Anybody involved in internet marketing for any length of time has heard all the rules. One of the biggest I’ve heard is it’s best to be involved in a niche you actually have some passion for. You know, if you care about it content will flow and you may even enjoy writing for it when the rest of your projects seem like nothing but a headache. Sounds good,huh? I mean we all need a sanctuary when our days are stressful. Some place we can just be ourselves and write about stuff we truly care about.

But what if that passion niche has yet to make you any money? It may be that you started it long ago before you knew what the hell you were doing and “just writing” was not making you any money. As you’ve gone along in the niche you’ve continued to use it as a place to do your best writing. So damn the money right? Not so fast.

A Niche Without Money?

I’ve got a blog in a niche I adore that I started way back before I really understood keywords or backlinks or article marketing or anything. I just wrote about things that I thought other people who enjoy the same pursuit would find interesting while maybe learning something. I picked a foundation product to base the site around loosely but tried hard to make it about the subject. Not just a load of affiliate links with wimpy content. I’ve since discovered I greatly misunderstood the niche and even though the site gets a good amount of regular traffic it just doesn’t make any money.

What Say You?

What do you do in this case? Try to sell it? Revamp it with what you’ve learned since? I don’t know. I’ve got a couple sites that are much smaller and make much more money that I am in the process of revising content and backlinks on. Trying to focus more on the terms people come looking for me for while trying to develop my authority for keywords I’d like to be known for. It’s a lot of work but fixing a site that’s already making money is a lot easier to justify than trying to fix a site that makes nothing.

Have you had this experience? Do you currently have sites that you love but make nothing? The biggest problem we all face is what? Lack of time. How do you look yourself in the mirror and say you’re doing everything you can to make money when you’re spending time with these time stealers? I am grappling with this very issue right now and I’d really like to hear from you about what you’re doing about it. Selling them? Fixing them? What?

Here’s my problem: selling them and really doing well means I will have to spend a bunch of time learning Flippa or some such service but revising them could take months. Keep in mind, I’m talking about sites that have PR, visitors,commenters but just no sales. I’m actually thinking about pulling my affiliate links for the site’s main product to see if it becomes more active. I’m also doing regular site marketing now which was nearly absent for the life of the site.

Please tell me how you’re dealing with these sites in your portfolio now? Leave a comment that says “selling”, “revising”, “deleting” or any other one word phrase that describes your approach. I’ll post the results after you weigh in. Of course, if you’d be kind enough to elaborate I’d love that too.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

When Do You Walk Away From A Niche?

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Multi-Tasking Is A Myth

First of all, let me disabuse you of the notion that so-called “multi-tasking” really accomplishes anything. Studies have already found that people who think they are working on five things at once are not doing any of them any favors. Usually, the whole system perpetuates having to revisit and revisit and revisit projects that could have been completed in a small fraction of the time. All the person needed to do was quit deluding themselves into believing more activity equals more accomplishment.

It simply isn’t so.

My honest opinion is the multi-tasking myth was created by people who had a ton of stuff to do but were too overwhelmed to start any of it. So, they made themselves feel like they were accomplishing something by getting in the middle of as much stuff as they could. In the end, all of it suffered including the human.

Simple Steps To Success

So, how do you keep yourself from getting sucked into the time-wasting, project extending, quality destroying vortex that lack of focus brings? Here are some simple rules that will make a huge improvement in your workflow and sense of accomplishment.

1. Start with only one task in mind.
2. Don’t veer off course until you get to a stopping point or an impasse you can’t move past.
3. If you find yourself trying to solve a piece of a project for more than 10 minutes, move onto the next task. Return to it no sooner than the next day.
4. Look up from your work constantly and ask yourself “Is this what I started to accomplish?” If the answer is no, get back to the original task.

It Can’t Be That Easy

I know you’re saying that none of this is ground-breaking or earth-shattering. You know what? You’re right. You know what else? Rarely is the solution to a problem really that complicated. We only make it that way so we can feel it’s worth the time we’re wasting on it.

If you try these four tips every time you sit down to accomplish a task you’ll find your projects staying on track and getting completed in much less time. You’ll also find your brain is more creative because you’re not lost in a multi-tasking cloud.

