credit: jon_gilbert

Oh the wondrous Nitrous, how happy I am that I chose to pay the additional $50 to have you during my root canal! Man, this was a great experience.

First of all, the laughing gas doesn’t make you laugh at all. What it does is make you very, very optimistic about everything that is going on. I mean, the dentist could drill, cut, inflict pain, whatnot. You just don’t care.

The pain is still there, but you are in this “bring it on” mode. So it is very recommended.

Another perk is that while high on nitrous your mind races, and all sort of ideas pop into your mind. Some are really ridiculous, but some are really great. The tough part is remembering them after it wears off.

I had this cool idea of promoting a CPA offer on Facebook in a certain way, and what do you know… took me a while to remember what on earth was it, but when I did, and implemented it, the results were good. lol… Conversions are ok, and the campaign is profitable.

Can’t tell you what it is though, sorry. Have your own nitrous enlightenment.

What I do want to tell you is the difference between running Facebook ads to Adwords.

While doing Adwords Search you can target the keyword the person is searching for and find those customers that are in the “buy mode” for your specific offer.

On Facebook, however, no one searches anything. But, you can target your adds to many parameters. Geo, Age, interests, language. marital status, etc… So, your mindset should be different.

Pick an offer that you think would fit the tightest targeting, and run it. Best bet if it is a lead, not a sale.

SO, for example, don’t get those forex or bizopp offers. Take a mobile pin offer for a trendy ringtone or a mobile trivia game. Target a certain country (if you know a foreign language and the offer accepts this traffic, great, make it local), think of the most probable age group. Think if that person would be a man or a woman (try running a Quantcast search on the url of the offer to get a whole bunch of stats), set the bid to the recommended lowest bid and go, go, go…

Don’t dismiss Facebook because people say it doesn’t work. Just try.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Facebook Ads on Nitrous

But, today I thought would be a perfect day to write a few lines because I have a root canal scheduled in two hours and I cannot start doing anything serious anyway.

This time I will talk about Google Adsense for the first time in a long long while. Adsense hasn’t been my cup of tea during my time online, but recently I found myself owning a bunch of domains that could potentially become Adsense sites.

So I slapped on some WP themes got niche-targeted content, hooked up Adsense blocks and let them simmer. Sure enough, traffic was slowly starting to trickle. Muhaahaa!

Having other, important, things to do rather than check the stats every day I let it be only to come back after two months…

Following the two months, my Adsense account stats showed I had a load of clicks (All Right!), but no earnings! (WTF!)

WTF!

photo credit: ffi

Googling for a reason I found that it usually happens when

• Public Service Ads displayed – I didn’t have those
• Someone paid for CPM (per thousand impressions, not per click). That could be, but I seriously didn’t think so.
• Invalid clicks

So nearly dismissing this issue, never to touch Adsense again, I almost by accident stumbled on another source that said that there’s an allowed sites functionality in Adsense, where you can restrict your ads to be shown only on specific urls. If you have anything in there, the ads that are displayed on other domains would not generate revenue.

Guess what! For some reason, over a year ago, I set up restrictions to this domain only. Every other domains were not generating revenue… that’s what I call a stupid mistake.

The moral of this story is that you should check stats in the beginning to see everything’s ticking, educate yourself and know the features of the services you use.

-Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

A Stupid Adsense Mistake

What do they offer to the user? Could be everything!
Free Gift Cards, Free Product Samples, LCD screens, PCs and MACs, etc…

Usually the user would enter his email or zip to be “qualified”, and then proceed to follow other instructions. You, however, get paid immediately after he submits that one field. What he does or does not afterwards is not your concern.

I know many people that don’t even look at those offers because the pay is only between $1 to $2 US. At first glance, nothing to write home about, but it really ads up if you know how to market those suckers.

The best thing about those offers is that for you to get paid, the user doesn’t have to whip out his credit card. Once he submits his email or zip, you get paid. That’s why the conversion rates on those offers are higher than any other. An email or zip submit offer can sometimes convert at 30%.

Almost every CPA network carries those, including Market Leverage, which is great.

What to pay attention to?

