I was, and I owe much of my success to his many tidbits of wisdom, but the one thing above all else that I can directly connect to real profits and growth for me was this, he said to me one evening “everything is a campaign”.

At its core what that means is, you have to plan everything you do as a piece to a larger pie. You never just advertise, you never just network, you do these things with a set goal in mind and a long-term strategy that you’ve planned for already.

I think the easiest way to explain this, is with the exact example he gave me during that conversation so many years ago. I didn’t record or write the conversation down, so I’m going to paraphrase here:

He asked me to “Look at the weekly in-store coupons that retailers run. They often lose money from those sales when customers use the coupons, because the discounts are often higher than their profit margins on the particular items. So, why do they offer them?”

My reply was “Because almost nobody comes into a store and buys one thing. So, they make up the losses on the additional items the customer purchases.”

He said, “Nope. They do it because the most valuable customer is a repeat customer that becomes a regular customer. The lifetime value of a customer who comes into your store once every week or two is so great, that taking a loss on something once early on to establish the goodwill and relationship is a no-brainer.”

When I think about that now, you could easily apply it to what online marketers, especially software and information product sellers, have been doing for years too. They give away free products, ebooks, reports, demo/trialware software, just to capture email addresses. It’s the same thing as an in-store coupon, because getting that intimate connection with customers that allows you to actually walk into their life any time you want via their Inbox, and make them an offer, is absolutely worth trading that free product for early on in the relationship.

But, this isn’t just about customer acquisition, those are just simple illustrations to help package the underlying concept that everything is a campaign, and must have a long term goal and strategy behind it to be successful.

Your entire business is a campaign. You start at one place with a goal to reach another. You will plan and work to reach that goal, and that’s the definition of a campaign. Each thing you do along the way, should also be a smaller campaign that flows fluidly into your larger campaign.

Let’s assume that in looking at his business, an online marketer decides he needs to increase his social networking because after looking at the numbers from his limited attempts so far, he sees that it’s a profitable use of his time for his business (it isn’t for everybody, despite the hype).

At this point, let’s say the online marketer has a few hundred followers on Twitter, a few hundred likes on his business Facebook page, a few dozen subscribers to his YouTube channel, and each video he uploads usually gets about 100 to 200 views. He also has an email list that he’s been building for years, long before the social networks came on the scene, and he has a few thousand people on his list.

From these hypothetical numbers, the problem is clear to see. If his goal is to increase his social networking, than he needs to start by increasing the numbers of people he’s connecting with on each of the social networks.

So, what’s the “Easy Button” one-stop-shopping solution to that?

There isn’t one. There are dozens of ways to increase your reach on social networks, but no single way that will lead to satisfying results. For that, he must think beyond just increasing his numbers and into how that will impact his business as a whole.

The key is always to build a campaign that utilizes several (or all) of those dozens of options, and to tie it all together into a cohesive campaign with the big picture.

Leverage what you’ve already got, use that email list, use your web site and/or blog, look for ways to create cross-overs to get your Twitter followers to also begin liking your Facebook page, and your Facebook community to begin following you on Twitter. Get all of them to visit your YouTube channel, and give them a reason to subscribe when they do. Give all of your followers and subscribers a reason to share your content with their friends and circles.

Once you’ve completely leveraged what you already have, expand outwards. Look at ways to reach new people. This can be anything (or everything) from traditional article marketing to buying PPC ads. But whatever methods you add into your campaign, tie them all together.

For example, just writing an article and submitting it to some article site with a link to your blog, or web site, or social network profile, isn’t going to be very effective, even if you’ve got a great landing page, unless that landing page has a direct and logical next-step connection with the article content they came in from.

Fortunately, that logical next-step connection isn’t very hard to create with a little planning.

With an article you’re giving readers some piece of information that should answer one of their internal questions, once they have that piece of information what’s going to be their next question or pain point? Ask and answer this for your niche demographic, and you’ve got the next-step connection to add to your landing page.

Now, take that to the next level. Your landing page exists to either capture their email address, or make a social network connection with them by trading content. They either submit their email address to get the free report or ebook or whatever you’re offering, or if you have some sort of content locker setup they have to follow you on Twitter or Facebook to access the content. Either way, you’re trading with them.

But, once the trade is done, don’t just stop because you’ve got them in your “funnel”. Being happy to have them in your auto-responder sequence at this point is a wasted opportunity. Think of that as the bonus, not the end of this campaign. This is where you can tie the smaller campaign of growing your social media presence with the overall campaign of growing your business.

