How to get changes to your web site spidered rocket fast!

If you've read prior postings in this blog, you know I've been reading up on RSS feeds and blogging techniques. Last week I saw a recommendation about a series of videos that promised to show how to get new sites or changes to old sites spidered in record time. The price for the videos was cheap, so I figured I'd check it out.

The name of the product is "Blog and Ping" and it was put together by a guy named Rick Butts. He really did a super job on the videos, which show you how to set up a blog from step 1 to completion. I was aware of most of the beginning videos but watched anyway. They're well done and quick paced.

Out of the 11 videos, one was particularly valuable. The concept around the system is that you write blog entries which link your readers to parts of your web site that you want the search engines to visit. Not only are you linking your readers, you're also giving the search engine spiders a path to follow to find those pages. The trick is to do it just the right way. If you do, you'll find Google and Yahoo going right where you point them.

Nothing in the videos is spammy or underhanded. What you're doing is helping the spiders find their way around your site and find the new pages. I'm sure they appreciate the assistance, since their job is to find and index every valuable web page in cyberspace, yours included.

It took me just 2 sessions of watching the videos, and then to work trying out the techniques. Now that I know what I'm doing I can write a blog post, and have it showing in the Yahoo directory within just a few minutes, where previously it would take upwards of 24 hours if not longer. But there's more to the "blog and ping attack" than just saving a day's time.

Obviously I can't tell the whole story, there are 11 videos that you need to see, if you're interested in getting your web site spidered quickly, "Blog and Ping" will be the most valuable product you can every buy.

Personally I use the information I learned from Rick every day now, if you have your own web site you should check it out.

Oops, big time!

I'm not sure if anybody noticed, but I posted a bunch of items today that I didn't mean to post here, they were meant for my other blog.

What happened was that I've been using the Google Toolbar, and using the "blog this" button to give a guided tour of the features of one of my other sites. Until today, whenever I clicked on the button, it added the link to the correct blog. Today (without me noticing it about 7 times!), it added the entry to this blog by mistake.

I have no idea what made it switch, I'll just have to watch it more carefully in the future. I think I transferred the entries from here to the other blog now, if you noticed some strange posts earlier today, well excuuuuse me!

Google kiss of death to affiliates?

There's been a lot of talk going on around some of the major forums about a rumor that Google is going to cut or severely curtail the ability for affiliates to place AdWords ads. It has gotten a lot of response, especially (of course) from affiliates.

First off, I always take rumors with a proverbial grain of salt, and would for this one also except it was started by someone who is well respected with good connections. So at least thought needs to be given to the what-if scenario.

If I were top management at Google, after a recent IPO (initial public offering), and after seeing a run-up in the price of my stock which I either owned or had stock options for, I certainly wouldn't want to kill the golden goose. Not only do affiliates spend a lot of money with Google, but they also cause others to spend even more, since AdWords is an auction environment. For example if you want to get a commission for a sale of a Harry Potter book, and you place an AdWords bid to send traffic to amazon.com, you are competing with many thousands of other amazon affiliates doing the same thing. Since only 8 ads can be shown on the first page of search results, people raise their bids in order to be shown on that first page.

Now, if we take away all the affiliate ads, what's left? An ad from amazon.com themself. An ad from Barnes and Noble. Maybe some other book stores. Maybe from eBay, who does a lot of PPC bidding (but not from eBay affiliates anymore of course). So the competition for that first page comes down drastically, and the price required to be #1 plummets. Who loses? Google, of course, and their shareholders who bought stock at high levels.

The rumor is that Google will ditch affiliates to make the search experience more meaningful for its searchers. I don't know how that will happen. Yes, there won't be a whole page full of amazon affiliates on the Harry Potter page, but will their demise mean a less pleasurable search experience? Maybe I'm missing something, but regardless of whether 8 people are sending traffic to amazon or Barnes and Noble, or whether amazon and Barnes and Noble are sending their own traffic to their sites, it's still the same bloody book, isn't it? If there's a glut of similar ads on the right hand side of the search results, there are still free ads on the left hand side, and after all isn't it Google's job to manage THAT, and let the free market auction system take care of the ads?

I don't see it happening, but I've been wrong before, and I'll be wrong again. Most likely there will be some less drastic policy change than the rumors have suggested, and the market and the affiliates will adapt. In the meantime reading the forum posts from the Chicken Littles thinking the sky is falling has been interesting.

What do I suggest if you're a beginning AdWords advertiser? First, don't quit your day job quite yet. Second, go on with life and the rules as they're currently written. If they change, they change for everyone. Third, make lemonade out of lemons if need be. There will still be plenty of ways for affiliate marketers to make money, with or without Google AdWords as it exists today. In fact it may be even easier if this scenario happens. But that's a discussion worthy of a post of its own in the future.

Quick tip to cutting down on spam

A while back I mentioned the advantages of publishing newsletters with RSS (Really Simple Syndication). I don't know if you followed my advice to get yourself a newsreader or already knew all about it to begin with, but I just picked up a good report that goes more in depth about the advantages of getting your news through feeds instead of subscribing to ezines, whenever you have the chance.

The report is in PDF format, you'll need the free Adobe Acrobat software to read it, which is installed on most computers already, if you don't have it go over to adobe.com to pick it the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. To get the report, just right click for the "Zero Spam Report" and save it to your desktop or somewhere else where you can find it.

Just as a hint, I talked earlier today about getting noticed by the search engines quickly, since I put RSS feeds on my sites, my traffic has gone up about 50% in just a couple weeks (and my traffic wasn't too shabby to begin with). Just a coincidence? I don't think so.

RSS feeds and blogs are the hottest item on the Internet right now. If you have a web site, you need to learn about them, and take advantage of them, now, before your competition beats you to all that extra traffic out there.

Talk to you later.

Getting some speed out of the search engines

In my last post I mentioned that I had put up a bunch of new pages on one of my sites, and was expecting to wait a couple months for them to get spidered, ranked, and start bring in traffic.

I was wrong. I started seeing traffic and revenue yesterday. Unbelievable as it seems, with something over 5 billion web pages to keep track of, Google was able to put a bunch of my new pages in their indexes, and some of them were coming up on the first search results page (even the first position!) for the search term the page was written for.

At this point in time, I have 2 major areas I want to further my education in. One is search engine optimization, the other is Google AdWords. In both areas I've already done a lot of studying, bought and read some excellent eBooks, and consider myself conversationally proficient.

However, in the Internet marketing world, you're competing with a lot of other people. If you do a Google search for a common phrase you might get millions of competing pages. For example I just did a search for "make money" in quotes it returned the first 10 pages out of over 10 million. The page that's in 100th place (out of 10 million) will rarely get seen. If you're not in the top 30, you have a major problem if that's what your page is about.

So what you have to do is two things. One, you have to focus your page on a more narrow topic, like "make money selling sunglasses" (which has no competition, but maybe not many people typing that phrase either). You want to find a happy medium, and there are tools that enable you to find out how many searches are being done for a particular phrase, as well as the number of competing pages. I highly recommend you invest in the "tools of the trade", if you want to master the trade. Later on tonight, or maybe over the weekend, I intend to post some of the better resources that I can recommend that have helped me to the point that I'm at in my progress towards my goals.

Second, once you find the topic you want to rank highly for, you want to be kind to the search engines. You want to make sure your page is set up so that you will rank well. That's a learnable skill, and one that can make you independently wealthy in a very short period of time. With that skill you can sell your SEO skills to other companies, or you can set up sites of your own and make a killing.

In life, receiving positive feedback is a tremendously motivating influence. Whether you're a child that was told "nice job" for a good report card, or a web site owner seeing your page at the top of the 1st page of Google search engine results 2 days after writing the page, it's an exhilarating experience.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to attempt to learn everything I can about search engine optimization, Google AdWords, RSS feeds and blogs. I'll let you know what I find out.

I'm typing this post on the day before Thanksgiving, I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

Today you graduate from "Affiliate Marketing University"

It seems like short a time ago that I started you on the road to learning the ropes in affiliate marketing. Today I'm going to point you to the last chapter of the course.

But first ...

Things change quickly in the Internet world. New techniques and tools are invented almost on a weekly basis. Those who are serious about making a good second or first income from affiliate marketing like to keep on top of things. I know I do, I'm subscribed to so many ezines I can't count them, it's a struggle some weeks reading everything that comes into my mailbox. Sometimes I get a bit behind.

I'll try to inform you about the best new tools and courses available through this blog. Most that I recommend will be things I've purchased myself. Those that I haven't purchased will be items available from marketers that I am familiar with and can put my reputation on the line by recommending.

I've always felt that investing in your own education and tools of the trade is the best investment you can ever make. That fact came to mind today as I put together some new groups of web pages. I have a product that I bought several months ago that makes it easy to clone pages that are similar, and it has keyword insertion capability so that the parts that change from one page to the next are easily inserted by a template. I'll probably talk about this tool in a future blog entry, but it isn't one of those spammy tools that lets you create thousands of pages on the fly and gets you banned from the search engines. So it probably isn't what you think.

Anyway, I'm doing a project that I have calculated will earn me an income of approximately a nickle a page. Now that doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a nickle a day. Forever, once the pages get indexed and decent search engine rankings. This afternoon I uploaded about 60 new pages to my site. When I'm done with the project, I hope to have around 6-10,000 different pages on my site with good content, each making a nickel. A day. Forever.

So today I made 60 pages, which in a few months will be bringing me $3.00 a day, $90.00 a month, $1,000.00 a year. I know I won't get $3.00 from them tomorrow. I can wait.

The point is, with affiliate marketing, you can't think about how much work getting a typical 100 page site set up is. You have to look at the big picture. I mentioned James Martell a few days back, and I believe I mentioned that in his experience a typical site makes him $500 a month. Obviously you can't quit your day job if you're making $500 a month, at least not in the U.S., but if you do one of those sites every month, even every 2 months if you're short on time, at the end of the year you have at least 6 sites done, and that could be $3,000 a month. Keep on adding those pages and those sites and pretty soon you have a full time income on virtual autopilot.

One of those 100 page sites might take you 100 hours to put together. If you make $500 from it a month, you're making $5.00 per hour per month. Or $60.00 per hour on a yearly basis. Or if you look at the 5-year picture, you're making $300.00 per hour for that site.

Believe me, if you start seeing the results from the first site (it takes a few months for a typical site to make it into the search engines and get ranked), once you start seeing the results you'll certainly be motivated to work a bit longer and harder.

In any event, let's send you over to the last day of our course, the "Affiliate Marketing Wrap Up".

But don't worry, I won't stop writing now that this particular course is done, there's so much more to talk about and learn together. I hope some of you start giving me some feedback and tips by leaving comments for everyone to read (again I reserve the right to edit any comments in case there are some inappropriate remarks made).

Some of the upcoming topics are sure to be ways to generate traffic, more AdWords and AdSense tips, stories about successes and failures, and lots more. I hope you'll stick around.

Earn unbelievable money by becoming an expert in something (anything)

Most people short-change themselves. They've developed 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or more years of experience in many different areas without even appreciating it.

Can you cash in on that expertise? You betcha! Let's just take an off the wall example. Let's say you suffer from allergies. Every spring you sniffle and suffer and try every new over the counter medicine you see on the television, some work better than others. You've been through this for 30 years.

Are you an expert on allergies? Maybe you won't win the Noble Peace Prize with your knowledge, but you know more than at least 95% of the world, so to them you're certainly an expert! By doing some digging using your favorite search engine, you can find a lot of information about allergies, various types, various causes, various cures. You'll find eBooks saying they can cure an allergy in three days. You'll find information about allergies particular to various countries and cities. Plus much more.

Now armed with your experience and new found knowledge, why not start up a web site about allergies? You can share your trials and tribulations, your victories and defeats against your particular affliction. You can write up reviews of the eBooks you've found (after signing up for their affiliate program and perhaps reading themself to see if they're worthy of recommendations). You can find lots of companies that you can direct traffic to that provide allergy medications, allergy relieving appliances such as air purifiers, vacuum cleaners, etc.

Not interested in allergies? Then how about golf? Cooking? Home theater setups? Pet grooming? Baby sitting? Wedding planning? Sewing? Woodworking? Negotiating with used car salesmen? We could go on all day.

The point is, anyone can go from being casually interested and able to hold their own in a conversation about a particular "niche" (remember the niche discussion?) to being an "expert" about the topic in just a few days of concentrated effort. You don't have to invent the home theater to be able to review the pros and cons of different setups and recommend your favorite choice to others.

Odds are there are at least a half dozen things (probably more) that you know more about than 95% of the rest of the world, and to them you can be considered an expert. Especially if you take your current knowledge and do some research and reading.

So, to wrap up, I'd like to send you to our 7th Affiliate Marketing lesson, and help you learn How to Become an Expert and Cash In On It. See you again soon, until then I wish you nothing but the best!

Load up your hard disk with tons of free stuff!

I was just thinking. I've been typing along for weeks to whoever is willing to listen, and I haven't even introduced the rest of this site to you.

If you haven't surfed around on here, you most likely don't know that we have one of the largest selections of free downloadable eBooks available anywhere, to say nothing of lots of good articles written by some of the best minds in the Internet Marketing business.

To find the good stuff, surf on over to the Fantastic eBooks Articles page. There you'll find a bunch of articles at the top, some very interesting reading, and further down the page are what we call the "Web Partner Tips". These tips were originally written as an email series, but I decided to just upload them to the site and let whoever wants them take them all at once. Each tip has a guest article on a particular topic, a downloadable eBook or software product, and more.

Obviously the price is right, so feel free to use what you can.

Also, if you sign up for our ezine with a valid email address, you are entitled to resell rights on most of the products listed (read the restrictions after you download). That means you can upload the product to your web site, sell it, and keep every penny.

There's more to this site than the free stuff and this blog, so please look around.

Finding merchants that will let make you money for both of you!

OK, we're back! If you've been with us for the first five lessons of our affiliate marketing course, you've come a long way in about a week (if not, I suggest you read the first 5 lessons before this one, they're linked from the archives section at the right of this article). Today's lesson will teach you how to find good merchants.

There are at least 3 and maybe 4 parties involved in affiliate marketing.

As in any transaction, there is the customer. Without the customer nothing happens, so you have to take good care of him or her. You want to make sure that you provide good information and don't overstate the benefits of the product you're recommending.

Then there is the company with the product. They have a "widget" that the customer needs. Once the customer finds the company, a mutually beneficial transaction can take place. If the merchant has the time and skills to market effectively, they can sell directly to the consumer. But often they don't have those skills. That's where you come in.....

The affiliate (you or me) help the customer find the merchant. We do that by building a web site that is optimized to bring in search engine traffic, or perhaps we use a pay-per-click search engine like Google AdWords to buy traffic to our site. Sometimes we do a bit of "pre-selling" wherein we review alternative merchants so that the customer can make a more educated decision on which merchant is better for their needs. So we might be affiliates for several different merchants on the same site.

At the very least those are the 3 parties involved in an affiliate marketing transaction. But who makes sure the affiliate gets paid? Sometimes the merchant does that directly, but more often than not, they let an outside firm, like Commission Junction, Clickbank, or Linkshare do the accounting for them. That would be the 4th party in the transaction.

With that being said, let's go over to Lesson 5, which is about "Finding Merchants". I hope it helps you start to pull things together.

Where would you live if you could live anywhere you wanted?

The Internet revolution has quickly changed people's way of life. Less quickly, ever so subtly, but happening still, the Internet revolution is changing where people choose to live.

When the U.S. was settled, during the period called the Agricultural revolution, people set down roots where land was available and fertile for farming. After the Industrial revolution, major cities sprung up where transportation allowed raw materials to easily reach factories, and finished goods to easily reach embarkation points en route to distribution facilities. Masses of people moved to where employment was easily obtainable, and factories were built where a labor pool of able bodied people was available.

Times have again changed. When I was much younger, it was predicted that the American economy would become more service oriented rather than agriculture or manufacturing oriented. The prediction has been fulfilled to a large extent with many manufacturing jobs being outsourced or moved to markets where labor is not just available, but cheap.

I think often about how I came to move from a small town in western Pennsylvania to a large metropolitan area in northeastern New Jersey. The taxes are high, the air quality isn't good, traffic is horrendous, the price of living is high. But at the time of the move, I came like many before me because of employment opportunities.

Now that I make my living by using the Internet and computer skills, I think sometimes about what keeps me in this part of the country. There are roots here that would be tough to pull up after 25+ years, but other than that task, the answer is that there is no overwhelming reason that I couldn't do what I do anywhere in the country. Isn't that a very empowering thought?

The numbers of people that take advantage of this mobility is certainly small right now. However I can see a trend as more and more people realize that they can make their living anywhere there's a plug for their computer, and a (preferably high speed) connection for their modem. With those two facilities you can log onto eBay, Google AdWords, or your web site, from anywhere you please.

Whether you choose to just vacation more often than you used to, checking in from time to time from a local Internet cafe, whether you choose to own multiple homes for different times of the year, or whether you choose to just get back to your dream location, the possibilities exist because of affiliate marketing.