Price
Obviously enough, you have to get cheap traffic. Although conversion rates are high, you still can’t afford to buy clicks for $0.5, or even $0.2, and expect to make money with it.
I mean really cheap. $0.01-$0.08, or free…

Targetting
To boost conversions you have to target your campaigns properly. Make a profile of who would be interested in an offer and figure out how to get that specific audience to fill out that zip/email submit.

Yea I know, easier said than done, but with the right tools you can find out how to make the most of your money (Google Insights for Search *wink, wink*)

Preselling
No presell for these… These are simple, matter of fact offers. A presell attempt would only confuse the punter, and make him wonder wtf is going on.

Imagine an ad saying “Get a Free Wii For Participating in a Brief Survey”, then getting to a presell page that basically says the same with some other bs, and only then getting to the offer page, where again they are going to be pitched a Wii for participating.

Maintenance
Always keep an eye on your conversion rates. Some of you may be familiar with scrubbing. Scrubbing is when a merchant decides not to register some of your sales.

This could be for many reasons, which I will not mention here. Maybe in another post

But, this means that at some point you might see a drop in your conversion rates from, say, 20% to 5%. When this happens it is time to look for another offer.

My Pitch

Ha! How can I end this post without pitching you guys something for desert?

One of the techniques taught at PPC-Coach is marketing single field offers and provides very useful and tried methods to get those work for you. These are elemental and once mastered can be expanded to other types of offers as well.

So… grab my $25 rebate and join PPC-Coach!

Enjoy!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Make Money With Single Field Offers

Being published on John’s blog is a bit symbolic for me.

JohnChow.com is one of the first blogs I stumbled upon when, on a cold November 2007 night, I was looking for ways to make money online. True, it didn’t come up in Google, since by that time John was already known as the Evil Panda Slayer, and Google didn’t bring him up. I was referred from some other blog. But, nevertheless, it had a huge impact on me at the time, seeing the figures he was making, the posts frequency, the FeedBurner counter and all the other authority markers.

Year and a half since, I was still reluctant to guest post. I always had a feeling that the true quality content was supposed to be on my blog. How on earth was I supposed to give away a fine article to another blog, when I was struggling to keep up with the daily posting?

But, a lot has changed during this time. I’m more laid back with my posts, and I made it clear to my readers that I will be posting weekly at best because I’m busy with PPC and other projects. I thought that I would loose my readership, but RSS count was steadily rising since then.

Luckily for me, I was getting more involved with article marketing, so releasing high quality content to other websites wasn’t as painful as it was before. And, as a weird coincidence, a buddy of mine was telling me that he thought it was impossible to guest post at John’s blog unless you were his close friend or a big-time-blogger…

So, I knew that I had to prove him wrong. John is a businessman and a pro-blogger. He must value his time and grab an opportunity when he sees one.

I proceeded to write a post intended to be published on John’s blog. The true way to make it a no-brainer for a blogger to host your post (wtf, it rhymes) is to tailor-fit it to the blog’s subject-matter. So a post about mailing lists was a good idea, since John’s marketing Aweber quite a lot.

A couple of days later, with a post about “making money with mailing lists” in my hand, I sent John a short email asking if he would be interested in hosting my post, with the .DOC file attached to the message. (saving him precious time and money)

I was prepared to give it away anyway, so no terms were set, no deadlines whatsoever. Imagine a noob sending you an email with a post and demands that it would be published in three days or else he’d go elsewhere. How rude!

So, ok, I’m not exactly a noob, but it’s always best to assume that you are in the eyes of the other. Especially since John didn’t know me personally and we never talked before.

So here we are.
Let me give you some tips to get published on another blog (when you’re not invited by the blogger, of course):

Four Tips to Successfully Pitch Your Post to Be Published on Any Blog

1. Fit your post to the host. (Rhymes again, I know)
2. Send the post itself along with the request email.
3. Make the email as short as possible:
   

   Hi,

   I’m Alex from net-entrepreneur.com, could you be interested in hosting my article about Big Red Widgets? See file attached.

   Cheers,
   Alex.

4. Don’t make terms or whatever. If the blogger doesn’t get back to you in two weeks, send it to another blogger, with the needed adjustments, publish it yourself or be free to do whatever you want with it. 14 days is more than enough to consider the offer and give a green light.

Have fun!

-Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Chillin at John Chow’s: How to Pitch a Guest Post

Luckily, although I knew nothing about making money online, I knew enough about the Internet to dig deeper than that. I started reading blogs, sifting out splogs of course, read a few forum discussions and basically got the feeling of this niche.

Like any of you probably did, I followed the gurus and opted-in to all kinds of mailing lists to receive free ebooks and how-to’s. I was swamped with information and the many money-making techniques. I was dreaming of multiple income streams and was ecstatic…

…during exactly one month.

After that moth, I started to suspect that with all those offers, methods, techniques, and way to make money online, it is probably a big bubble to get beginners to pay for info products.

Obviously enough, I ended up doing exactly nothing of what I’ve read as ways to make money online. I made a pledge not to buy another ebook ever again and, as a general rule, not to pay for anything again.

It’s human nature to choose the easiest path and stay in the comfort zone and, so I did. I was blogging and hoping to monetize the blog at some point. The “wonderful” and very promising ways to make money online I discovered in my initial research were long forgotten.

This is the point where most people would just forget about making money online and Internet Marketing altogether.

Make Money With Affiliate Programs: A Year Later

The comfort zone for me was not to spend too much money, and not to go where I was new. I had WordPress skills naturally I chose to go the blog way. A full year has past before I realized I needed to change my strategy, making minimal sales that wouldn’t even pay for my grocery bill. A full year!

Fortunately, I had the brains to realize that a huge change is needed, and enough persistence to make myself go into new online ventures.

I have chosen to pay for PPC coaching, and bought a really outstanding Internet Marketing ebook: One Week Marketing.

It’s been a few months since, and those two have provided me with the needed insights to dominate niches using both SEO and Pay Per Click, and for the first time in a long time I started to see sales coming in.

Summary and Insights

So what did I learn from all that?
Let me give the beginners a piece of advice:

1. Try to join a community of like minded people. That way you will have a way to easily find out what works and what doesn’t. What program is a scam and which is a true money maker. Find a paid forum or a paid coaching program, this automatically weeds out spammers and freeloaders.
2. Keep in mind that work is required to achieve results online. Nothing is easy, and your initial efforts will be tough.
3. If you feel that you “need” or “must” pay for another ebook or tool, refer to Advice No.1 above. Consult others. It is very probable that someone has already bought that and has a solid opinion, which is not biased like the opinions you’d find on a blog or a sales page.
4. This one could possibly be the best advice. Go at it.
   If you just read about a wonderful way to make money, and don’t give it a go, you might as well forget about Internet Marketing and watch Youtube videos all day. You can’t possibly expect to catch fish without throwing in the line, can you?

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Make Money With Affiliate Programs – Why 90% Fail Miserably When Doing Affiliate Marketing?

A lot of the things are not secrets at all, and are available if you know what to look for. Knowing what to look for comes with experience, or if you have someone point you in the right direction.

It’s like when I was starting out over a year ago. I was thrown from one way to make money online to another. I was so thrilled by the fact that there are so many way to make money online, at first, that I was pretty much sure that I was going to be stinkin’ rich in two months. Three months at best.

I’m not stinkin’ rich and many months have passed since. What went wrong?

Simple, Not Easy

Most of the ways to make money online are simple. But there’s a big difference between the simplicity of the method and the ease of making it work for you.

The major obstacle that rises in front of a beginner when he realizes that he’s going to have to pay for stuff. Most think that everything is free on the internet, and those who pay for services are suckers.

Well, most beginners are ok with paying for hosting (which would also give them a free domain name). But that’s where it ends… They would try to get everything for free and are going to spend 6 months threading water. Most will quit not too long after.

Let’s take mailing lists for example. The simplest of schemes.

You get people to opt in to your list by offering them something in return, that had to do with a certain niche. That way you will have a list of people who are interested in a particular subject.

The next step would be to take suitable CPA offers and gently pitch them to your list, while trying to establish a strong relationship with the subscribers.

Simple? YES! Easy? NO!

First of all, enter our major obstacle; a beginner would probably not sign up with Aweber, or any other autoresponder service in the first place because there’s a monthly fee involved.

“What’s the point of singing up and paying monthly fee if I’m just starting out?”
Sounds familiar? How about:

“I can’t justify the cost of the autoresponder because I’m not yet making money…”
Duh!