Right at this moment, you know exactly where their mind is at. You’ve just walked through two steps with them, answered two internal questions for them, so what’s their logical next-step again?

With all of the information and answers you’ve just provided to them, will they logically have another question? Another point of hesitation? Or maybe it’s more logical to believe at this point they’ll be ready to purchase a solution? If you know your market, you should be able to anticipate what they need now and give it to them.

The point is, getting a purchase is the real target, so you keep moving them along, giving them answers to their questions until they reach that stage where their only choice is to buy a solution or continue living with the problem; even if the problem is simply not having the product, that’s a legitimate problem if the product empowers them in some way.

By staying with them until the only logical next-step is to buy or live with the problem, you’ll see a much greater return on your efforts, and still have them in your “funnel” for future marketing too.

That’s how everything is a campaign.

Most people (and by most people I mean the majority of people who aren’t having success), would see increasing their social network followers as the goal, and direct their efforts at simply increasing those numbers.

When you see everything as a campaign, you learn to tie all of your efforts into your overall business campaign, which means there are really two goals. First, to get them into your “funnel”, either with a social network connection or by getting their email address. And second, to turn them into a customer that pays you for something as soon as possible, because that’s what your business campaign needs in order for you to move from your starting point to your target point.

Nothing you do should ever be an island. It shouldn’t be isolated in application or short-term in concept. Everything you do needs to be part of something bigger, and planned out to tie-in with your entire business in some way.

While people who struggle to earn any money seem to spend all their time looking for some sort of Easy Button or Magic Bullet that they’re sure is out there but they just haven’t found yet.

Folks in that second group are their own worst obstacles, not because they’re looking for something that doesn’t exist (though they are), but because they’ve convinced themselves already that things are more complicated than they really are, and it’s that mindset that has them seeking some helper application or system that they don’t really need in the first place.

There’s no mystical secret knowledge to be found, and none of this is rocket science.

You give people value, and they’ll trade for it with their money. That’s the core engine here.

When you peel back all the layers of B.S. that are created so that others can sell their products to you, then you see that it really is just a simple process of trading one thing for another.

And once you see that, it also becomes easy to see how simple it really is to make however much you need or want to with your online ventures.

For example, let’s say you want to build a $50,000 per year income stream. You can do that with less than 100 customers…easy.

Get 99 customers to pay you $42.10 per month, done!

Seriously, 99 x’s $42.10 = $4,167.90 per month, and $4,167.90 x’s 12 months in a year = $50,014.80 per year. A $50k income stream with less than 100 customers.

When you look at it like that, you realize that your job then boils down to just providing $42.10 worth of value each month, and getting 99 people (less than 100 customers) to trade you for that value.

Can you get 99 customers on the web? According to InternetWorldStats.com 2,095,006,005 people around the world are using the Internet as of March, 2011.

That’s 2 billion with a “B”. Can you offer something of value to less than 100 of all those people? If you breath I believe you can.

To improve the odds, I like to use what I call the “3 to 5 to 1″ rule, which means for every $1 people pay me I want to give them at least $3 to $5 worth of value back, so if people are paying me $42.10 per month I would want to provide them with $125 to $215 worth of value each month in return, but that’s still not very hard to do.

Think about it, (using the high number of my equation which is $215) can you give deliver $215 worth of value with a whole month to do it in? If you can, you’re set to build a $50k income stream with less than 100 customers.

This all describes just one model that uses a monthly membership type foundation, there’s a lot of other ways to build revenue streams online too, I just picked this one model and wanted to demonstrate how simple it really is when you focus down beneath the B.S.

And there’s tons of ways to build membership or monthly recurring businesses online if you went that route. From ongoing training or support to software access (or support) to information to services…you (and your ability to focus) are your only limitation with it.

You see, I like to study people. No matter what the venue or circumstances are, it’s my nature to watch and pay attention to how people view and react to different things, and by observing people in this way it usually gives me insights that I can rely on for improving my own business and life.

One of the more obvious tendancies I’ve picked up on with people looking to build an online income stream, and it doesn’t matter if their goal is to earn spare cash or a full time living from it, is that nearly everybody seems to anticipate it will happen very quickly.

News shows, talk shows, magazines, Internet Marketers selling money making systems–they’re always telling stories about someone who just threw up a simple website and suddenly the money or fame came rolling in to them.

Sure, that happens once in a great while, maybe 0.0001% of the time even…but for the vast majority of people that isn’t the reality you’re going to see. It’s just what gets told in stories because it makes for good info-tainment.

