to do all you can to optimize your efforts.

While all of this might seem extremely daunting, implementing it is relatively simple. The hard part is collecting statistically relevant data, interpreting it properly, and making the right decisions. If you can succeed at that, you will have a very good chance of profiting in any niche you choose.

A big factor for your success or non-success in affiliate marketing is the offers that you choose to promote. There are markets that just don’t do well online, merchants that do a poor job of converting the visitor into a sale/lead, and offers that are just difficult to promote for one reason or another. You can avoid these problems by understanding how to choose good markets, using your judgment when choosing merchants, and thinking out of the box when developing promotion strategies.

As you progress in your affiliate marketing ventures, and increase the number of successes that you have, you will also increase your confidence and knowledge of what makes a good offer. To help you get an idea of how I think, I will pick a few offers (none of which I have promoted before) and give you my thought process on them; one or two per post. Some of them may look promising while others may not. Hopefully this will turn into a frequently recurring series.

The Offer: Value Plus / Vacation Passport Trial

I found these two offers (value plus, vacation passport) while browsing AzoogleAds. They are both essentially the same offer, but are targeted at different markets. They have a base payout of $18.25 per lead, can be incentivized, offer a built-in incentive ($25 gift card), have almost no restrictions, and are based on inexpensive trials.

Trial offers are great because you can get huge payouts compared to the relative cost to the consumer. I almost always have success when promoting trials. A free trial would have been better, but it only costs $1.95 and is more of a validation step than anything. Also, on top of the $18.25 base payout, I’m sure that once you send even a couple leads their way, your Azoogle affiliate manager can bump it up to $20-$25 per lead. This would give you an enormous advantage on your margins.

Landing Page Strategy

So how would I promote these offers? Well, the one thing that I don’t like about these offers is their landing page (they both have essentially the same one). If you send unqualified visitors to this page, I can almost guarantee you that they won’t convert. It just does not offer enough compelling reasons for a consumer to give out their credit card details. This means that you will have to do more work with your own presell page, but that is actually a good thing.

By being forced to set up your own promotion, you can differentiate yourself from the crowd and all of the other affilaite marketers who are too lazy to spend the amount of time required. The first thing you should do is buy a domain name specifically for the market you are going to promote (two if you wanted to promote both of them). Keep it short and sweet so that you have space to add additional information to your display URL in the PPC engines (this is usually limited to 35 characters).

Next, I would see if there were any related offers that I could combine on a comparison/review page. I have found this to be the best choice because it gives the consumer a feeling of control. If there were no other compatible offers, I would simply create a catchy, yet easy to read, landing page that clearly displays all of the benefits, explains why they should sign up, stresses the trial offer and $25 gift card, and makes multiple calls to action (actually says things like “sign up now”).

All of your call to action links would point to the offer landing page (with your affiliate link), and hopefully you will have informed and sold your visitor on the membership.

Making Use of Incentives

Since these offers do allow incentives, you might as well make use of them. Generally, I advise against out-of-pocket incentives because there isn’t much point in reducing your margins. I’ve seen affiliates promote a $20 offer with a $10 cash incentive, and I am pretty sure they aren’t making more net profit than I am with no incentives.

The right way to do incentives is to offer something that has no reproduction cost to you. Make a quick compilation guide of [free] articles and links from around the internet. Make some how-to videos that the market would find interesting. Interview some experts in the given market and give away the audios as an incentive. The great thing about this is that you don’t have to worry about the logistics of tracking individual signups. If someone just wants your bonuses for free, and tells you they signed up when they really didn’t, you don’t have to worry about getting ripped off… your reproduction cost is $0.

For this particular offer, I would probably also offer an optional $1.95 monetary incentive. Just say something like “if you want to sign up, but are turned off by the $1.95 trial, just let me know and I’ll pay your trial fee.” Most people wont take you up on this offer, but for those that do, the $1.95 paid will be worth it. To make sure you are getting ripped off here, just require that they send your a copy of their payment receipt and their PayPal address that they would like the funds sent to.

Choosing The Right Keywords

You can never know for sure what the right keywords are, but you can certainly increase your chances of finding the right keywords. For these offers, I would use base keywords like “budgeting, budgeting guide, budgeting advice, household finances, reduce spending, frugal living, hotel coupons, retail coupons, etc” and then probably combine them with the names of states, large cities, stores, restaurants, hotels, etc.

Of course, each of these keywords should have their own pay-per-click ads and, if possible, their own variations of your landing page. If you just lump everything together without any organization and/or planning, you will end up with inactive keywords, low click-through-rates, and expensive click prices.

Again, not all of your keywords are going to prove successful. You will need to test, track, and monitor your results. Some keywords might be too competitive (increase your bids or niche down deeper) and other keywords just won’t turn into sales (rework your corresponding ads and landing pages or throw them out).

Going Beyond Evaluation

What I have done here is a quick analysis of a random affiliate offer. These are just ideas of how I would likely approach this market and offer. The actual steps for setting everything up, creating your campaigns, grouping your keywords, building your landing pages, and testing your results can be as simple or as complex as you feel necessary.

The real key here is that you simply need to get out there and try it. With experience, you will be able to evaluate offers with your own knowledge and style. If you don’t feel comfortable spending money just yet, just go through hypothetical scenarios. Do all of the thing I did above, analyze the competition, and watch everything unfold. You will see some marketers stay in the game (they are probably making money) while others come and go (their promotions weren’t successful).

End Note: The offers that were discussed in this post were found through the AzoogleAds CPA network. If you would like to get an account with them, use this link and send me an email so I can talk to my account manager about expediting your application.