Are you lost in a cloud? Let me hear from you and how you escaped.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Tips To Maintain Focus

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I wanted to pay tribute to somebody who has been instrumental in shaping my internet business.  I’ve followed a small group of internet marketers. Some of them I’ve lost interest in as they seemed to have lost their way. Such is also the case with Lynn Terry. She was the first person who provided me help with my internet marketing business when I was both penniless and clueless. Now, I believe both of us have come full circle in our businesses serving the people that helped make us successful.

Namely, you. Those who want to learn the tips and inside scoop on what works and what doesn’t without being buried in a sea of offers and spam.

A Bumpy Ride

I can’t remember exactly but I think it was 2008 or 2009 when Lynn, a then admitted hater of high-dollar affiliate programs, started actively promoting one of those programs which will remain nameless. I’m thinking it was at least two grand and I was confused. I understand that it was probably a great program and that she certainly paid money for it and didn’t get review access to it. My question at that time was is she trying to move out of the struggling internet marketer niche or has she just lost her way? All I knew was that price tag seemed completely incongruous with the Lynn Terry I had ‘grown up’ with since 2007. With the daily barrage of email and work coming my way, it only took a blink to put somebody off the most watched list and onto the someday list.

Still, I never deleted her from my daily feed.

Coming Back Around

As the years went by, I kept an eye on her blog and I started having steady success using her ideas and Ed Dale’s Challenge system. Things continued to grow and I realized I had them both to thank for that.

Two Biggest Lessons That Lynn Taught Me

I was writng a post on another blog of mine the other day and I thought ” it’s a great post that stands on its own”. I laughed when I realized I used to think that in 2007 when I started. And I remember how mistaken I was. No blog post stands on its own.  There’s always a way to make it better.

How to make it better? Give the reader a known and trusted resource they can use to get the same results. In case you’re wondering, they call these O-F-F-E-R-S!

That’s right. Shameful as it may seem to some(haha), there’s always a way to help your readers while you get paid for your efforts. Let me give the two lessons here for your consideration.

1. Never write a blog post just to make money
2. Never pass up an opportunity to make money off a blog post

Do these seem like they can’t exist in the same space? They shouldn’t and let me explain why.

Humble Beginnings

I started this blog in 2007 and started writing posts about anything and everything I thought might interest readers. Maybe some banners. Heck, I still rank on the first page of Google for “Dan Fogelberg Death” for heaven’s sake! (You can bet that’s paying all kinds of money-LOL!) I learned a lot about writing but didn’t have much success for obvious reasons. I was just starting to follow Lynn.

Then I started following other(non-Lynn Terry)affiliate gurus who were telling you to do everything including stealing elements (graphics,copy,borderline illegal stuff) from other sites to make money. This was a time of great confusion for me because this flew in the face of what I knew to be right. Yet, these were the ones that were making all the money. What was wrong with me? My blogging was a mixture of poorly written affiliate program reviews and way too much crap. That’s right, crap. Yes, I still managed to provide quality content in between the offers but the crap to content ratio was way too high for my liking.

Came To My Senses

Then, I started publishing content that I thought would benefit my readers and only reviewed products I had first hand knowledge of. Some marketers still think that’s under-achieving but I don’t care. I know I can write an article that helps somebody and makes some money without selling my soul. I believe that!

This is when I got back to following Lynn again. I realized that she’s also rededicated herself to helping people trying to make their first dollar while still appealing to those that are making a good living online. That’s a fine line and a tough balance and she pulls it off with consummate ease.

So, I’m back Lynn. I feel good that I’ve come a long way but I still have a way to go. Thank you for all the lessons I’ve learned and have yet to learn from you. I continue to wish you the best in everything.

Jeff

BTW, Lynn is currently running a “Growing Your List Challenge” on her blog that’s for anybody thinking about a list or having problems growing one.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Two Big Lessons I Learned From Lynn Terry

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We’ve all heard the stories about creating blog networks and auto-posting content on either your own group of sites or with services like Posterous that will put your content on several sites at once. Some of these work well but most are just a pain in the ass and will only last a few months at best until the service decides it doesn’t want that traffic a la Posterous. But can you do site linking on a much more targeted yet smaller scale and still see benefits.

I believe you can and I just proved it to myself.

Two Quality And Related Sites

I want to start by saying this is not some bullshit method of trying to bolster a low quality site with a high quality one. This is about linking your related sites together into a merger of sorts and having them both benefit from it.

I had two sites in a related niche. I’ll use the example here of a writing blog and a guest posting blog. The guest posting blog had quality content and was easy to read and find useful information in. It only suffered from lack of promotion and it was a new site. After months and months of not finding time to promote it, I decided to announce on my writing blog that it was expanding and did a release about the new partner site. I talkied about how it would help the writers following the big blog by giving them another piece of the puzzle and made sure to link directly to the site.

BTW, Google loves links from related sites, don’t they? LOL!

What Happened?

What came next surpassed my expecatations. The newer blog’s readership is now on par to more than double it’s last month’s traffic. How do you like them apples?

So, see. Everything that can help your blogs succeed does not have to be massive to work. If you’ve got two or more related quality sites. Tie them together with an announcement in the big blog. You can even use the merger angle because it lends creedence to your successful business empire model.

Caveat

Let me give three warnings. First of all, the sites MUST be quality sites or you could hurt your popular blog by association. This is not some lame sleight of hand trick to get people to read a crappy blog. Sometimes, one of your sites just needs readers to prosper and a popular site can help with that.

Secondly, just linking them is not enough. Build on that success by publishing more on the smaller site to help increase the affect of the linking. Don’t think you can just link them and never worry about it again.

Finally, if linking doesn’t help the struggling site maybe you should consider selling it off or proposing a linking with another site in your niche. You may be able to find plenty of writing blogs that would welcome a ready made, QUALITY guest posting blog. Especially if all they had to do was either buy it from you or pay you to maintain it.

Let me know your thoughts or if you’ve done this successfully by leaving me a comment below.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

An Easy Way To Save A Struggling Site

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This Sale Has Ended.

3 Days And Counting

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know I don’t push out affiliate offer after affiliate offer. But I just received an email from Jay Stockwell of SpeedPPC (the PPC marketing tool that guarantees you make more money or they give you your money back) announcing a 3 day sale of their SpeedPPC product. For the next 3 days you can get:

• Instant access to SpeedPPC v4.5 Pro, the industry’s most advanced PPC campaign building software, now with support for pay-per-view advertising and even more PPC search engines. Value $497
• Four additional software licenses, so up to 4 people in your organization can access SpeedPPC to build amazing pay-per-click campaigns. Value $396
• Their 2 week, 14-part Advanced PPC Bootcamp that will train you on all the fancy tricks and techniques we’ve learned over the past 3 years. Value $397
• You’ll also receive 12 months of FREE upgrades to future versions of SpeedPPC, immediate access to all of the SpeedPPC training materials (including videos), 24/7 access to their members-only Customer Area, a year of monthly training updates on new techniques and strategies, and free SpeedPPC product support.

This total bundle is worth $1290.00 but for the next 3 days only you can get the whole package for $347.00!!!

SpeedPPC is the most comprehensive PPC marketing suite available today. Their customer service is top notch and their guarantee is unheard of in the industry. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines wishing you could get into PPC but afraid of the learning curve and expense, SpeedPPC has just solved both of these problems for you.

But you need to act fast! This offer is only open for 3 days and counting.

Buy SpeedPPC Now!

Post from: Senjo Marketing

SpeedPPC Kick Start 2011 Sale

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If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for any length of time, you already know how much comment spam Akismet has saved you from. It’s a really good system they have set up for bloggers where reports by one blogger help to update the database so that other bloggers don’t even need to see comments from a spammer. Not perfect but very effective. When you consider it’s standard on all new WordPress installations, it’s positively a no-brainer.

What About Contact Form Spam?

Contact form spam is kind of another animal. The same bots that can be trained to leave BS comments on your blog can be used to find the contact form and spam you there. Unlike comment spam, there’s no built-in solution that comes with every WordPress install. That’s the reason I’ve done some research and found two free WordPress plugins that will all but eliminate your contact form spam.

Not All Contact Forms Are Created Equal

I’ve used a number of different contact form plugins and I’ve got to say the easiest to install and customize by far is Contact Form 7 It’s free and installs in seconds and really requires no customizations out of the box. It’s nice looking and easy for your visitors to fill out when they have a question of you. The only problem is it has no built-in spam detection. The easiest way to get this feature is to install a captcha field on your contact form so a bot cannot complete it. But which one?

Keep It Really Simple

Really Simple Captcha, that is!  Really Simple Captcha is a free WordPress plugin that puts a simple but effective captcha field on your contact form. Once you get the Contact Form 7 and Really Simple Captcha plugins installed all you have to do is go inside your Contact Form 7 settings, click the “Generate Tags” dropdown, select CAPTCHA and copy the codes for the image and input fields into the form code on the left of the settings screen in between your Message and Submit fields. See the graphic below. Click the image to open it in a new window.

Hope This Helps

I’ve looked at a bunch of contact forms since I’ve been blogging and Contact Form 7 is the one I keep coming back to. Pairing that with Really Simple Captcha should make your contact form spam almost completely disappear overnight. You can see it in action on this blog by going to my contact form

If you’re using another tool or tools that you really like, leave us a comment and let us know about it. I’m always looking for better stuff.

I’ll also mention that while it would be easier if the plugin could do both duties every all-in-one contact form plugin was way too complicated to just get the form up and running on your blog. Contact forms and their spam are just not that complicated. Unless you require a completely customizable solution and you’re willing to put the time in to learn it, my method is your easiest choice.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Eliminate Contact Form Spam

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Part of my 2011 goals had been to get back into Adwords for my niche sites that have shown promise. I had run some campaigns back in 2009 with some success. I just didn’t have the time or budget for a large scale investment in it at that time. This year, I pledged to get back into it a little bit at a time until I was running a fairly large group of Adwords groups.

I selected as my first site one that has been busting my goals since about six months into the project.  A partnership I had set up for it had run into a roadblock due to the partner’s health. The partner was an expert at the niche the site was built on and I was counting on them for a good block of content and community engagement. With that temporarily on hold, I decided Adwords would be perfect to send more traffic to the site until it could be resolved. The site has a great foundational educational product that I had reviewed extensively so I thought that would be a great place to start.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

The Nightmare Begins

I did extensive keyword research and had picked out a small group of long-tail phrases that had good search volume and reasonable competition.  I had just used one of the coupons they send for established accounts so I thought I was ready to go. I set up my first ad group and ad and submitted it. I was moving on to my next group when I noticed the first ad showed “disapproved”. Disapproved? Before going any further I knew I had to resolve this because.  I got an email in a little while that said the ad had been disapproved due to “Site Policy”. Reading further, it appears the product review I did which was 100% unique content was cited as a bridge page. In other words, the page, in Google’s eyes did little more than tell the visitor to buy the product and sent them to the merchant with a link.

Not at all!!! The page referenced contained a 1000+ word, unique, non-cut-and-pasted review that looked at every aspect of the product. Yes, it did have a link to the merchant in it but added significant value to the visitor beyond that link.

Long story short: after numerous email exchanges I finally got them to say their main problem was that it wasn’t unique. I sent them a CopyScape report showing it hadn’t been stolen from anywhere and was original.

Then It Just Got Ridiculous

They countered by sending me a list of every site that had SCRAPED(yes, I said scraped-stolen)my content from another review and claimed that was why it wasn’t unique. Forget that all of those scraper sites did point back to me. That was as good as they could come up with. More emails and they refused to admit their error. I just don’t have any more time for this.

So, where am I? I’ve got a killer site I can’t send Adwords traffic to. I’ve got an Adwords balance I can’t use for this site. I guess that’s why we have to be so flexible in our industry. You never know when you’ll hit an impasse and have to maneuver around it.

My Advice To You

If you haven’t been running an Adwords campaign in a while I wouldn’t use their coupon to get back into it. I know this sounds paranoid but I really do believe this has something to do with it.  I would also make sure you send traffic to a page that hasn’t been scraped(good luck with that)and provides more than a link to a merchant site.

My Question For You

If you ARE currently running Adwords campaigns could you please tell me how you get around the bridge page/site policy/non-unique content nonsense? Or have you been running bridge pages forever and I was just unlucky to start a new campaign now?  Any advice you can give on your Adwords experience would be greatly appreciated. If not, where are you doing your PPC for the best bang? How is the new Adcenter?

Beyond that, do you think there is any point in me fighting this further? How do you fight the unique content thing when they’re claiming scraped content is your fault?

Post from: Senjo Marketing

My Adwords Nightmare

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As part of the Challenge, I set up a posterous account to tie together seven sites for posting articles relevant to a niche I had build a site around. It was easy to set up and worked marvelously. I could get content out to my network sites that contained a link to an article I was reviewing and just one link back to my main site. I set it up exactly as Ed Dale had recommended and it helped me get ranking for some long tail keywords fairly rapidly and retain them.  I wasn’t using it for spam and I recognized that some of the sites were no-follow but I was willing to be able to post to seven sites at a time with unique, useful content.

Then, last month, it just stopped working.

Posterous Support Sucks

I noticed that the posterous email I normally get when I posted to the blog didn’t show up. I attempted to log into the account and it let me do it but it said my blog was missing or deleted. An email to support told me the account had been banned.  Banned? What the hell for? The support email only pointed to the TOS and basically left it for me to figure out. An email from me asking for clarification was ignored. I checked the Challenge forum for others in the same boat. I found a thread where a member said they just wrote them and explained what they were doing and the account was un-banned.  I tried this as well and have been just as ignored.

So, what am I left with? A banned account that used to connect seven sites. I could just set up another posterous account and tie them together again until they decide to ban me again but without any clear idea of why I got banned that seems just plain silly. Not to mention a waste of time.

My conclusion: a service is only as good as its support and posterous’ support sucks. I would not recommend them to anybody. If people can’t reach somebody who is interested in working with them then they provide no value to anybody.

Let me just add, I wasn’t trying to game a system, spam it or get around their policies. I was using posterous as it is set up to be used. To publish to multiple sites and enjoy some limited link juice. The only possible thing they might not like is that the main site IS commercial but that’s true of probably 99% of the users and posterous knows this.

To all Challenge members: have you had any luck with posterous or have you been able to get a response of any kind from them? Please leave your comment below. Good or bad, tell me your experience.

Update

Since this article was posted I was able to get a wonderful support person at Posterous to reinstate the account. What I did was send a support email telling them I was interested in setting up an account and told them exactly what each post would entail and asked if any of that would be a TOS violation. When the support person wrote back and told me it wouldn’t, I explained that I had an account that had been disabled and that I only did what I previously told them. She took a look at the account and realized it had been disabled in error and reinstated it. Now, I have posterous working again and I didn’t have to re-establish the linking within a new account. It just works again.

She looked at my posts and could never figure out why it had happened in the first place. I thanked her and gave her kudos in her review system.

Patience and perseverence pays off! Yeah! I’ll let you know how it goes.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Posterous Problems

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I get something almost every day in my email that always puts a smile on my face. It’s an email by people I’m sure are imaginary at some supposed SEO Firm.

Why does this make me laugh so much?

OK. Let’s suppose for a moment that there really is a human that went to one of my sites who is a site promotion whiz. Let’s further say they actually filled out the contact form and didn’t have a bot search for “contact” on my site’s homepage and auto-fill the contact form fields. Why does this person think I would have ANY confidence in their site promotion abilities when their first point of contact with me is a form, spammy email to me?

I mean could they possibly show me more convincingly how much they DON’T get it if they tried?

Do you get these emails?  Do you laugh at them like I do or do you just feel sorry for them?

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Today’s Chuckle – SEO Firms

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I was looking for a header that combined the various tools I use to make money online. I used Photoshop which I am not a master of by any means. Still, I think it turned out pretty close to how I conceived it.

I use the Flexibility2 (now the Flexibility3) theme by Advantus Media which I think does an excellent job at putting the tools you need together when you’re building a site. Their support is also awesome. The only complication I had was that the header was broken down into a background and a logo section instead of just being able to make a full header and upload it. If I wanted to, I could have made a logo section only but that was more work than I wanted to do. So I just used my header image background and tweaked the title and tagline inside the Flexibility2 admin panel.

Let me know what you think and let me know if you have any experience with the Flexibility2 theme.

Post from: Senjo Marketing

Site Header Redesigned

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