The best advice I ever got, and that I think I’ve ever passed on to others, was that it’s crucial to think big, but start small.

By that I mean you should be plotting your course to a grand ultimate goal, but the waypoints between starting out and getting there should be made up of small, obtainable steps.

There are a few reasons why this is such good advice. Having incremental goals between where you are and where you want to be lets you measure the success and failure of everything you’re doing along the way.

Some things will work for you, and others won’t. If you don’t measure and evaluate as you go, then you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed with things to do, and many of them won’t be benefiting you anyway.

Small step goals give you plenty of opportunity to adjust your course as you go. There will be new challenges and new opportunities that you never imagined when you first started that pop up from time to time, and if your focus is on the “big picture” of your end goal, you’re likely to trip over these sudden obstacles and completely miss these moments of opportunity.

Smaller goals are more obtainable goals, and with each one you reach you’ll find yourself gaining enthusiasm about what you’re doing rather than growing frustrated by chasing some far-off goal all the time.

It’s okay to say to yourself “I want to reach $250 per day in earnings and quit my job”, that’s a fine and obtainable end goal to start out with, but you should have 10 to 20 waypoint goals between the Zero per day you’re starting from and that $250 per day level.

Start small, set a $1 per day income goal. Believe it or not that’s one of the harder goals I’ve seen for many people. It takes a lot of effort and learning to actually build a consistant income stream of just $1 per day.

But, once you get over that hurdle, it starts getting easier. I’ve found that it’s easier to increase earnings from $1 per day up to $10 per day than it is to just reach that steady $1 per day mark starting from scratch. So you see, by setting your first goal small, it will force you to really focus down on what you’re doing and you’ll get there quicker.

Once you reach that first goal, set your next one at $5 per day, or $10 per day, just keep it close. Once you get to that one, set your next goal at $20 or $25 per day, then $50 per day, and so on.

With each goal you reach you’re going to be building on top of success, which gets easier and easier as you go, plus by keeping your goals close you’re going to stay focused on what’s most important to you and your business at that moment in time, thus avoiding pitfalls and being prepared to explore sudden opportunities that arise.

I wanted something cleaner, faster, and laid out to focused on displaying the content over every single online haunt that I can be found at like my last theme did. I left icon-links at the top of this new design for my Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I’m pretty sure most visitors didn’t need links to my profiles on MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Orkut and a dozen other places where I might visit once a month now. (If you do need those links, I’ll leave them on the About page of the blog just for you)

With the new theme comes lots less noise, meaning I didn’t need all of the plugins my blog used to have (there were 41 of them suckers active here).

I trimmed that down to about 7 or 8 and deleted the rest. Between the cleaner theme and 30+ fewer plugins, it feels like my blog lost about 50 lbs. of dead weight.

And while I’m at it, I’ve decided to go back through every post I’ve made over the past 5 years, and I’ll be deleting a bunch of those suckers too.

A lot of the stuff I published years ago is very outdated now. Some of it I’ll update and keep if it’s worthy, but much of it is so wrong now that there’s no point in giving it life support, I’m just pulling the plug with it…it’s the more humane thing to do.

Which brings up an interesting question; should bloggers delete old and outdated posts that can’t be revived with an update?

I did some searching to see what others have said about this, and it seems most people agree you shouldn’t do that.

They give reasons that range from SEO purposes to broken links leading to pitch-fork mobs chasing you down after enough of them hit your 404 error pages.

My opinion though, is that if you have a nice and friendly 404 error page, one that apologizes for the missing content and offers suggestions for other content on your blog that may be of interest to the visitor, as well as an easy search function, then that’s far better to give to people than an old post of useless or bad information.

So, if you notice some things missing around here that’s why.

Now, even though we’ve kept the content creation and revenue streams separated on these sites all along, there has still been an underlying connection between traffic and revenues that did influence our content creation in some ways. For example, simply by paying attention to trending or fashionable topics on the web, the scope of what we covered with content has been swayed.

Similarly, just by doing minimal keyword research for stories once a topic was decided upon has often had the unintended consequence of writers creating articles from a slightly different perspective than they had originally planned.

Depending on your view, these are either minor or major faults committed by publishers. However, it’s always been with the best intentions that these decisions were made, and these actions were taken. The bottom line was we were trying to cover the topics people wanted to talk about, and we believed that paying attention to keyword relevance helped us to reach the largest possible number of readers with our content.

Still, over time I’ve noticed these small details having a large impact on what we were doing from the content creation side of our operations, and I really didn’t like it.