Drum roll please… The secret of part 2 is:

Have a Plan

A beginner would not have a plan. He would typically go on and try a new technique every once in a short while. Is that because of the lack of a plan or the other way around? Who cares…

You have to have a plan. You have to know what you are going to do today, tomorrow, next week, next month.

You better sit down and write:

1. I want to reach 2,000 subscribers on my mailing-list in the red widgets niche within the next mont. I will do that by doing a, b, c, etc…
2. I will make profit by mailing to that list the following offers: a,b,c etc…
3. The expense is going to be X, but the potential profit is going to be Y.

Now ask yourself a question:

Am I prepared to take a risk and enter this venture?

You see, this is a beginning of an online business in affiliate marketing.
Having a detailed plan will show you how to start making money today, even before you spent a penny.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The Big Secret of Affiliate Marketing, Part 2

The thing about PPC is that you have to pay money upfront, and usually will have to throw anything between $100 and $600+, depending on the niche and your experience, on testing an offer before you decide whether it is a keeper. Imagine testing several offers and you would clearly see what I’m talking about.

Now, the big question is what you do on these breaks?

• If you’re doing affiliate marketing full time and find yourself in this situation, you’re obviously out of luck. Look for ways to get money! lol.
• If you have a day job, you can just relax and wait for your next paycheck to come in to fund you with a few coins.

But if you want to become a serious affiliate marketer, and eventually quit you day job, you can’t afford to sit back and relax. You got to go out there and find ways to make money online without paying anything,

There are a lot of ways for that, and one of them is bum marketing a.k.a. article marketing. This post is not article marketing in particular, so I won’t explain you the whole theory. Besides, it is so basic and elemental that you’ve probably heard about it numerous times since your being online.

This is not just about Article Marketing…

Article marketing has seen many critics and since it works exceptionally well for some and can extraordinarily suck for others.

What many marketers (the ones that it sucks for them) don’t understand is that article marketing is a very large division of Internet Marketing. It can be done this way or that way or the third way. Or the fourth way, really, there are many different and creative ways to implement article marketing.

What is this About?

One of those ways was One Week Marketing, a cool guide that I reviewed a few posts back. One Week Marketing gives you a one week long plan for launching an elaborate marketing campaign for an offer, without spending a dime.

The thing is that not only had I reviewed it, I also started using it to supplement my PPC efforts.

I already had sales coming in for a few offers I launched, and the beauty of that is: you get to keep the commission as net profit!

No more subtracting ppc costs… Everything you make is yours – sweet.

So, I want to take this chance to offer you a $20 rebate for One Week Marketing. You can find the details in my members’ area, after you opt in and receive your password.

One Week Marketing is not expensive as is, and with my $20 rebate it is really a no-brainer. Don’t miss this opportunity.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

What Do You Do When You Run Out of Money For PPC?

Sell products? Sell services?
What are we selling exactly?

See, that’s when I stopped and had an “AHA!” moment. I suddenly realized that we are not supposed to sell at all.

I used to work as a project manager in marketing agency once, and I don’t remember any of us selling anything to the customer. Why should online marketing be different?

We are not online sales reps. Marketing has a different purpose.

We are to inform a potential customer that a product he wants or needs is available for him at a certain location. That’s it. No selling!

The customer you want to grab is already holding his credit card in his hand. He wants to buy. He’s online to see whether or not he’s being suckered into something, and to know if there isn’t a better deal for him.

So, you don’t go: “Can I interest you in a great Red Widget? Only $27… All your friends would be jealous! Buy NOW!”

You should be more in this direction:

“I have a Red Widget that is making a lot of people happy. All their friends are jealous because this red widget has this and that advantage over the other red widgets. You can find out more here…”

You see the difference? Why sell anything to someone who’s already a minute from signing the deal? You just need to nudge him in the right direction…

Of course, you can choose to target a different audience. Let’s take those who are looking to compare stuff first and have not yet decided. But, it’s all the same…

Don’t sell. Be of service to them and they will appreciate your treating them like people instead of like a herd of sheep.

Have a different perspective? My comments are open for you

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The Big Secret of Affiliate Marketing

Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.

This is great info if you’re venturing into ppc. You will understand how the behind the scenes of bidding on keywords works.

Have fun!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction