Take your online work offline….

Most of my closest online friends know that I am very rarely on the internet. Other than the short time I spend uploading files and doing link building runs, I spend very few minutes (comparatively) online. And yet still I consider myself an internet marketer. Let me explain….

The internet is nothing but one big, fat distraction. It is. And it is very easy for you, internet marketer, to get caught up in this distraction because for whatever reason, most seem to think that to do internet marketing, you need to constantly be online.

Let’s take a look at a very likely scenario-

So, you wake up, grab a cup of coffee and get online. You check your email, check your favorite forum, maybe head over to the NYtimes for news, check your analytics, ect. ect. Only then, do you get to work. You write an article, submit it and then wander off to a forum or blog and get side tracked. You spend the next 30 minutes lost in la-la wasting time land before you start writing more content. Rinse and repeat.

By the time the day is through, you have written 3 articles for the day and wondered how in the world the day got away. You promise yourself that things will be different tomorrow. They won’t but that is okay.

Sound familiar? Getting sidetracked is so friggin’ easy that it is probably one of the most difficult things to overcome.

About a year ago, I wondered what it would be like to NOT work online. The results were absolutely astounding.

These days, if I am building a new website and want to fill it with content, I will typically start a folder with the afforementioned niche. In it, I will save web pages (sometimes entire websites) in the folder….it could be 20 for a small niche….it could be hundreds for a larger one.

I take that folder, move it over to my laptop and then remove myself from being online. There, I will write article after article and develop a heirarchy of similar articles. On this laptop, I also have dreamweaver and xsitepro (I spend more time building static websites over blogs because the heirarchy of the site is easier to “visualize”).

By the time my day is through, I will have written more content and have a better blueprint into the niche I am trying to exploit. This is all done sans the internet.

Of course, this is assuming that you have a plan for your content and aren’t simply writing from day to day whatever is on your mind (which is a haphazard way of building content…you should have a structure for any money making venture you plan…for instance, content should be well written and formatted with all the potential internal link structure mapped out…)

So what about keyword research and link development you ask? The same thing applies to this as well:

When it comes to keyword research, I will plan a complete day (if it is a small niche) or an entire week (if it is large) for it. Without getting into tools of the trade, I will start with a very general search, throw it into an excel sheet and then start to drill down into the niche. The niche gets its own folder for general terms. Each keyword goes in a subfolder. I will drill down at least 10 levels and download onto an excel sheeet. By the time I am finished, I will have a pretty large folder which will then get printed out in which I will go offline with.

Linkbuilding is another story which I will get into in the next tip.

The moral of the story? Remove the source of your distractions and you will get a lot more done and be far more productive.

A good marketer plans ahead

Sometimes it isn’t enough to have an over abundance of content. You have to have a plan of action. Since the majority of ranking involves getting links from authority sources (or making your own if the content can’t stand on its own), link building is probably one of the most boring things that is involved with internet marketing.

And to make things worse, you can easily get lost in the amounts of links pointing to each site or secondary site. In other words, if you can’t keep detailed records, you will sink yourself very quickly (assuming you are doing it all on your own).

I can’t remember the marketer who said it but the saying goes something like this…..

A professional marketing campaign is always a year ahead in its planning

What that means is that everything most of you are doing is not what you should be doing. At best, I imagine there are a few of you who plan the week out. There are a few more that may have a loosely plan for the day. The majority of you will fly by the seat of your pants day-to-day.

So, let’s take a look at how I link build. Once again, I am not saying that my way is the “best” way but that the strategy I employ works for me.

The first place to look for links is your competitors, right? Most of you won’t go any further than the front page to see who is linking to it. I run deep research on my competitors to pull up links that would otherwise be missing. I identify my competition.

I will copy and paste the urls of the links in a .txt file along with a note as to the nature of the link (is it a blog comment? a “partners” page? in text?…ect.) and what the page is talking about in context to my competitor’s page. This, along with keyword research, is where I spend the majority of my online time by the way.

Depending on the size of my niche, by the time I am through, I will have hundreds, sometimes thousands of links.

From there, I will itemize the links into “immediately doable” or “work links (meaning I will likely have to put in the work for them).

I will take the immediately doable links and write out a 260 day plan of action. For each day, depending on the amount of links I uncover, I will have 5-20 links that I will work on each day, not including directory links (which I still use but sparingly and only the ones that matter). These go in 260 separate .txt files, one for each day of work. These links will have places on my site that they will point to and will most certainly be pages deep in my site.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, this kind of research is thorough and will set you up for success. Most of you won’t do it because it involves a lot more than making a blog comment here and there while you are spending your day wasting your time.

The research involving links can take a week or two but in the end, you have an entire year planned and mapped out in front of you. Pretty crazy, right? And the best part is that it is regimented….ie. on Monday, you get 6 links…on Tuesday, you get 20 links…on Wednesday, you get 2 links, ect. ect.

Of course, you could simply outsource this task and pay someone in India weekly to do it for you on the cheap.

Always keep your eyes open for new niches

I have an idea bucket where I keep all my ideas for niches. For example, just recently my wife printed out Guilana’s diet plan (from reality show Guiliana and Bill). She gave me a list of things to go get at our local health food store. One of the things was a drink called Kobucha. Doing a a little research, I realized that Kobucha tea gets a fair amount of traffic. And although the top competitor is Wikipedia, there is a marketer down on number 3 of the first page which is offering a free PDF on this product in exchange for an email. There isn’t a ton of competition for this keyword in general and it gets a fair amount of traffic.

Plus Kobucha fits my profile for a potential niche site:

• Has traffic and interest
• Has a rabid fan base (not kobucha but the organic food market)
• Can’t be bought everywhere (most towns won’t have this freely available)
• Has the opportunity to upsell with backend products

Anyway, my point is that you should always keep your eyes open to potential niches that you would otherwise miss that you happen upon in your day to day life.

Another place where I look for opportunities is places like hubpages and squidoo. The gist goes like this:

1. Identify the profile of a marketer- Less astute marketers will lump everything into a single profile. This is particularly effective for contextual ad sharing networks like adsense in which the marketer has done the leg work and found long tails that have advertisers.
2. Get alerted whenever they write something new
3. Analyze what they are doing and why they chose the niche

I typically don’t like to spend a lot of time online doing this (once again, most of my work is offline). So, if there is a good idea with traffic, I will take the webpage, save it and throw it into my idea bucket.

Okay, so let’s put it together. Let’s pretend that I am going to build an authority site on Kombucha (the tea I mentioned). I can most likely expect to see 20k in traffic a month (most of the traffic will come from long tail traffic….)

Here is what I would do online….

1. I would probably spend 40 solid hours on keyword research and trolling content.…this would include saving all web pages of my competitors and analyzing their linking structures
2. I would gather all the direct links of my competitors and put them in a .txt file and separate them into separate .txt files, for a day to day linkbuilding plan. These links would only go to my deeper pages. I would save my front page for directory links (at least at first). This makes for a more natural looking link structure. This would once again probably take 30-40 hours of work.

The rest of my time would be spent building content (or outsourcing it…or both) offline.
My offline work would also be spent developing a solid navigational plan for my soon to be website (working silos if necessary but making sure that the pages I link to are synonymic and relative to one another).

Considering that this niche is fairly small, after a month I should have a site with at least 20 pages of solid content. I would launch it and add a blog. On the blog I would build pages that link to my internal pages AS WELL as other topical items relevant to the niche. This can be done on a day-to-day basis although most of the time, I include this in with my link building files.

By the way, this is just an example niche and you can take it if you want. I have been working on a new niche for an authority site for the last 2 months (which is why I haven’t written in a while). The keyword research took me about a month but is finally done and I have roughly 80 pages of solid content, all siloed out. I still have the link building daily plan to go along with roughly 200 more pages of content. This is BEFORE I even make it go live.

Anyway, that is it for today. For those of you hard pressed for time, you should try out some of my time saving tips. They made me a far more productive internet marketer and I have nearly doubled my money by simply following them.

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• SEO for Intermediate Sites-Building a Solid Link Profile
• Internet Marketers- Web2.0 Traffic Does NOT want to be sold to
• Search Engine Optimization for the Complete Newbie
• How to get your site indexed quick in the Search Engines
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way
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• Take Back Your Life…How to Get More Traffic to your Site With Just One Post a Week..

This is a long post so I am going to be a bit proactive and give you a little table of contents as to what is on this page:

• First Things First…What this blog is about….
• What would happen if you were to throw 10,000 backlinks at a page all in one day?
• Hubpage and Infobarrel update
• The Link Wheel? Why you should use it with caution?..
• Google?s Sandbox?Why does anyone really care?
• Why do-follow/no-follow doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things

First things first. I think I need to address this because I have received a few emails and even a comment from readers who have gone over and did a check on this site to see how I am fairing. This is a vanity site. Nothing more…nothing less. It gets traffic, roughly 200-400 visits a day. I actually started writing for this site to chronicle my internet marketing endeavors almost like a diary.

And since there are so many who struggle with internet marketing and get suckered by the various make money online products out there, I figured I could help those who are looking for more realistic answers to the typical “earn $xx,xxx in 30 days” crap that marketers are pushing on gullible people.

Just to prove this point, notice how there are no ads at all….I have pushed one product in nearly a year since this site was “born” although I guess realistically I could push more since there are a few that I really like. I even took down my newsletter sign-up because frankly, I have no time to screw around with it. This is an internet marketing blog, sure. But it ain’t one that I plan to monetize in the near future and therefore is very low on my list of priorities.

So take this blog for what it is….if you disagree, you disagree….if you think I am wrong, test the theory and see for yourself. I am not here for a popularity contest and this blog isn’t meant to catapult me into internet marketing fame.

The last time I checked, I am ranked somewhere in the 300-500 range for the search term internet marketing. All this said, if I was actually going to make a push for that keyword, I would do a number of things:

1. Do a complete link analysis of the top 20 web sites including an architectural analysis of the site itself
2. Point directory links to my home page using a variety of similar but different anchor text. This would include paid directories that google trusts.
3. Grab as many links as I could from my competitors and use different anchor text for link equity purposes than my competitors (in other words, if they were linked with internet marketing, I would make mine, internet marketing tips)
4. Rather than point these links directly to my home page, I would point them internally to other pages and use internal links to the pages I want the link juice to go
5. Internal pages with the most inbound links would get the most internal links to other pages within my artchitecture
6. Build a “partners” page for reciprocal links…I know..the juice isn’t great but it does add a bit of lift and enhances user experience.
7. Oh…and I would improve my navigation…something that is seriously lacking right now due to time constraints.

Of course, there are more things I would do, like keep a tight monitor on long tails traffic in my analytics as well as purchasing links and making deals with other folks but that is a nice, tight list that I would start with. Then again, because I am not really gunning for it and because my niches are removed from the make money niche, I wouldn’t even consider trying until I am in the game…or within the top 200 search results.

I may make it there eventually but if I don’t I don’t really care….after all, considering that wikipedia is supposedly the “best” most riveting source of information according to google for people searching for “internet marketing”, I would say that unseating that giant is far from worth it and probably isn’t even possible.

What would happen if you were to throw 10,000 backlinks at a page all in one day?

I asked this question a couple months back. You see, many of those marketers who are in the viagra and prescription drug markets typically will spam their way to rankings. They do this by using black hat tools like xrumer (which is an automated backlink builder for forums) to build 1000’s of backlinks very quickly.

A couple years back, they used to simply point the links to a new domain and google would rank it accordingly. These days, things are a lot different and a huge surge of thousands of backlinks going to an obscure or new site is a big fat red flag which will cause google to deindex the page.

Black hat marketers are smart though. They figured out that while sending 1,000’s of crappy backlinks to a new site would get the ban hammer, sending them to sites that were already trusted by google would get different results.

So, rather than going out and buying throw away domains, they instead used forum profiles from trusted sites to rank quickly for competitive keywords. And as I am speaking right now, at this very moment, it works for niches that are heavy with spam marketers, like prescription drugs.

But, what would happen if you used the same methods for trusted sites that internet marketers use? You know, like ezine articles or hubpages?

Would you get the same results?

Would your page skyrocket up to number one simply from shoddy forum backlinks?

I did this with one of my hubpages that was ranking on the second page. The page was a PR2 and already had a few internal links going to it. It gets roughly 50 visits a day, most from organic search.

I put in an order for 10,000 backlinks with a black hat marketer. He was going to use xrumer and I wanted to see if it would fall from the rankings (it was page 2), get deindexed or banned, or climb in the rankings.

What do you think happened?

Well, 2 months later and it has yet to get deindexed or banned. It hasn’t lost pagerank either. However, it has dropped like a rock from the rankings for the primary keyword. Interestingly enough, traffic has actually picked up marginally (it is averaging 100 visits a day) despite losing the ranking.

Oh, and out of the 10,000 links, only 134 have been indexed. Now this test is far from over and as each day passes, I should pick up more backlinks as google finds them. I could also wake up in 6 months to discover that I am number 1 for the primary keyword as well.

The reason why I even decided to do this was because I have noticed that there are some eza articles that are doing this on the primary tier or the secondary tiers of their backlinking strategy and staying way out on top of the market.

Speaking of parasitic hosts, Ezine Articles still easily outranks hubpages and infobarrel coming out of the gate for whatever reason. Google loves them almost to the point where I think they have a stake in the company or something because I have seen some pretty shoddy articles on that site that my 2 year old could probably have written better.

Hubpage and Infobarrel update

I have stopped creating hubpages and infobarrels and refocused my efforts on my websites. A couple months back, I asked the question could someone with very little knowledge of the internet make money with adsense by simply creating swarms of content? Well, 2 months and nearly 160 properties later and I can verify it. While I won’t get into the actual numbers, I will say this- Last month’s adsense check for infobarrel and hubpages was right under $1,400. This month looks to be the same despite the fact that my traffic has dropped a bit (I am getting higher CPC at this point).

I have read a couple forums where there are claims of a hubpage slap. My traffic has gone down a bit but like I said, the money hasn’t.

Infobarrel, on the other hand, is finally outpacing hubpages in views but the CTR is terrible, something I wish that the admins over there would fix. If you guys are reading this…please…for the love of god….take a page out of hubpages and clean up your site a bit…..pretty please?

Hubpages, infobarrel……they shouldn’t be used as a means to end though. All of these parasitic hosts that ad share, while some are great for the potential cash flow, are better used to test long tail traffic when you are considering building a full fledged site OR for the potential link funnel. In fact, if any site has the potential of ranking high coming out of the gate on the back of their trustrank, you should be dropping links to your main site. But then again, most of you know this already. More on that in a second though…..

The Link Wheel? Why you should use it with caution…..

The newest internet marketing strategy on the block is something known as the link wheel. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is pretty much a link scheme in which you use several sites to index all of your properties. Most use them on forum profiles because they are kind of out of the site of the forum administrators and visitors.

The premise is that you sign up with a forum that is dofollow and that has page rank. On your profile, you simply add a little relevant text to your niche with your anchored keyword. The relevant text changes the theme of the site. In other words, you can make an auto forum profile page relevant simply by connecting your niche topic with autos. It is called topical theme vectoring in case you are wondering.

Then, as you build up more forum accounts and keywords, you simply link all the forums up with each other with the prospective anchored keywords.

I have seen some link wheels with hundreds of backlinks on the profile. Currently it works.

Now, for the 1 million dollar question- Should you use a linkwheel to game the search engines?

Here is the issue…..you are going to have to fight several things when building a link wheel. An over zealous forum admin will drop your account quicker than I can say black hat if they discover your spammy profile. Some may even do it if you aren’t using a link wheel but are simply using it for a crap backlink. And given the fact that you have some people that are currently selling backlink packages to hundreds of people en masse, a webmaster is going to notice pretty quickly and wonder why he/she is suddenly getting hundreds of new sign-ups a day.

Then there is the google problem. Currently a link wheel works. But it is a short term solution and if you are trying to build a website that can stand the test of time (which you should be doing), then little “fads” like this will eventually be devalued in the grand scheme of things by google.

Make no bones about it. The link wheel is black hat and most black hats could care less if it goes away tomorrow. They are in it for the short haul and will move on to a new scheme to game google for the short haul. If you are trying to build a site that lasts, it is something that you should definitely not hang your hopes on.

Just something to think about.

A better approach to getting building backlinks is to simply either grab links that are freely available from your top 20 competitors OR broker them out. That way they are about as clean as you can get and while you are still gaming the system, there is very little chance for all your work to disappear overnight because some forum admin figures out what you are doing….

Google’s Sandbox…Why does anyone really care?

I read in forums how people are crying over getting parts of their site or pages sandboxed weekly. It seems like people can’t stand the idea of losing ranking for a period of time and as a result many folks who teach backlink strategies all advocate backlinking slowly at first. But I really want to know….who really cares?

Getting sandboxed may suck but it ain’t forever. And usually, when you come out of the sandbox, your rankings are very good…..much better than they were before. So, if you ask me, I would say that if you get sandboxed, keep doing what you have been doing….pump out more content and see what happens once the dust settles.

Come on, folks….it isn’t like it is the end of the world. Your rankings will be greatly improved in most cases on the other side. Just continue on as if it hasn’t happened.

Do-Follow/No-Follow

Another thing that kind of gets to me is when people complain that so-and-so doesn’t pass link juice so therefore it isn’t worth it to drop a link. These people get so consumed with the prospect of building links that they forget that links build traffic as well.

Look….in a perfect world, all links would be followed. But they aren’t. And to be perfectly frank with you, the “dofollow” backlinks that are freely available for anyone aren’t worth much and won’t help you as much as you think for ranking purposes. After all, if anyone can serve up for themselves an easy backlink sans the work, why wouldn’t it get devalued? Just something to chew on though.

At the risk of sounding crotchety or cranky, what do follow backlink hunters miss (and what internet marketers understand) is that a link can also be used as a traffic funnel. And considering that you can rank for a semi-competitive keyword coming out of the gate on a trusted site, why wouldn’t you take it even if the link was no-followed?

What would you rather have?…..

• A backlink that is followed that is solely there for getting ranked BUT you would need hundreds of them to rank? ie. digg

OR

• A backlink from a site that could reach a #1 ranking and in which you would share the traffic with? ie. zimbio

Don’t get me wrong….do followed cheap backlinks have their place but your main goal is to get traffic to your site, right? Use the parasitic hosts that can rank easily EVEN if they are no follow. In the end, the worst case scenario is that you get the page ranked and you get trickles of traffic pointing to your site. The best case?…..you get two or more listings on the front page all pointing back to your site a la Howie Shwartz.

Well, I was going to write a little more but really need to get back to doing what really makes me money…and this blog ain’t it. So until next time….I wish you godspeed in your internet marketing endeavors.

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call
• Bullshit- The Art of Creating Content
• Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”
• Trend Marketing explained- How to Profit from the Recently Deceased
• Internet Marketing with ClickBank Products…some suggestions
• Time to Push the “Easy” Button on Niche Marketing
• 3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way

So, what does it take to make money with contextual ads? You need two things coming out of the gate:

1. Targeted Traffic
2. Traffic Volume

Most people get one of the two wrong or simply underestimate how much traffic they need. Most people worry about CTR since this is the easiest number to figure out. The second easiest number is to simply compare your earnings. This is where most people get disheartened.

I am only making a buck a day… OR It will take me four months to make a payout

This is really the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you should focus on the CPM or in layman’s terms, cost per thousand (impressions). This will give you an inkling of a clue of what you are making but more importantly, a way to measure how long it is going to take you to make the money you want to make with adsense.

How is this?

Well, let’s say that you are currently making $1 a day with your adsense sites and your CPM is $10. Your goal is to eventually hit the seemingly insurmountable $100 a day figure.

In this case, you would need to get roughly 10,000 impressions per day to hit those numbers with a CPM of $10. Now, obviously, you will need to create more content to reach that number or branch off into other niches if there isn’t enough traffic to feasibly get 10k.

And while it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, if you are getting 100 uniques a day, I can say with a reasonable assurance that you ain’t making money with adsense.

First Problem- You will need a lot of traffic for adsense to work

You need a lot of traffic either over many niches or in your authority site to make money using contextual ads. That is just a fact. A lot of folks think that this is as easy as “tweeting” your way to success or blasting the social media platforms. The problem with this is the social media folks are there for entertainment and in most cases aren’t willing to buy (but you already know this). And here is the first problem. Folks think that traffic is traffic and it simply isn’t the case.

It has been well documented at this point that social traffic is less likely to buy from you (sorry Perry…you are wrong). Yet social traffic is the easiest type of traffic to come by. Because it is so easy, some adsense publishers think that working social media will somehow pay off….they get the traffic but no one is interested in the ads….as a result, they don’t get the clicks, and their CPM plummets.

Oh, man….yet more fuel for the fire for those adsense haters, right?

You need TARGETED TRAFFIC to make money with adsense….

People don’t like doing what they need to do. But the reality is the best “clicks” come from search engine traffic.

• And to get search engine traffic, you need to know a little about SEO.
• And to understand the potential of keywords and their viability in the scheme of things, you need to know keyword research.
• And for the search engines to recognize your page as relevant, you need to produce relevant content.
• And to get in the rankings race, you need to get links….

(Mock Scenario to illustrate point)

Let’s pretend that you took the hubpage challenge a few months back. You have 100 hubs that are underperforming but that are making you money. Your cpm for the month is $8.00 (after a couple months, you will be able to get a round about average, assuming you aren’t testing). Last month you made $85 or you are averaging a little under $3 a day.

You want to eventually get to $100 buckaroos a day.

Remember…targeted traffic is everything. According to this figure, for every 1,000 impressions, you are going to make $8.00. Therefore, it is only logical that in order to make $100 a day, you are going to need to get roughly 12,500 impressions a day Or over 300,000 impressions per month with a $8.00 CPM.

If you have a CTR of 3.5%, then with 1,000 impressions, you are averaging roughly .20 cents a click….not great. In other words, if you are getting 100 uniques a day, then chances are you are getting 3-4 clicks a day at .20 a pop.

Smart marketers learn how to make more money with adsense….

It is at this point where all the grief comes from that you read in the forums. People take a look at their daily revenue and write off Adsense. After all, how on earth can you possibly make money with it if you need to have that many impressions to make a reasonable income?

Smart adsense marketers think differently though. They learn from their lessons. They figure out they are going to need to do one of two things….

1. Get more targeted traffic
2. Raise their CPM either by optimizing for better keywords OR getting a higher CTR

In both cases, raise your CPM.

What happens when you are able to raise your CPM by $2.00 to $10.00?

A little raise in CPM even just by a couple bucks (which in no way is a leap) will do wonders for your $100 a day goal. Let’s take a look….

To make a hundred dollars with a $10 CPM, you will need 10,000 impressions. Sure, it is still a big number but you have effectively shaved 2,500 impressions off a day.

What is a good CPM for adsense?

The average CPM is typically anywhere between $5-8. This is average which happens to include the majority of folks who are seriously underperforming because they are either targeting the wrong keywords or are in an unresponsive niche…or both. So, while you may be thinking that an $8 CPM is at the top end of average, understand that the masses simply don’t make money with adsense because they don’t understand how to. So, the average is $5-8. This predominately depends on the niche and what advertisers are willing to pay. Remember, ad space is very much dependent on supply and demand. (which is the main reason why most of the hub writers and marketing forums bitch and moan about how little money they are making…they unwittingly target these long tail keywords that the advertisers don’t deem as valuable… OR, just as bad, the keywords that are profitable, they can’t rank for) The bottom line is that if you target high paying keywords, your CPM will be higher.

So, your have 100 hubs in our mock scenario. You are making $3 a day currently with all your hubs combined. Because you know your CPM is $8.00 and your CTR is 3.5%, a smart marketer can figure his daily traffic at around 300-400 unique views a day after hubpages takes their cut.

A smart marketer normally at this point starts to figure out that in order to make $100 bucks a day doing what they are currently doing, they will need to create way too many hubs to make it worthwhile. So, instead they start to optimize the hubs they have….

• Watch their analytics and then add new content to their old content- Chances are good that you will find little nuggets that could be worth either another page or a highlight on your existing page
• Optimize their page- Once again, the more targeted your page is, the more optimized your ads and the more likely someone visiting the page will click on an ad.
• Get a higher ranking- This is done by building backlinks and link authority. It never ceases to amaze me how people will be content to be on the first page without gunning for the #1 slot. If you make the #1 slot, you can expect a huge increase in impressions

There are other ways to bring in more targeted traffic volume but I think that you get the point. The more targeted traffic you bring in, the more money you will make.

Simply by optimizing your articles, you could increase your traffic by as much 40%. In other words, if your article on “colon cleansing solutions” is #10 and gets 40 uniques a day, then you should add another 30 uniques simply by moving up nine spots. 30 uniques a day will add 1-2 extra clicks a day or 30-60 extra clicks a month.

Imagine now for a second, if you did that with all 100 articles and how that would increase your bottom line….

So, if your current traffic is around 400 uniques a day (or 12,000 a month) and you manage to rank for every one of your articles, then a 40% increase would equate to an extra 160 uniques a day (or an extra 4,800) from content that you have already written. Supposing that you didn’t do a thing different and were averaging .20 clicks at a 3.5% CTR, you would effectively add $34 a month extra income (or $400 and change a year) to your total.

You have effectively knocked down that seemingly impossible number down by 160..which will take a chunk out of the 12,500 impressions you need a day.

A smart marketer will also think about stemming keywords to get more bang for their buck….

So you want to rank for whitening creams. A smart marketer will go after long tail keywords as well by grabbing common modifiers that are used in search such as “best”, “top”, “review”, “good”…ect…ect… This way, they could potentially rank for similar long tails in their niche that will improve their traffic.

Additionally, they reduce their keyword choices down to the ones that are most profitable with the least amount of competition. (I actually use Micro Niche Finder and then do a search on Ezine Articles to see what ads are showing up). This will lower the amount of work all the while making their choices more profitable. Just by choosing the right keywords to rank for, you can easily increase your CPM which will have a profound effect on your bottom line.

Some Niches aren’t as responsive as others

This is just a fact. Typically, niches that involve computer savvy people will almost always have lower CTR’s (which will lower your CPM) than those in which the most people do with their computers is check their email and facebook page. A programming keyword simply won’t be as responsive adsense wise as a keyword in which the person is looking for a DUI attorney. I can say this is true first hand as my wife unwittingly click an ad while we were searching for a montessori school in our area for our daughter.

Problem-solution type articles work the best because the chances are someone is researching something or wants to find the answer to whatever it is they are looking for (hence, once again, my wife clicking on an ad that stated that they had a list of montessori schools in our area that they had reviewed).

So, the smart marketer will simply build problem solution pages in markets that are most responsive. To ease the burden of researching content, they may find the niches that are bringing in the lion share of the adsense (think 80/20 rule) and add more keywords in the niche as well as test verticals. As a result, the next 100 pages that they create should raise their CPM and put more money in their pocket than the previous 100.

What is a reasonable goal to reach for if you want to be a successful Adsense Publisher?

Some people look at performance from a daily viewpoint. This can be disconcerting given the fact that typically adsense earnings will fluctuate wildly from day to day. Instead, look at it from a business standpoint. Most offline businesses are looking for positive percentages at the end of the month. I think that a 10% increase per month is a good goal to have. So, if you are currently making $100 this month, it is reasonable to look for a $10 gain the next month and so on and so forth. The first few months should be easy. You should write your goal and post it somewhere where you can see it daily. While this number looks low, understand that the challenges grow exponentially….if you are making $3,000 a month, your goal should be $3,300 and so on until you start to get into the law of diminishing returns.

While these numbers look lower than what you are hoping, I think that any growth above and beyond 10% a month is good growth. The end result is that you are going to get what you put into it though.

If you are are an adsense publisher, remember that Google is watching you….

This is for all you paranoid freaks out there. Yeah, google is watching and if you are doing shady things, it is better NOT to add adsense to these sites as you could get banned….or buried….

…and they should….

Google is a business which relies on advertisers. If you are doing shady stuff and the advertisers don’t make money, then google suffers and their stock investors aren’t happy. Google does need sites to publish their content on just as much as you want the income. But Google wants responsible publishers that are just as concerned about user experience as they are. If the advertisers don’t make money with Google adwords, they simply will stop advertising with Google and take their business elsewhere. Just something to think about if you are considering cutting corners.

Making Money with Adsense is an ongoing learning experience

The more you do it, the better you get. It really is as simple as that. Most adsense publishers want to get better but don’t want to put in the work learning how to get better. I am sure that anyone who makes real money with adsense would agree with this statement.

It takes more than simply reading the book by Joel Comm to get a clue. Ad placement is important, sure…but understanding what it is going to take to reach your goal is just as important. And it is something that you won’t read about in a get rich quick book because frankly, it doesn’t exist.

You need volume from targeted traffic. You do this from either targeting a niche that gets a lot of traffic (harder because of the competition you face, but possibly more lucrative if you don’t mind filling your days building links), or by writing and optimizing volumes of content that gets the same amount of traffic because of the amount of content you have scattered throughout the web.

That is it. So, you are making $1 a day with adsense and are unhappy with where you are at. You can either bitch and moan about what a crock adsense is OR you can get to work and build pages that can get ranked that get traffic and build a lot of them.

(so much for a short post)……

Adios, amigos…the next rant you read from me will have me sitting nice and pretty in a new (and bigger) house…..

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Bullshit- The Art of Creating Content
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way
• Ezine Articles Case Study..Can a New Site Outrank an Ezine Article in the Search Engines?
• Take Back Your Life…How to Get More Traffic to your Site With Just One Post a Week..
• 114 Things I Wished I Knew as an Internet Marketer When I First Started
• Why Internet Marketers and Make Money Bloggers Fail
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…
• Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”

So what did it take to get there?

I operate in campaigns. I typically will take a niche and break it down into keywords. Usually this is done a variety of ways but the main source of my keywords come from competitive research. I use keyword research and competitive research to validate and verify traffic. A lot of times I don’t know much about the niche so I spend some time learning the basics and then learn it as I go. This usually entails reading a ton of articles online and off and rewriting them so that I understand and sound like I know what I am talking about. I usually have a good idea of how difficult the market is but really it doesn’t matter in the long run (I will explain why in a sec)…..

The niche is typically general enough for me to write a ton of content but not so general that the content will get lost. This is like a tightrope act. For instance, Home Remedies is too general. Treating Eczema is not. ?Home Improvement…too general. Kitchen Projects..not so general.

So, I have an inkling of a clue on the niche….I have a list of keywords….now it is time to get to work….time to write some?bullshit content.

I am a writer. I love to write. Internet Marketing and writing content go hand in hand. If you can’t write, you have to outsource. And that can be very expensive. Personally, I don’t know if I could outsource content simply because even though I write bullshit, I am a control freak and want to write good bullshit. So I get to writing…..

I typically aim for 10 articles a day although most of the time I write about 7 a day on average. I will focus on that one market and write as many articles as I can. I publish these articles on wordpress blogs, blogger blogs, weebly blogs, hubpages, squidoo, infobarrel, any of the various article databases….pretty much anywhere and everywhere that will accept me. If I have a site that is closely aligned with the market I am attacking, I will do rewrites of the same articles I am spitting out.

By the end of a couple weeks, I have roughly 100 pages of content, all of them being around 400-1,000+ words and the content is decent. Some is better than others. Each page is completely unique from the other.

I don’t add affliliate links….I won’t use adsense unless it is integrated with the system. In other words, I don’t monetize it. I also won’t interlink any of the sites together…yet. Usually at this point, I know the niche like the back of my hand. You would be amazed at how much you could learn simply by writing articles specifically written about one niche. You would also be amazed at how intimate you become with the niche. You start to understand the reason why the searcher is searching for the content. You start to find crazy verticals that are associated with the niche…time to write more content.

I rarely outsource article writing UNLESS I am testing things and am too lazy to do it myself. What I do outsource is a rank charter though. I pay my guy $50 a month to simply send me a spread sheet of all of my sites and where each property is ranked up to page 20 in four datacenters. I shoot him an email with a list of sites and corresponding keywords that I am hoping to rank for. Typically, this is my title. He sends me reports twice a month. This way, I don’t obsess over what property is doing the best and I am not tempted to constantly hit the refresh button on my browser to see if I have moved up two or three spots. Instead, I can focus on content generation.

I usually take a day break when I get roughly 100 articles written. I use this day to recoup, re-energize, and start to look for a different niche into another niche that I may want to break into the next month. Sometimes, I will sit on a niche for a couple months just spitting out as much content as I can. It is also the time that I write content for this blog. This blog is my “fun” time.

The reason why I even write this is to illustrate exactly how hard making money online is. So many of the books that are out there make it seem like creating stuff and making real money (I’m not talking about making $10 a day with adsense) is stupid easy and can be done with a single website quickly. It simply can’t. There is some serious work that takes place.

I should also add that there are two schools of thought when it comes to content generation and internet marketing. The first school doesn’t focus on content generation but instead focuses on backlinks to get ranked. The other school of thought is to produce a truckload of content and see where it falls in the SERPS before you take action. Both work. The problem with building backlinks based on keywords is that what happens if you spend all of your time building backlinks for a keyword and that keyword doesn’t produce the traffic you thought it would? ?The problem with producing massive amounts of content is the time it takes and there is always a risk for serious burnout. ?There have been weeks where I do absolutely nothing because I have burned myself out to the point where I can’t do anything.

So, I have 100 or so pages written on whatever. Now what do I do? I move on to the market I had worked on the previous month (which I will explain what I do later in this article). I don’t worry about backlinks or where the pages are ranking in the beginning. People get excited when they see their page rank right after they publish it. It makes them feel like what they are doing has meant something. It doesn’t last for long though. Typically Google will drop the page in rank and it will eventually settle where Google thinks that it should be. This could be on the first page….it could be on the second page….for those that cut corners, it could be in the supplemental index. After a couple weeks, when I get my excel sheet with the rankings, I can see what pages that google prefers over others. I can see what pages are ranking well and are worth pursuing. In most cases, I can judge my traffic levels.

You see, for whatever reason, you can write 40 articles on whatever that are generally the same but different enough to pass copyscape so that they are unique. And out of those 40 articles, you will find that a hubpage will rank well for a keyword while the ezinearticle won’t. A buzzle page will rank for a keyword that hubpage is 3 pages back. A squidoo will easily take a ranking that an articlebase will struggle to get. I am not sure why that is but it is just that way. By creating volumes of bullshit content, I can assure myself at least some rankings somewhere. It is kind of like throwing up a hundred dice and then counting and keeping the ones that land on 7.

So, a couple weeks have passed and I have verifiable data on what sites are doing well both in traffic and ranking. I will take all of the properties that rank within the top 3 pages and separate them from the pack. Usually, this is about 20% of my content. There will always be some sites that are getting traffic NOT from the keywords that it is targetting. I usually begin the process of trying to reverse engineer the page to see where the traffic is coming from. Sometimes the page is ranking for something that it not valuable. Other times, it is a new keyword that I never thought of. ?Usually, it is ranking from a stem that I added next to the keyword I was focusing on though.

With the 20% of sites that are ranking, I will go ahead and monetize. With things like Squidoo, Hubpages and Infobarrel, the adsense is and will always be there. But I will still try to match a real or digital product to it. The reason why is because if I can get a 2% conversion with a product, it is far more valuable than what I would make with adsense in most cases. The only way that you can know is by testing though. Not all keywords are going to convert.

For the other 80% of pages that aren’t doing anything, I repurpose them. They become my funnels and backlinks. I start to link them to the sites that are doing well in the search engines with the keywords anchored within the content. If they are articles built for the directories, I will add a link to the bio box. You get the picture. At the end of the day, I have 80 or so pages with the potential to add links to support the pages that google has deemed most relevant for my niche.

I will take some of my content, cut them down to 100 word snippets and add them to a text file. If I have time and don’t mind the grunt work, I will begin adding these snippets to various bookmarking sites and social sites. Sometimes I will create profiles in forums for the link equity and add the 100 word snippet to it to alter the theme of the page. This is called theme vectoring and is something that the black hat community understand. Unlike most, I will take these snippets and link them to the pages that aren’t doing so well or the third tier to support the links linking to my links. If I don’t have time, I usually can pay someone $100 to do it for me. This is usually money well spent though.

Notice, that in this article I have made no mention of taking the same article and throwing it out on all the article databases for backlinks. Notice that I didn’t talk about spinners (although I do use spinners but not for the 1st or 2nd tier of my network.) Notice that I don’t really talk about gaming the system. You see, the reason why I don’t is because I want to have as much valuable bullshit content out there that could rank later in the year or the following year. I don’t want all that work to simply be wasted because I was cutting corners and google found out about it and deindexed me. I don’t want to risk my adsense accounts or kill my affiliate accounts by doing things in a lazy fashion that could jeopardize them. The content is good enough for the casual reader to learn something and maybe enjoy it. It typically isn’t good enough for it to be “remarkable” and get links to in most cases (although I have had a couple pages get a ton of links for one reason or another).

At the end of this process, I will usually be sitting on 200 or so pages of content on the first and second tiers with just about as much on the third tier that link to my second tiers. Sometimes I will revisit the niche and write more content. This usually happens when I am bored or starting to burn out on the niche that I am working on and need something different.

This is alot of work. Internet Marketing is a volume business and anyone that tells you any different doesn’t know what they are talking about. ?Either you are getting volumes of backlinks or you are creating volumes of content or you are doing both. It also is one of those things in which you start to graduate and get better and better at ranking as you go. For instance, if you are doing article marketing, then chances are you are going to make more money in a year if you write one article a day every day. The reason? Because that is 356 properties that you can repurpose and reuse should they not be converting the way you want them to . The more content you have out there over as many different IP’s and networks, the better off you are. And if you are new to internet marketing, then you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by this.

If you want to make money with adsense, you need the numbers. If you have a 1,000 visitors a day and your CTR is 4% and your average click is worth .30 cents, then you could safely bet that you would make $12 a day.

Using the same numbers, if you are pushing an affiliate product that has a Conversion rate of .5% with 1,000 visitors a day and the affiliate sale is worth, $10, then you would make $50 a day.

The latter was a pie in the sky figure that has a lot of variables such as product matched correctly to keyword, ect. though.

So, let’s say that you can’t possibly spit out the same amount of bullshit content that I can. Instead of aiming for 10 pages a day, you instead decide on 3 pages a day. In a year, you would have over 1,000 pages of content that you can repurpose and redirect anyway you choose. Multiply that by 5 years and you can see the possibilities, right? You see, this is where most new internet marketers get confused. They want to make a ton of money right now and don’t understand that it is really a journey. Sure, if you could pay someone to write 5,000 pages of content that is targeted for good keywords, sure you would probably make money. But who has that many nickels that they would be willing to risk? It is better to build a plan with a goal that you can easily reach and then start plodding along as you go.

Things that stick will make you money. Things that don’t get repurposed and reused for the backlinks.

And THAT is how I get THERE…….

Until next time y’all….

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way
• Ezine Articles Case Study..Can a New Site Outrank an Ezine Article in the Search Engines?
• Take Back Your Life…How to Get More Traffic to your Site With Just One Post a Week..
• 114 Things I Wished I Knew as an Internet Marketer When I First Started
• Why Internet Marketers and Make Money Bloggers Fail
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…
• Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”

So, I have recieved an email or two or three from virtually a who’s-who list of gurus including the stompernet team, Mike Filsaime, and Frank Kern. The cost of the system is $997 (low end) and upwards of $3,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle. It is run by Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss and is called the Social Media Money System.

My question is this….are these kinds of things (social media) huge time sinks, huge time-wasters or actually profitable FOR THE AVERAGE MARKETER? And should you take something like twitter and add it to your marketing plan?

I should start this rant with the fact that I am not a fan of social marketing media. Actually, I am a fan of social media….I just don’t see social media as a good tool for marketing, outside of branding…. I don’t think it is a good way to market. And I think that the ones that do so ‘en masse’ are one step above spammers. I also think that your nameless twitter followers, facebook fans and YouTube subscribers aren’t as interested in your offers as most would think. I know I’m not.

I rarely “Tweet” and don’t follow everyone that follows me. Personally, I think it is a complete waste of time IF you are a no-name marketer trying to market products….If you have the name equity of being Frank Kern, Ashton Kutcher, or CNN then that is a complete different story. Then again, most of these guys don’t follow just anyone.

The funniest thing happens whenever I start posting on forums. I post and then next thing I know, I get several follows that very same day. In fact, the amount of new “follows” seems to be indicative of how often I post on forums.

This would be cool, a big ego boost…whatever…except that after a couple days, if I don’t follow these guys back, I get promptly “unfollowed”…

The funnier part of this is that the same people who “unfollowed” me, will reconsider the next week and follow me again….then unfollow me when I don’t follow them back….again….it is like the groundhog day for twitter marketers…

I call it the marketing twitter carousel.

Okay, so what is the big deal?

Call me ignorant, stupid, cynical or whatever, but I find most of the marketers who market to other marketers on twitter very desperate. ?Here is the strategy most follow and for whatever reason, people think that this works….

• Get a twitter account….
• Add your website and picture in your profile…if you are adept at design make your template unique…
• Make 5-10 tweets immediately…find some cheesy quotes or random links to generic information…
• Do a search on twitter for whatever market you are planning to market to (most likely the MMO niche)…
• Start following these people but do so slowly at first….(don’t want to trip Twitter’s spam detector)
• After a day or two, delete anyone who isn’t following you back…
• Repeat the process until you cross the 2,000 follower threshhold.
• Rinse and repeat until you have 100,000 followers….

This would be okay IF the people who are following actually are interested in what you have to say (they aren’t). In reality, chances are great that the same people who are following you are doing the exact same thing that you are doing…getting the same advice and calling this a business plan for their internet marketing.

So, at the end of the day, what do you have?…..

You have 2,000+ marketers who don’t know you from Adam…don’t care to know you beyond hoping that you will click their link and buy something from them (which is what you are hoping that they will do as well) and have so many followers that it is virtually impossible to actually build a relationship without some serious outsourcing…

….and that is supposing that they are actually reading their twitter messsages….

I dunno…..call me cynical but unless someone can speak with reason as to why I should be viewing this differently, this is how I see it….

First some facts that aren’t “hype” that you read in most sales letters:

According to Sysomos.com,

• 15% of marketers who use twitter follow more than 2,000 people. ?Compare this to .29% of all the rest of twitter users.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people..
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet

Great…. you have 20,000 followers…or do you??

A problem that Twitter faces and the reason why you haven’t heard of the multi-billion dollar deal to buy it out is that what companies have found is Twitter has the lowest retention rates of any of the other social media mega sites.

Retention rates is something that most marketers selling social media don’t talk about. According to the NeilsonWire, 60% of twitter heads in the U.S. fail to return to Twitter the following month or from a “glass is half-full” perspective, 40% actually come back. This is a problem for twitter but as a marketer, this could make your numbers and reach look much bigger than it actually is.

I liken it to owning a list but not being able to have the advantages of the metrics when you have a list. For example, if I blast a email broadcast, I am presented with real numbers on who opens the email and if there is an action step in the email (like a URL), if they take action. This gives me a bead on how my marketing is doing, how responsive my list is, and if not, I can formulate a resolve to the problem (whether this is pruning my list or making the emails more interesting, addressing key concerns of the niche, ect..)

With twitter, you don’t get metrics, you don’t see who is passively participating with you (ie. listening), and most importantly you don’t see who have moved on. Instead, you get a puff chesting follower number that may make you feel better about yourself but won’t help with the bottom line. Once again, this is a cynical viewpoint and if anyone can prove me wrong, I encourage them to do so….

Twitter Number Crunching….why 10,000 followers doesn’t mean 10,000 followers….

Okay, so using the above retention rate numbers, your 10,000 follower list doesn’t mean 10,000 followers….it is closer to 4,000 followers. And to the novice marketer, this would sound like a good number still. I mean who wouldn’t want to have 4,000 people hanging on your every word, right?

Well, the reality is that if you are a marketer marketing to other marketers, those same followers are viewing you as a follower as well. What you have is a bunch of folks actually thinking that they are “marketing”……an exercise in masturbation would probably be more fun and worthwhile when all is said and done though.

Don’t believe me? Well, I like to look at verifiable and concrete data to help me along the way. Since you can’t see who is actually “listening” to you, and since twitter doesn’t give out those metrics, the only verifiable way to see if anyone is listening is to post a link that you can monitor for twitter activity. I would be willing to bet that most twitter marketers out there would get less than a 1% response rate…

Run the test and tell me who responds….then tell me how worthwhile twitter is for a marketing campaign….

Now, I want to say that I am not talking about tweeters that actually talk to their list. There are some that do but most are going to keep this number down to a bare minimum…no twitter list of 2,000+. Outside of outsourcing your tweets, there just isn’t a way to engage that many people.

Perry Belcher is a different breed of marketer though. He has a list of 100,000+ followers on his list. ?If you check out what he does with twitter, he practically responds to everyone who engages him. That is a ton of tweets. When watching him at work, I can’t read fast enough before he is on the next response. This is primarily why I think he outsources his work. He also probably (but haven’t verified this) has a higher response rate than the average tweet because of his level of engagement. ?For a regular marketer, this would be next to impossible to manage.

I currently follow roughly 150 people and in the event that I actually get on twitter, would have a difficult time managing this….but hey, that is me…you may be different..

I would love to hear other people’s view on this. I am cynical and suspicious of any of the new time sinks that marketers suggest as the next big thing (actually, I think the honeymoon is over although the social media money system may initiate a new round of gullible marketers toward trying to manipulate social media.)

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Trend Marketing explained- How to Profit from the Recently Deceased
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…
• Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call
• Bullshit- The Art of Creating Content
• Internet Marketing with ClickBank Products…some suggestions
• Time to Push the “Easy” Button on Niche Marketing
• 3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way

• You get someone to opt-in to your list by giving something away for free….
• The next 2-3 posts you make yourself credible by showing them you actually know what you are talking about….
• Then..and only then…should you start to pitch products.

That is the formula anyway that is suggested by most marketers. Of course, this, just like so many other “blueprints” out there has some serious flaws that a marketer has to cope with. Credibility and Value are both subjective terms making reaching your list and getting them to respond to your offers very much so hit and miss.

So my questions are:

…what constitutes value and how can you make yourself more valuable to your reader?

What makes some marketers get people to pull money from their wallets while others struggle to get one sale even when they have a growing list?

How do some have very high open and response rates from their list while most of us sit at the industry standard 20% open rate?

To answer these questions, I am going to go way back about 10 years ago when I first started marketing online. By the way, at that point I was doing my “marketing” via a webTV and had absolutely no clue that what I was doing was “marketing”. I was simply doing what came natural to me….writing stuff in a niche that I was interested in. More on that in a second though…

I belong to a ton of lists. In fact, I am probably one of those people that marketers hate because while I will open their message to me, I rarely buy. I am just looking to see what & how other marketers are plying their trade. Most of these are not in the make money online niche but just over this past year I have taken a keen interest in the internet marketing list builders…

After all, you would think that the make money online niche would have the best and brightest marketers out there, right?…well, not exactly…here are some of the more negative characteristics that I have noticed from list builders in the internet marketing world…

• The “I am going to tell you a secret that really isn’t a secret unless you are a complete newbie marketer and frankly I am not an expert..yet” marketer- This marketer is usually brand new to the business and actually has just enough knowledge to help the absolute beginner to get started. This type of marketer typically doesn’t make much money online and is faking it until they make it. They start off with tips to try to prove their credibility. The problem is that they really don’t know anything. Because their expertise is so new, they are relying on other marketers’ advice to be convincing and powerful enough to make them look credible as well.
• The “I am going to follow ?{insert name of favorite popular guru..most likely Frank Kern…} and use his style as my template to success marketer- This marketer usually already has a list but is now struggling to get his list to actually like him. Perhaps he/she has ruined his credibility by making too many offers. Perhaps, he/she is hoping that the same magic formula that popular gurus use will work for them as well. Unfortunately, because so many of us in the internet marketing world are subscribed to multiple lists, we usually get inundated with the “bad news” subject lines or worse still, get a paraphrased version of the gurus original thoughts as their message.
• The “profit by attrition” list building blueprint- This model is a lot like Mike Filsaime’s model..but without the credibility. Basically, this marketer doesn’t necessarily care about the value they bring. They figure if they can get a list of 100,000, 200,000 or more, that even with atrocious open rates, they should make some kind of money. These marketers simply don’t care about value and don’t claim to care about their list. The bottom line is the $$ and so they make no bones about it…they are trying to sell you.

How I made $67k in the FIRST year on my first list without realizing I was “marketing”

I should caveat this statement to state that I forgot this for nearly 5 years after I left the niche partly due to my arrogance that I could replicate this success doing it like all the other marketers suggest. ?Bear in mind that when I first started doing this, I had no idea what I was doing and came across more as a friend to my list than what you would typically expect from signing up to a marketer’s newsletter.

This was a little over 10 years ago and I was in the beginning stages of “I am about to hit 30…now what?” phase of my life. You see, I played music and was chasing the ever elusive record contract, eating bologna sandwiches in the van with 4 other stinky, sweaty guys and depending on benevolent strangers to let me sleep on their couch. For those of you who are musicians, I am not trying to kill your dream but the lifestyle of most “rock stars” is very rarely filled with houses made for cribs and no-limit expense accounts.

I ended up gravitating toward the internet by accident and with no real thought that it could make me money online. In fact, my first “computer” was nothing more than a webTV. Without getting into the niche, let’s just say it was on the periphery of the make money online niche. Within less than a year, I had cemented my place as an authority in the niche. Here is how I unwittingly did it.

I found a couple forums that I was interested in.

Once again, there was no master plan to this. I was sincerely interested in the niche. My obsessive compulsive nature actually benefited me here because I started to learn as much as I could about the niche. I basically lived and breathed the niche. I became a regular poster and started to become a known figure in two of the forums. What was regular? Well, let’s just say that after a couple months, I had almost 1,000 posts to my name in one forum and over 1,000 posts in the other.

I also started to notice people “advertising” things in their signature. These things were programs they were in and things they suggested. At that point, I didn’t realize that these guys were advertising. I just figured that they liked these programs enough to promote them. When I found out I could make money, I decided to give it a shot. My first referral was worth $20. I was hooked.

I built a website and started a newsletter

At this point, I was still using WebTV and didn’t know a thing about the how to build a website. In fact, I had bought the html for dummies book and was feeling dumber than a box of rocks because I couldn’t understand that. I opted for a sitebuilder. The idea for the site had more to do with my passion for the niche than making money though. My idea was to give beginner’s a place to find out real information without have to scour the forums for it. I was, in effect, becoming a watchdog for the niche.

The sitebuilder also came with the possibility of a newsletter via GetResponse. I decided that I would write one newsletter a week and promote the newsletter via the forums. The newsletter wouldn’t be just a money making vehicle for me though. Remember, I was doing this without a marketing frame of mind. I was actually going to help people make the difficult decisions that they couldn’t on their own and more importantly, help them NOT make a bad decision.

Within 2 months, my list had grown to 1,000. By the first year, I was on mark to hit 10,000. This was all done with no SEO (I didn’t know SEO), no link building campaigns (I didn’t understand why it was necessary). In fact, I had stopped posting in the forums as much. But I was making money everytime I sent out a newsletter.

..Oh, and there was no special bonus for signing up other than they were going to recieve my newsletter…

….I should also state that my open rates (which I rarely paid attention to) were over 50% for my newsletter….

I didn’t realize that this was extraordinary at that time because I didn’t have anything to compare it to. This was my first and it was easy to assume that my efforts could easily be duplicated…

My last campaign was a piece of arbitrage software for forex. It was in its pre-launch. I casually mentioned it to my list as a potential to make money but unproven up to this point with my affiliate link.

The next day, I got a call from the owner of this software. ?I had sent him 1,100 referrals in the period of around 12 hours. He was astounded. I didn’t even realize that that was a big deal.

Anyway, I eventually moved away from this niche because the attrition levels were high and I was getting tired of having to wade through the scams. In case you are wondering what niche it was, it was MLM and the occasional forex product.

But there are some lessons in there for those of you who depend on lists for your dinner….

Know Your Niche

This should go without saying but so many marketers are willing to trade in expert knowledge for PLR crap to cut corners. I see it everyday in the crap that fills up my inbox from other marketers. They are either selling you stuff OR giving you rehashed tips and secrets that are common knowledge. As for the rehashed tips, this is the sure fire sign of someone that does not know what they are talking about. You can fake it till you make it. You just have to know what you are talking about and experienced it first hand.

Become the Alpha…Make yourself Visible

Most of us out there are content being mediocre because frankly being “Great” is so friggin’ hard. Think about it. When was the last time that you could say that you know (I mean really know) your niche? In 2 short months, I was able to be one of the Alpha’s in that niche BECAUSE I immersed myself in it. I may not have known the niche like someone who had been in it for 5 years, but I was able to cement my place by always being a visible member in the community.

Find an Angle and Provide Real Value to Your Subscribers

In my case, my angle was being a watchdog. I honestly viewed myself as this. As for value, my subscribers waited on my newsletter to arrive weekly and if they didn’t, I got an email from them. ?Dunno why but they did. ?If you can actually make yourself valuable or entertaining (which are really two of the same), then you don’t really have to worry about catchy subject lines to mess with your subscribers’ emotions…

Credibility Should Come from others, not just from your mouth

I didn’t really promote my newsletter very hard. I didn’t have to. In many cases, whenever someone asked a question on the forum, someone (hyper-responsive in market geek speak) would direct them to my site using my name (which was a screen name). After the first two months, the majority of my list came from referrals.

Do you think that the Frank Kern’s of the world have to state how awesome cool they are? They don’t. They have an army of followers who will spread the word for them.

Most of us marketers get so caught up with trying to prove that we know what we are talking about that it almost makes us come across as desperate. If someone else states for the record that you know what you are talking about, the proving bravado goes away…..you are because so many state you are…..

And what happens when others give you credibility? Your open rates are higher. Your response rates are higher. You make more money.

Internet Marketing and the Slippery Slope of Value

Okay, one last thing on Value and my take on it. You hear all the time that in order to get a list started, you need to make it valuable.

The problem is that value is so subjective and vague, it is easy to assume that value has to be simply the content you create.

So, the newbie marketer goes out there and absolutely kills it. He writes ebooks that he gives out to his list weekly. He writes how-to novels on whatever is hot. And in the end, he finds that his open rates are still industry standards. What gives?

Well, value doesn’t necessarily have to do with what you are giving in content. You could give away the farm and still not grow a responsive list…

Value is all about perception.

For instance, if someone is promoting you as a must read, then guess what?….your value has gone up before the person has had the chance to read anything you have done. Better yet, they will be more willing to read your stuff as you send it off and if a lot of people give you kudos, then your chances of success are enhanced through what I like to call the herd mentality (if so-and-so said it was good, then it must be good and I need to check it out).

Another thing about value that no one discusses is that entertainment has a value as well.

While most marketers will focus on the quality of their content, they spend less to no time on the actual entertainment factor of their email. People like Paul Myers understands how to entertain. If you can get in their heads with a story that ties into a product, then the chances are great that they will not only NOT feel like they are being pitched but will finish the story feeling like they have accomplished something (other than simply reading an email) AND even consider your pitch.

Frank Kern does this as well.

So do virtually all the very successful email marketers.

If you aren’t putting in the effort to create a back story to your email, then you are likely going to be like everyone else in that person’s inbox. And it doesn’t matter how good your content is or how “creative” your subject line sounds, if the person perceives you to be like everyone else, they are likely not going to click on to read.

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..
• Trend Marketing explained- How to Profit from the Recently Deceased
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…
• Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call
• Bullshit- The Art of Creating Content
• Internet Marketing with ClickBank Products…some suggestions
• Time to Push the “Easy” Button on Niche Marketing
• 3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel
• Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way

IF YOU DON’T READ ANYTHING ELSE, LOOK AT THE LAST PORTION OF THIS ARTICLE AND CHECK OUT THE COPY….YOU MAY LEARN SOMETHING…

Now, I am not going to get into an ethics debate on whether this is right or not. What I do understand is that people have this morbid fascination with dead celebrities. Just to use an example, the day Michael died, one of the last standing music stores in my city sold out of his stuff within 1 hour of the announcement.

I should mention that if you are planning on doing trend marketing through organic search and don’t already a high pulling authority site that can garner artificial elevated numbers simply by posting OR the black hat muscle (aka automated link building tools) that can bully a spot very quickly for a couple days, then you should look to do something else. PPC is the vehicle and it becomes a numbers game where you ride the razor’s edge of margin and cost vs. ROI. It ain’t cheap. While my buddy didn’t give me the approximate cost for the ads, he did give a round about figure of $5,000.

There is also a science to trend marketing. It is get-in, get-out. In other words, you can make a ton of money BUT if you stay in too long, it will start dipping into your profits. My friend actually has a 1 day rule where he won’t stay with an ad campaign longer than a day. The reason is simple. As the trend gets recognized, you wind up with a bunch of amateurs trying to profit as well, which will drive up costs.

How long does a trend last?

A trend normally lasts as long as it is getting publicity. However, for a trend marketer, the key is to not only be on the heels of a trend going viral but also to vamonos BEFORE the trend reaches its apex. In the case of Michael Jackson, you can imagine that this would be a huge trend to ride.

I am going to show you a few models that I ran across through random ad search that trend marketers are using. They are all, in my opinion, all good models.

The Continuity/loss leader model

Here is the first model that I ran into. For those of you who don’t know what continuity is, it is basically when someone bills you more than once, normally because you signed up with a credit card and agreed to be billed. This is nothing new for the marketing crowd. If you have jumped onto the “free” offers by Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, or Russell Brunson, then chances are you have also been billed the following month. From a non marketing viewpoint, I get billed every month for my rhapsody music subscription.

I actually found a continuity model when I was perusing search for Michael Jackson. To the right is the actual Google ad. The actual website is below….

This particular company makes a swipe at our “I want it now emotions” by promising the latest updates (in this case, it is Michael Jackson BUT I imagine you will find a latest updates page for nearly all trend setters…ie- Farrah Fawcett). ?What makes this work for this company is that there is no running to your wallet for credit card information…..They make it as easy as they can…all you have to do is input your cell phone number, which they will send you the breaking news of whomever it is you are interested in straight to your cell phone. ?Oh…and by the way, you will also be billed $10 per month for this on your cell phone bill.

…..and it ain’t so easy to cancel it either….

The site itself is probably nothing more than scraped content that auto updates. Once again, while we, as marketers, understand this and give a collective yawn, most people in the real world don’t. And what about those SMS alerts? Can we say Google alerts?

So, let’s do the math….no overhead once it is done other than possibly a server and fully automated - pay per click advertising = a true cash cow turn key business.

And even if you lost on the first month, the chances of getting it on the backend would be high. I imagine that unlike the cancel rates of Internet marketing memberships, $10 on a cell phone is hardly missed. Plus, once again, they make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe.

Moving right along…

The CPA/email Submit Model

The next model is the typical CPA model that most of you are familiar with….the question followed by an opportunity to vote AND win a prize model. Once again, the general public don’t see ads the same way we do so you will need to take off you marketing glasses.

One thing that you will notice is that most CPA ads are fairly low paying. Usually, you can expect an email submit to pay out roughly $1.00-2.00 with most ad management systems paying $1.25. This can be leveraged if you already have a relationship with your ad manager with a clean track record and a history of being a heavy hitter.

Because the payout is so low, it makes PPC a bit tricky. What you will find is that most email submit offers will be found on the content network where it is less focused YET also costs much less. The secret comes in the ad’s call to action. If you can create a compelling reason for someone to click through, then you after that it becomes a number’s game.

This is the most typical ad format you will see. This particular marketer simply uploaded an HTML page, created a compelling offer that is targeted toward Michael Jackson fans. If they decide to participate, they will win a “$1,000 {fill-in-the-blank} card or something else that has a strong WIIFM factor. There are some issues with this though (at least according to my friend) with the biggie being the abandonment rate once they hit the REAL landing page after they vote. He has been able to curb abandonment by reiterating to the viewer that in order to recieve their free whatever, they will need to add their email on the other side (which is done immediately after they vote).

Ringtones ARE Dead…OR are they?

Here is another ad that is being circulated that is interesting as well….This time rather than the typical email submit, the model is Michael Jackson Ringtones. The payouts for this is a little higher as I believe that ringtone companies pay more because they use a forced continuity model. Interestingly enough, this particular marketer has quizzes for literally hundreds of musicians….all with the same offer: Take the quiz, win a ringtone…. Here is the page including the series of pages afterwards to get to the offer-

I know, I know…the ringtone market is old news, yada yada yada…well, that may be the case but there still are people buying ringtones…the secret isn’t what you are selling….it is how you are selling it (it’s the offer stupid)….

The NON-AD CPA Ad Model

And speaking of offers, I am saving the best for last. I ran into this ad just recently and absolutely loved it. What separates this ad from other ads that you are used to seeing is the fact that it doesn’t look like one in the first place.

Before I show it to you, I want you to notice several things:

• When you get to the page, you will notice that it looks like an online newspaper. In fact, the website is The Daily News Gazette.
• The headline is compelling, albeit in a sales-y kind of way. But this is diminished because it looks like a newspaper thus dropping your “I am about to get sold to” guard.
• The actual information is nothing more than a story written in the third person (reporter style) about how this person(Andrew Qualls) went from being homeless to earning a 6 figure income…oh yeah..I almost forgot….he is also Michael Jackson’s biggest fan….
• The site uses social proofing web 2.0 style…rather than the social proof coming from testimonials typical in a sales ad, he instead creates comments at the very bottom of the page from ficticious people proclaiming this as the best system since the invention of the T Ford Model.
• Finally, EVERY link points to his final offer. It is linked throughout the article body, in the “ads” on the side as well as in the social proof, covering all the bases thoroughly….absolutely brilliantly done….

Take a look for yourself…..(Click the image to see a full page version…)

Alright, that’s it for this week. I hope you find this interesting and can have a few takeaways in your marketing endeavors (I believe that the last example should get those wheels turning in your head)…in fact, I have a ton of ideas for the last model. ?After all, couldn’t you just as easily rehone some of your non-converting offers you are selling and change them into a non-ad advertisement? ?Just a thought……

Other blurbs that may tickle your fancy

• Social Media Money System and What They Don’t Tell You..
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”
• 114 Things I Wished I Knew as an Internet Marketer When I First Started
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…
• Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call
• Bullshit- The Art of Creating Content
• Internet Marketing with ClickBank Products…some suggestions
• Time to Push the “Easy” Button on Niche Marketing
• 3 SEO Musings on Outbound Link Structure,Keywords and TrustRank
• Internet Marketing and Reinventing the Wheel

• Clickbank and internet marketing
• One Week marketing Review- testing the waters (my criteria when I started to experiment)
• One Week Marketing Full Review

I all but abandoned her Squidoo strategy as literally ALL of the traffic is coming from my EZA. I just am not convinced that Squidoo has as much ranking power as some of the other parasitic properties out there. PotPieGirl did mention a possible reason which I didn’t really think of at the time of my original review….if you are in a niche that is saturated on Squidoo then chances could be good your site could be discounted by Google coming out of the gate. In other words, since google likes variety, too many squidoo lenses on the same topic could be a strike against you.

However, in the original article I did mention that here strategy on the whole is a good one and I can certainly see how she is making money with it. You have to understand that what she is saying makes total sense BUT chances are great that if you are relatively new to making money online, there are some things that she kind of takes for granted that you know(understanding how to use search operators to drill down data for instance).

So, after 2 weeks of not getting the results using Squidoo, I simply applied the same method to hubpages. The result has been remarkable. I threw out 20 hubs on three different accounts to test as “bait” to see what would happen. In a matter of hours without the typical prodding like linking articles to the hubs, my hubs were indexed. They almost immediately started getting organic traffic.

It has been a little over 2 weeks now and I have roughly 50-something quality hubs out. These hubs collectively bring in roughly 600 page views a day with a little over half being from organic traffic. A couple of my hub themes I have scaled based on ad interaction.

Now, let me make it clear that I DO NOT like mixing 2 advertising mediums together. I think that every page should have just one directive. If you are monetizing with adsense, then you should monetize with adsense. If you are selling products, you should just sell products. Unfortunately, Hubpages and Squidoo don’t afford you with that luxery. The good news is that both have adsense sharing programs.

What I have noticed is that Squidoo lenses for one reason or another don’t garner the same CTR when it comes to ad revenue compared to hubpages. The reasoning behind this is crystal clear to me. Squidoo lenses are easier on the eyes but also have way too many distractions and gives the visitor too many options to choose.

Hubpages, on the other hand, is much plainer and the ads are carefully placed within the content.

So, overall in the past month here is the rundown:

In adsense, I am averaging between $5-$7 per day. This number is really on the low end of possibilities since I didn’t focus so heavily on adsense CPC but was more concerned with selling products.

In 2 1/2 weeks, I have made 5 sales totally $111.87. Obviously, it ain’t a living but is probably more than most people make with affiliate marketing. Plus, I have just begun scaling my profitable campaigns and reorganizing the unprofitable ones by testing link placement, call to action and other things.

I should note that this is using PotPieGirl’s one week marketing methods WITHOUT an external link campaign as she suggests (she gives places to do it). I am also using Hubpages, not Squidoo. Finally, although I began testing a month ago, I have really only been using hubpages for a couple weeks.

This is all good news for those who are struggling to make money online who have issues following a system or plan. I believe that it could work for literally anyone who has even a remote idea of keyword research techniques or that have an inkling of knowledge of how to build backlinks

Hubpages…the flavor of the week?

The reason why I moved this one week marketing test to hubpages is because it is very clear to me that Google prefers Hubpages over Squidoo. That is not to say that Hubpages is better…it is just better for now. And this is something that I should address for those of you who haven’t been doing this for a long time. You can rank a site with virtually any property eventually provided that the page, site or network isn’t blacklisted. However, you should always search out the properties that are really making waves in the listings right now because it simply makes better business sense. Hubpages may or may not fall out of favour with google. ?But right now, they are hot.

If you are using the One Week Marketing Plan, I suggest you move to hubpages if Squidoo isn’t working for you.

I should also note that I have changed all my EZA links that were pointing to my Squidoo lenses directly to the sales page through a redirect. There is a reason for this. Squidoo lenses have way too many distractions in my opinion and I felt like I was leaving money on the table. Plus, directly linking to a sales page helps me test the sales page itself.

Anyway, those are my results. If you are struggling, you should give PotPie Girls One Week Marketing product a go. Just bear in mind that if it doesn’t work on Squidoo, like she suggests, you can easily take the system and apply it to other properties. Just my 2 cents.

You can purchase it here if you are interested….

Random Posts

• Why Internet Marketers and Make Money Bloggers Fail
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• Unbiased Connect Content Review
• How to Guest Blog to Get More Traffic
• Internet Marketing with ClickBank Products…some suggestions
• Keyword Research Tools Give Accurate Traffic Volume? I Don’t think so…
• HTML for Beginners 3
• Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…

Years ago, when I first started, I simply didn’t understand why someone would create content for someone else’s website which they could, in turn, monetize to their benefit. Now, in light of what I now know, I fully understand. EZA is probably making a killing in adsense income from bum marketers who are willing to give their content up for just a small percentage of traffic to their own site, Hubpages, Squidoo and other properties that monetize your work in exchange for a little free internet real estate wouldn’t have a business model were it not for those of us who use it for links, funnels, or search engine rankings.

The mantra for bum marketing fanatics is to drop a load of articles for whatever niche they are pushing and eventually something will stick. They do this through basically repeating or spinning an article several times over, changing up modifiers to try to saturate a market. It works. It really does. The problem is that it is time consuming if you aren’t outsourcing.

Now, this isn’t saying that you are going to make a killing doing it though. But you get one of the biggest problems that marketers face online out of the way- without traffic, you pretty much may as well not have a site.

I am lazy though. I don’t like the idea of throwing enough shit against the wall and hoping something will stick. The idea of writing 5-10 articles daily is not something that appeals to me. I want to have the potential to have the most traffic and make the most money with the least amount of work. ?So here is what I do…..

Whenever I am researching a niche, I typically do all the keyword research that comes with it…I pay close attention to what sites are listed in the top 50 for the keyword before deciding to give it a go. If their is a social site, article directory or some other parasitic host listed then I know it could be ripe for an assault.

For example:

Article directories such as EZA actually display the amount of times a given article has been looked at. This is golden because it gives me a way to measure the article itself. Now, they may or may not be buying keywords but you can get the picture.

Bum Marketing Example

The article above has been seen around 26,000 times over the period of a little over 2 years. Translated, it gets on average, 1,000 looks a month, give or take a few looks. So, I know that it is getting the views.

One 400 word article that probably either cost $10-15 or 15 minutes of your time for 13,000 looks a year or 1,000 visits a month OR 33.33333 visits per day….talk about a windfall…

I can figure that this is mostly done through organic search. This isn’t that exciting as I bet that a lot of you use this. But where it does get exciting is that because just one article from EZA is listed for this particular keyword search. Many marketers won’t bother if they see a listing already there for their preferred parasitic host. However, it tells me that if it can rank for one listing, why not two?

Google has a double indention rule which essentially means that one site can grab two rankings, one below the other. In other words, if I really wanted that second spot fairly quickly, all I would have to do is write another article that uses the same keywords as the original. What I would do is take my cut from the keyword kitty that this article is already getting. You follow me?

Ironically enough, you can do this for literally any parasitic host….squidoo, hubpages, ect. ?If there is a site listed in the top 10 without a second listing, you can do a quick rewrite of the original article/hub/squidoo page and get listed very quickly.

It takes the guess work out of what keywords to write for.

How to outrank the original article/hub/lens

To outrank the original article, all you have to do is simply get links and point them to your article. Until Google changes the fact that links = votes = higher listings this will be the case. And since most bum marketers are so busy trying to “inundate” the marketplace, chances are pretty good that they aren’t linking their article.

Get a dual listing yourself..better yet, take over the whole god dang top 10…

If you do plan to “inundate” the market with niche articles, then it would probably be a better idea to go after a dual listing once you have started to realize traffic. This way, you have 2 of the 10 results on the front page. This is nothing new. Howie Schartz goes over this in his conversation domination series. The idea is that you could dominate top 10 listings by using a bevy of web 2.0 properties such as hubpages or squidoo. Most of these types of properties have sufficient trust rank that you could easily get ranked and listed for the same keyword.

Like I said, this isn’t genius work. There are only so many ways to cook an egg before you wind up repeating yourself. And chances are you have probably heard it before. But as far as traffic generation goes, there is nothing like it (other than PPC) for near immediate results on a marketing campaign.

As far as making money with the traffic…well, I will leave that for another discussion at another time. Ta-ta for now…….

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• Ezine Articles Case Study..Can a New Site Outrank an Ezine Article in the Search Engines?
• Internet Marketing, Making Money and the Slippery Slope of “Value”
• Why Internet Marketers and Make Money Bloggers Fail
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• HTML Tutorial for Beginners 1

Anyway, the newest couple launches have been Mike Filsaime’s launch tree and some new upcoming deal with stomper net in which Eban Pagan seems to be involved in and finally, some sort of crap that Michael Cheney is pushing in which he shows you how he made 1 million in 7 days (or something to that effect). I hardly ever never buy anything…I guess you could call me a window shopper…..but I do have a question…

Who the heck buys this crap?  And more importantly…why???

Listen….there are only so many ways you can crack an egg.  There are no “secrets”.  If someone finds a work around and enough people use it, then it will be dead very quickly.  Unless you are trying to learn something..ie. improve ad copy skills, learn SEO or some other computer related skill that is congruent to your marketing plan, learn how to test and track campaigns, ect., you are just throwing away your money.  Rather than get rich, you are making someone else rich.  Just my 2 cents.

One Week Marketing Update

Well, it has been a little over a week and a half since my One Week Marketing Experiment and over half of my lenses aren’t indexed yet.  They are getting traffic though, thanks largely to the Ezine Articles that are pointing to it.  In fact, the feed directories that I submitted to are indexed but the site that they are pointing to isn’t…go figure. You can check out my one week marketing review here which was basically a preliminary review.

To be fair, I did start a couple other lenses on pregnancy and they got indexed fairly quickly with just an ezine article.  

As far as traffic is concerned, there just aren’t that much…just a smattering of visitors.

Overall, I have been less than impressed with PotPieGirl’s strategy (which I will talk about in a second) with regards to squidoo.  That said, I do think that her product is decent still….

If you take away squidoo and add whatever is hot at the moment as deemed by google, then her strategy should work for someone who has very little money and wants to learn an easy to use marketing system.

You have to realize that most of these systems are highly reliant on what google is favoring.  In other words, if squidoo is ranking well today, then you can build a system around it and should get some traffic.  Same thing goes with article marketing or using any other web2.0 property.  However, if/when google pulls the rug out from under something that you are using primarily, it is back to square one.  It happens over and over and over again.

One Week Marketing Flaws

One of the one week marketing flaws is the belief that the more properties you have, the more money you make.  It sounds right but it just doesn’t work that way.  Sure, you should create a lot of properties but if you think that creating 50-100 properties and counting on each property to make a certain amount of money (say, $5-10 a week), I am going to call foul.

Don’t believe me?  Well, if you use the past as a means to provide proof for the future, it wasn’t too long ago that someone was touting building 100 adsense sites on the premise that if you could make $1.00 a day from each site, then you would be making $100 bucks a day.  It just doesn’t work that smoothly and if it did, I would have 1,000 adsense sites by now.

You should spread yourself out.  But you are spreading yourself out to identify profitable niches.  Frankly, most won’t make you much money.  But if you happen to find one that is pulling in some dough, you then scale it.  Anyway though…..

Another flaw in her system is what I call the three click conversion.  I hope I can explain this….If Squidoo could rank well straight out of the box, then this would be okay.  It doesn’t though.  One of the things she suggests is to use article directories for backlinks.  However, what I am finding is that my articles are garnering more traffic organically.  So what happens is this:

1. Someone arrives at my ezine article page which has a CTR of 25%.  The article gets roughly 20 views per day….so my squidoo page gets 5 uniques a day from this article.
2. The visitor clicks through and heads to my destination page…the squidoo page which is basically a more thorough rehash of the article.  The click through rate for my squidoo page is a much lower 10% (which is still high but I have a strong call to action above the fold).  So out of the 5 visitors a day, I average 1 click through every other day.
3. Now the visitor has already had to jump through hoops- EZA page—>Squidoo page—>Sales page to what I am promoting.  Now let’s suppose that the sales page is a converting giant converting visitors at 10%.  Do you realize how many days it would take to make a sale??

I say this because a better way (and something that most article marketers don’t really talk about) is to knock it down to two clicks at most.  Now you tell me, which would work better?  The way described above or this way….

1. Person arrives at your EZA via organic search.  
2. They click through and arrive at a sales page which converts at 3%……

OR

1. Person arrives at your EZA via organic search
2. They click through and arrive at your capture page to sign up for something (in which you sell them at a later date).

Do the math.  I would make more money simply redirecting to the sales page by purchasing a top level domain than using one of the free methods which required the visitor to click 3 times before I made a sale.  I would make more money even if the ctr was lower and the conversion rate was lower…..

….plus it would be a lot less work since I am not creating additional properties to make the sale.

Some people would argue that it typically takes someone to look at a sales page 3-4 times before they commit.  If that is the case, then I guess having them jump through hoops/sites may be a good thing.  It has never worked for me though.  If you can find a sales page that converts well, then a domain redirect to the sales page works WAYYYYYY better.

Of course, this would be moot if squidoo was ranking well straight out of the box or with a little prodding here and there.  You could grab several of the top 10 spots using all sorts of web 2.0 properties.  Then again, you would have to put in the work to make it happen.  I am sure that many will argue this point.  But frankly, most people don’t have the money or time to do everything it takes to get something ranked that needs a little prodding.  

Stick with what works well now…as you start to make more money, move to a more permanent plan.

Hubpages and the 100 Hub Challenge??

If you read Court’s blog  or a countless number of other make money/internet marketing blogs, you have probably heard about the 100 hubs in 30 day challenge.  If you haven’t here is the skinny….

Court was messing around creating hubs when he suddenly saw his adsense account spike a little.  He suddenly saw hubpages as a possible way to make a little extra money so he started to create a few sites.  Several of those who follow his blog quickly followed suit and suddenly Hubpages is endorsing a challenge (which I have no clue whether there is a prize or not).

Some of the social hubbers are not too happy about this.  Some say that it creates subpar hubs.  

SEOZombie isn’t sure of it either because of the risk you take by using someone else’s property to promote your stuff on it.

I tend to look at things a bit more differently.  The real litmus to any web 2.0 property and whether it is worth the time and effort to place content on it is how well it does in organic search.  If it does well with little or no prodding,then it is worth it in my book.  Double bonus if I can use it as a traffic funnel.

Up to this point, I have had no love for hubpages.  But just last week, I noticed that google indexed several of my hubpages within 4 hours.  This tells me that the bots are hanging out in full force there.  I am also getting organic traffic to the tune of roughly 50-100 visits per day spread out over 13 hubs.  These 13 hubs are making me roughly $2.00 a day which isn’t bad considering I spent around 4 hours dropping content on them. It also shows me that you could theoretically use hubpages for an adsense model although once again, what happens if you build 300 hubs and watch google pull the rug out from under them?

For those of you who would like to see one of my personas on hubpages, you can check my Dr. Alex profile (I have several, each covers a niche or subsets of niches).  In this case, I chronicle a lot of home remedies (which I have an authority site to pull information from).

As an aside, you could use PotPieGirl’s system on hubpages for now instead of squidoo.  Then again, your hub score may take a hit.  I don’t know how their rating system works, but I think it has to do with outbound links.

For those of you who want to study someone that optimizes her hubpages, Lissie is the place to check out (fyi- she is using hubpages to make a living…).  Her sites are totally optimized for google.

That is pretty much it for this week.  Have a great memorial weekend….

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