First of all, following trends is for followers. It may seem prudent and practical to focus on what everybody’s already talking about, but being part of the “in-crowd” is a pointless path in my opinion. Anybody can yell/write/blog “me too”, I’ve always wanted my business, and especially this portion of it, to stand out from the crowd.

So, for almost a full year now we’ve specifically gone against the grain when it comes to topics covered and keyword research practices at all of our content based sites.

The writers and editors who work on these sites pitch and shape story ideas without any regard for what’s trending online or being talked about currently in the blogosphere. Their focus is on what’s interesting and can they tell the story from a new and/or unique perspective.

As for keywords, all of the keyword research tools (software) that we used to use have been uninstalled and absolutely zero attention is paid to keywords until a story is completely finished and ready for publishing. Then, at that point, an editor picks the most obvious keyword term from the already finished story and that’s what gets placed into the meta keyword tag upon publishing of the piece–and this is only done for bots which still use that meta tag.

You might think that by abandoning keyword research and trends completely that our traffic and readership would have taken a hit, and I was prepared for that when I made the decision to take these steps to purify our content creation process, but we’ve actually seen the exact opposite happen.

In fact, over the last 12 months traffic is up 12.3% across all of our content centered sites. Revenues are up 5.8%, and reader engagement (which we calculate based on a number of factors from commenting, email feedbacks, social network interactions and so on) is up 18.2% overall.

The bottom line is that all of the noise out there about the necessity of sound SEO, and established online publishing and marketing practices, is just that…a lot of noise. Focus on good story telling with interesting topics and people will respond to it.

Just to be clear, the guy approached me, I wasn’t looking to make a sale, and this is not a rant because I’m upset about not getting to a deal. It’s a learning opportunity, period.

The basic backstory leading up to the guy approaching me is that he’s someone I’ve worked with on a few projects, and he knows that I hold quite a few sites which I no longer invest much time into, that I earn a fairly passive income off of through displaying PPC ads on them.

These aren’t the old MFA’s (Made for AdSense type sites) that people used to build, but rather legitimate topical sites that I either lost interest in or found weren’t working very well for me as far as monetizing with affiliate products, so instead of pulling them offline since I felt the content was decent, I just put PPC ads on them and basically moved on to other projects.

So this guy approached me last week asking if I had any of these sites which were earning above $150 on a monthly basis, and if I did would I be willing to sell any of them.

I do have a couple in that range, but I’m not really interested in selling all of them so I offered one of them to him.

The site I offered to him had earned between $150 and $200 every single month except one for the past 20 straight months, and that one month it actually earned $234.72 — so it has a long history of consistent income. I offered it to him for $1,800.00

Here’s where the deal went into the Twilight Zone.

He countered with an offer of $650.00, stating the site had a Google PageRank of Zero and a poor Alexa ranking.

I was a bit floored, but kept it civil, responding by asking did he want to buy PageRank and Alexa numbers that mean nothing to his bank account, or was he looking for sites with proven earnings to add to his portfolio?

Again, he responded with an offer, this time saying he could go up to $700 but that’s it because without PageRank or good Alexa rankings there’s no guarantee the site will earn him anything tomorrow.

Seriously! That’s what he said, and apparently believes.

I let him stew for a few days after that, then emailed him saying we wouldn’t be ironing out a deal here, so Good Luck. I wasn’t being bratty (taking my site and going home), I just don’t have the time to waste on perpetual tire-kickers or anyone with their head up their…well, lets say in the clouds.

Listen, if it’s not obvious to you at this point having read this far, things like PageRank, Alexa ranking, heck, even traffic levels are totally meaningless benchmarks unless you intend to create an income from selling them to direct link and banner buyers (and that’ll often get your site deindexed by Big G eventually anyway).

When buying (or selling) a site, the bottom line is what is it earning and how long is its earning history, obviously the longer the better. Not even “potential” has any kind of quantifiable value unless both buyer and seller share the same vision.

But, when a site has a long income history, and nothing in that history suggests there’s a new problem which will obviously change the earnings going forward (like if the site had been recently penalized by Google), then the value of that site is easy to figure out, and it has nothing to do with those meaningless numbers like PageRank and Alexa ratings…it’s all about the cold hard cash.

Don’t get caught up in the pointless, it’ll wreck you before you even get started. I know lots of people who have wasted tons of money buying sites with high PageRank and tons of social network traffic, then found they couldn’t convert the site into a significant asset because those things are rarely directly related to earnings value.

Yes, even traffic is pointless without a working monetization method. How many high traffic sites and services do we all use on a daily basis that have never turned a profit and stay afloat because of Investors? I can think of a half dozen just off the top of my head. They’ve got tons of traffic, but no significant income to claim.

I currently own 127 domains, about 80% of them have sites on them, the rest are in the ‘to be developed’ bin. Only one of them has a PageRank above 5 that I’m aware of (I don’t pay much attention to PageRank since it doesn’t mean anything to my wallet), and only one of them has an Alexa ranking below 50k that I know of.

But all of them earn me money. Collectively, they earn me a comfortable income, built on real value and NOT derived from meaningless calculations of my sites or traffic by 3rd party services.

Time, it’s the most valuable resource you invest into your business or website, but it’s also the easiest resource to completely lose track of and overspend on.

If you run your own business, manage a website, or even if you’re just in the planning phase of starting some new project or venture, then you’ve probably already seen your time slipping away here and there. You open an email, or visit some blog or news site for information, and the next thing you know the day is over and all you’ve accomplished was watching some golden kitty surfing on YouTube.

I’ve been doing this since 1995 and while the distractions have changed a bit over time, from BBS boards to forums to blogs to Twitter and YouTube, the problem is the same and I’ve been fighting it myself for over 15 years now.

Along the way I’ve created a few simple rules that I stick to in order to better manage my time online, and perhaps they’ll be helpful for you as well.

Only check email twice per day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon–and save personal contact messages for the late afternoon viewing.

The worst distractions online are intentionally sent at you by friends and family. They know you’ll love the video of the Alaskan Malamute howling out “I Wuv You”, and maybe you will, but don’t get sucked into the “cute/funny video void” during your best working hours. Leave emails from friends and family until your late afternoon check, and even then save them until after you’ve read and replied to any work related emails in your Inbox.

Never write more than a single paragraph in an email.

If I can’t answer somebody with a single paragraph in an email, then I pick up the phone and call them instead, it’s faster. I used to write reply emails that were as long or longer than my blog posts are. That’s a terrible waste of time and nobody really wants to read a novel length email. So, emails get 2 to 4 sentences at most, and if I can’t respond with that limitation I’ll call the person on the phone.

Limit all phone calls to 5 minutes.

Just because it’s quicker to call someone than to write them a long email doesn’t mean it’s okay to then spend a half hour chatting about sports or the kids with them. The point is to better manage your time, so limit your call to 5 minutes and stick to that limitation.

Unsubscribe from all synopsis newsletters.

I have a vested interest in web technologies, so I try to stay on top of the latest news and trends, but few things waste my time like a newsletter from some tech source that’s nothing but headlines and summaries which require you to click-thru for the full story.

I know that format is popular, but it’s called a newsletter because it’s supposed to be full of news, not just teasers to increase the publisher’s page view stats. If a publisher won’t give me a little meat, then they can keep their potatoes, I’ll get the story elsewhere.

Unsubscribe from all summary-only RSS feeds.

Ditto the reasoning from synopsis newsletters above. I love RSS and spend a lot of valuable time in Google Reader every day, so don’t waste my time demanding that I click-thru for the full story. The whole point of RSS is to syndicate content delivery for easy access on the platform of choice for the reader, not to tease for page views. Respect my time or you’ve lost my eyes, period.

Remember, anything worth reading or knowing about will be covered in multiple places anyway, you won’t miss out on anything Earth shattering by leaving these greedy RSS publishers in your dust.

Learn to learn from text.

A lot of people find it easier to learn something from a video or even an audio presentation than they can learn it from a text post or PDF. The problem with that is it often takes 10 minutes of video to get through what could have been described in 1 or 2 pages of text that you could have read or skimmed in half the time.

Unless it’s something visual (like art) where you need to see something on screen as it’s being explained, teach yourself how to follow written directions and stick to text-based tutorials wherever you can.

If you’re learning something like a programming language by spending hours watching videos of someone else typing on their screen…you’re falling behind. Get a book or text-based online resource and you could learn the same thing in half the time or less.

There you have it. If you take just a few of these rules I follow and apply them in your own daily operations, you’ll soon find there’s more time in the day than you thought there was.

And last week Google rolled out a new algo tweak, some are calling it the “farmers update” believing it’s aimed at so-called content farms, though the fact that eHow has gained ground with this update I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of it; but as a side result of this algo tweak many article directories have lost rankings with Google too.

So, now the nay-sayers have evidence to point to this time around as they shout once again, “article marketing is dead”!

Except…that rankings and SEO have always been the least of the reasons why anyone should be utilizing article marketing in their online promotion campaigns. In fact, I’ve said over and over for years that any backlinks or “linkjuice” you get with article marketing should be viewed as an unintended bonus only, because the real power behind article marketing is in getting your message or brand in-front of more eyeballs.

Article directories like eZineArticles came to strength because they served two purposes, for two very different crowds. For writers and marketers, they provided a place where you could freely distribute your content in the hopes of getting more eyeballs on it, and for publishers (of newsletters and ezines) they provided free catalogs of filler content that could be repurposed and used in their mailings or even on their websites if they were in a content pinch.

And the funny thing is, article directories are still serving those dual purposes and crowds, even if they aren’t getting the same love from Google that they once were.

Newsletter and ezine publishers still need quality content for their mailings, and still find it cheaper to locate and curate filler articles from directories then to hire a freelancer to create them. And trust me, these publishers aren’t searching Google to find that filler content, they’re searching on the article sites directly, so Google’s update doesn’t have a negative impact on this at all.

Also, writers and marketers still need places–with established audiences–to publish their content and spread their messages out beyond the borders of their own websites.

And it isn’t just about getting an article picked up by a newsletter or ezine publisher (though that’s worth it’s weight in gold when it happens for the marketer), but quality articles found on article directories will still get mentioned, linked to and discussed in niche forums or on individual blogs from time to time, despite not being well represented in the search engines, and that’s a great way to get more interested eyeballs to your content.

Let’s say you write a definitive article on grooming Golden Retrievers, with special attention paid to the squiggles (that’s the technical term for it I believe) they tend to get. Those are clumps of long hairs that knot up behind and below the dog’s ears, and can be very painful for the animal.

And you publish this article to a few article directories. I don’t want to go off track into discussing duplicate content here, but when I write something good I want to share it in as many venues and platforms as I can get it. Remember, my goal is eyeballs on my content, not pleasing engineers from Google or anywhere else. Besides, you never know which directory your content might connect with a publisher looking for filler articles, I’ve had as much luck on smaller niche directories as I have on the bigger ones like eZineArticles, so I want my great content everywhere I can put it.

So, you put this article up on a few directories. If it’s really a quality article, then there’s a good chance that someone interested in dog grooming or care will see it, and at some point down the line refer (link) to it on their blog in a grooming post, or on a pet related forum in a thread discussing grooming or squiggles.

And of course, there’s also the newsletter and ezine publishers out there (thousands of them) who still need quality content to fill their mailings with. If your article is a quality writing then there’s a chance of getting it into one or more of those publications too.

These reasons, focused on getting your content in-front of human eyeballs, are as alive and valid today as they’ve ever been for using article marketing in your promotional toolbox.

Writing, or machine/software rewriting of junky-crap articles solely for the purpose of getting cheap backlinks has been devalued, and that’s a great thing for us article marketers because it means less noise on the article sites that we will have to rise above to get our content noticed now.

But, article marketing as an effective means of spreading your message to a wider audience is every bit as powerful today as it’s ever been; and the people who are touting off about article marketing being dead now, well, realize that they’re the ones who have been doing it wrong–or for the wrong reasons–all along.

I decided to post my comments here rather than join that discussion because I feel some of what I have to say might not be received well and I didn’t want to hijack the conversation and turn it into something new.

So, let me get that out of the way by stating that it’s my opinion (and only an opinion) that the majority of buyers who rant about sellers mentioning “potential” in their sales listings are probably people who shouldn’t be buying websites anyway. (I told you my comments might not have been enthusiastically appreciated?)

The fact is, if you’re experienced in developing and managing websites, then you know how to judge the potential value of any offering based on your existing situation and abilities, so any hype being touted by the seller on potential is probably meaningless dribble to you. It’s only purpose is to encourage bids by the un(der)informed.

Case in point, I recently purchased a site from a webmaster forum I frequent for $900. That was the seller’s Buy-It-Now price. When I found the site listed for sale, it was at auction with the current bids at just below $500. The seller had the site for almost a year and had a 6 month history of AdSense earnings showing a steady average of $90 per month, so the seller was looking to get about 10 months worth of earnings with his Buy-It-Now price. That’s a silly way to value websites personally, but it’s fairly common online and fodder for another posting in the future.

Anyway, the site was related to a piece of software my company sells, which earns a little over $33 in profit per online (direct download) sale. I didn’t care about the AdSense earnings the site had, I judged the value of that site based on what I thought it would mean to get my software in-front of the traffic the site was consistently generating, and the $900 BIN price seemed like a bargain to me without even taking into consideration that I could likely increase traffic to the site in the future.

So, I purchased the site, transferred it to one of my servers, spent 30 minutes removing the AdSense ads and replaced them with a lead-gen form (email list) and advertisements for our own software.

That was in December, 2 months ago, and since then it has averaged 4 new leads (list subscribers) per day, and averaged 1 direct download software sale every 3 days. Not overwhelming numbers by any means, but with that consistent pace I will recoup the initial $900 investment within the next couple of weeks just from the direct software sales, and will profit nicely from future direct sales as well as additional sales and upsells to the growing list of leads. And I still haven’t made any moves to promote the site or increase traffic to it yet.

With this site purchase, as I do with every buying decision I ever make, I based what I was willing to pay upon what I believed the potential of the purchase was to me given my circumstances. That’s the only smart way for a buyer to make a purchasing decision. And in this particular case, I would have paid more than double that $900 BIN price for the site, and the results so far show even at that it would have been a wise investment for me.

This all illustrates the fundamental problem with mass marketplaces that’s really behind discussions like the one on “potential revenues” being listed in sales posts at Flippa right now.

If I didn’t have an existing product to plug into that site I bought, if I didn’t know from experience the traffic would produce leads and direct sales for me, then how could I ever have placed an honest value on the site as a buyer?

I suppose I could have based it on the history of AdSense earnings, but where’s the guarantee that I’ll get the same CPC rates with AdSense? Maybe my account is ‘smart priced’, or maybe as a buyer I don’t yet have an AdSense account, so who is to say I’ll even get accepted into the AdSense program?

Really, as a buyer that’s not a valid way to measure value on an asset purchase like a website. You’re not purchasing the past, you’re purchasing the current stability and future potential of the site, so you have to determine what that potential is–for you given your circumstances–in order to find a fair price that you should be willing to pay for it.

And for sellers, I think it’s only prudent to consider those same questions of your potential buyers when setting up your sale, and fair-game to offer ideas on other ways to monetize the website beyond AdSense which have to be based on “potential revenues” if your current revenue history is based only on AdSense earnings.

That doesn’t mean sellers should be guaranteeing profits or specific earnings, that’s as misguided as unskilled and uneducated buyers purchasing sites without a clue as to how to maintain and grow them; but I think it’s okay for sellers to say “here’s what it does with AdSense, you could also do [this] or [that] to monetize traffic on the site” and speak of general potential in their sales listings without making specific earnings claims on the potential.

The bottom line is in business, every sale and purchase is based in some part on potential. There’s no problem with that, it’s natural.Business is nothing but a series of investments made with the expectations or hopes of recouping a higher return.

The problem comes in when you have too many people who probably shouldn’t be selling or buying websites engaged in a marketplace devoted to buying and selling websites, eventually it’s going to lead to under-informed buyers feeling like they’ve been taken advantage of, and an overall devaluing to the entire marketplace that results in frustrated sellers not getting the true worth of their offerings.

I like Flippa, I’ve done business there and at SitePoint before Flippa, but I think they’re missing one thing that could possibly help avoid many of these types of discussions/debates/frustrations and would improve the user experience for many of their members, and that’s a “Start Here” link with some basic insights and information for first-time site buyers who have no experience in running or owning a commercial website.

It’s not really their responsibility to educate people like that, but I’m sure they’ve probably got the material for it already archived back at SitePoint that they could just link to for the most part; and it could help keep the Flippa marketplace thriving into the future.

Or, here’s a wacky idea, Flippa could start sending first-time site buyers over to Ed Dale’s Challenge site (he certainly sends plenty of his Challenge members over to Flippa to sell their sites after all), then they could get a basic education in commercial site ownership and return to Flippa to make better informed purchasing decisions.

And there’s always a ton of replies to these questions, some helpful, some silly, and some ultimately rude responses telling the user to just search the forum or Google.

The truth is, it’s not hard for the average site owner to get a new site noticed, by search engines or people. You just have to realize that unless a new site goes viral overnight (which is very rare), the process of growing your search and other traffic can be a slow one. The up-side is that everything you do should be accumulative and the process should ultimately have a snowball effect, meaning what you do each day should be helpful on its own, plus be helpful in strengthening what you’ve done previously as well. It’s all about building momentum.

Before I explain my own process here, I think it’s only right to point out that there are “systems”, “tricks” and “schemes” for generating lots of generic traffic to a web site very quickly. Many of them considered Blackhat and having to do with gaming/manipulating/deceiving people on popular sites like YouTube, Craigslist, and Facebook that are effective in bringing tons of traffic to a site right away. The problem with these tactics is that the traffic ultimately isn’t getting what they expected when they reach your site, so the long-term benefits from using them is almost nothing and so not worth the efforts in my opinion.

That’s why my approach, while slower out of the gate, tends to focus more on attracting targeted/interested visitors right from the start. I don’t care if I only average a couple visitors per day at first, because if they’re finding what they expect and want on my site and I keep doing a little more each day to build momentum then I know it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be getting solid traffic numbers from it.

And, I use those early days to also fine-tune my content by monitoring the traffic that I am getting. You don’t need thousands of daily visitors to tell you which topics or pages are getting the most attention, and which ones are sending the most people away from your site. Even with low traffic numbers, if that traffic is targeted to your site’s overall topic then it will give you a good idea of what people expect or want to find, and that information is golden for developing future content and building more momentum with.

Okay, what’s the plan, man?

Simple, I publish and ping. If you’ve been at this for any length of time you’ve probably heard the term “blog and ping” before. Several self proclaimed Internet Marketing Gurus have sold systems around blogging and pinging, and that eventually led to a saturation of splogs (SPAM blogs of stolen/rewritten content) filling the web and to some degree devaluing the power of pinging. Search engines caught on to what was being done and began taking measures to adjust their rankings to avoid letting these splogs gain premium space in their search listings.

And that has led to a notion that pinging has lost it’s effectiveness, which is totally false. Based on several years of doing this and watching the results (I’m anal about testing everything), what I believe is more accurate is to say that pinging stolen/rewritten/crappy content is no longer effective because the search engines learned to filter out that noise. BUT, publishing and pinging original content is still a wildly effective way to build momentum for your site with the search engines and with human traffic.

Right now I have 7 websites in the top 35k according to Alexa. Now, you can’t always trust Alexa rankings because they can be manipulated or skewed, but since I own these sites I know the numbers are accurate and the daily traffic reach for each of them is real.

For all of them, my method of building search rankings and traffic has been the same, publish and ping. I publish content on my sites, and ping it. I publish articles on article directories that link back to my site(s) in the author’s resource box, and then I ping my articles. On some rare occasions I publish a Press Release about one of my sites because it’s hit some milestone or had some other newsworthy event, and then I ping the published Press Release.

And of-course I’ll bookmark my better content that I publish on other’s platforms (articles, Press Releases and etc.), on my favorite social bookmarking account.

That’s it. I don’t troll forums to drop my links, or create forum accounts just to drop a link. I don’t leave shallow comments on other people’s blogs just to drop my links, I don’t do any of that crap that gets touted as “what you have to do” by so many out there.

I simply focus on publishing decent content, then ping it.

Now, I’ve repeatedly used the phrase publish and ping rather than blog and ping because of my 7 top traffic sites only 1 is a blog. The rest are not. A couple of them have blogs included in the overall sites, but in those cases the blogs aren’t the primary focus of the sites by any means.

The point is, pinging isn’t just for blogs. Pinging works for any site that is updated frequently, and preferably has a RSS newsfeed of your latest updated content attached to it.

This is already long, so I’m not going to get into the mechanics of creating RSS Newsfeeds for static HTML or other non-blog sites. Google is your friend and there’s plenty of information out there about this.

My message is simply to publish fresh content, and ping it. This works to build momentum for a new site, and it will continue to grow your reach over time as well.

The only other thing I’ll add to this is that you should use multiple pinging services, that seems to be more effective than using the same service all the time–and avoid using services that ping out to too many sources because for the most part there’s only about 3 dozen sources that matter if your site is targeted to English speaking traffic. The rest of those ping sources are usually non-english speaking in nature, and while you can still gain links and traffic using them, it’s really just noise pollution and pointless to the long-term goal in my opinion.

Here’s a few decent ping services (in no particular order) that I like to use, and I typically rotate through these so as not to ping from the same service 2 times in a row:

iPings
Ping-O-Matic
FeedShark
AutoPinger – check the “Let me enter my own blog title, url and rss/atom feed” button for full benefits
PingCaster – newer service that I’m a partner on (full disclosure!)

There are other Ping Services out there that are good, these (including PingCaster where I’m a partner) are just the ones that hit the top sources for English speaking sites that I like. Use the ones you feel most comfortable with, just make sure you have a couple of them in your toolbox and can rotate your pinging so that you aren’t always pinging through the same service. I’m not sure why that helps (I have theories but nothing I would set in stone), but through testing I found about a 20% increase in effectiveness when rotating my Ping Services over using the same one repeatedly, so I highly recommend it.