You see, what I'm trying to convey is that affiliate marketing and/or Internet marketing is not just about the money available. Sure, some people will spend a few hours a week so that they can make the lease payments on their BMW that they couldn't afford otherwise. Some people will replace their 40-hour a week plus daily commute "j.o.b." with a work at home business. But more and more now, people are replacing their entire way of life.

Just something to get you thinking, the subject of this entry is "where would you live if you could live anywhere you wanted?", if it makes you think a bit about the serious possibilities and benefits of spending a couple extra hours at the computer per night instead of watching the latest episode of Survivor, the basketball game, or Judge Judy, then I've accomplished what I intended to accomplish with this article.

Hopefully we'll be one of the Internet resources that you check out frequently, I'll do my best to provide timely and helpful information, including the affiliate marketing course that we've been giving you for the last several days (and a few more to come). If you haven't read it yet, there are links in the archives section to the right on this page.

Thanks for listening to yet another random thought in the mind of a still-striving Internet marketer.

Mastering keyword selection - the key to online success!

We're up to lesson 5 in our quest to succeed with affiliate marketing. Today's lesson covers the absolutely most important topic of all, and that's keywords.

Whether you create your own web pages, or use a pay-per-click search engine like Google AdWords or Overture, selecting the right keywords and properly optimizing your web page or advertisements for them is the difference between success and wasting your time and money.

There's also a great article from one of the real industry experts about what to do with those keywords after you've found them.

So, let's take you away to learn about "Keyword Selection".

Developing an effective strategy for affiliate success

Today was a very busy day, one of the software packages I use to build web pages came out with a new release, so I've spent the last day installing it. So far, I've had no glitches in the process, but it hasn't left me much typing time. But, since the affiliate marketing course has already been preloaded in advance, at least I can give you the next lesson in our series.

If you just stumbled onto this blog, we're up to lesson four in affiliate marketing, I recommend if you haven't read parts 1-3 yet, you should check out the archives and read them before continuing.

Lesson 4 talks about developing an affiliate marketing strategy. It introduces you to some great tools, and an outside course that will help you prevent money down the AdWords toilet if you're inclined to market that way. Today's lesson will keep you busy if you do what's suggested. When you're done, and if you've read and absorbed the prior lessons, you'll know as much or more about affiliate marketing, and what it takes to succeed, than probably 80% of the people out there, maybe more.

Of course, knowledge in and of itself does not guarantee success. You need to take action, and you have to persevere in the face of adversity. Thomas Edison didn't successfully make a bulb light on his first try, and the affiliate marketers that are making five figures a month didn't do that their first month either.

Anyway, I hope you get a lot out of today's lesson.

Finding a niche market - the key to affiliate success

In today's third affiliate marketing lesson, we'll focus on a very important aspect of affiliate marketing, which is finding a niche market worth entering. It's not enough to say that you want to make money on the Internet, you need to say that you want to make money on the Internet by providing a solution to what a group of people are looking for.

Generally the bigger the group, or "niche" the more competition there is, therefore it sometimes much more profitable to find a small isolated market that isn't being properly served and try to dominate it.

We go into much greater detail in today's lession about "Niche Marketing", I hope you enjoy it.

How a small affiliate commission can brighten your day

I received a very pleasant surprise yesterday. The mail came, I sorted it into my pile (bills and junk) and my wife's pile (checks to write up orders for). A few minutes later, my wife asked me "what's this $25.00 for?", and I saw it was a commission check from a company I had barely heard of.

I checked my records today and found sure enough I had a small link on one of my sites for this merchant, I didn't even know they owed me money, and they sent me a check.

That's what affiliate marketing is all about, and what makes it one of the best ways to build a good second (or primary) income stream.

I'll probably talk more about it at length in the future, but I'm a very big fan of James Martell, who literally wrote the book on affiliate marketing. Often you'll hear other Internet Marketers talking about Martell-style sites as opposed to mini sites (I call them Phil Wiley style sites, for lack of knowing who else to give the concept credit to), extolling the virtues of each.

Martell sites are web sites constructed with many (usually 50 to 300, maybe more) web pages, each page optimized for a specific keyword or keyword phrase, the goal of each page is to capture search engine traffic for that specific keyword phrase, provide good content about that phrase (250-500 words usually), and then direct the visitor to product pages where affiliate links to merchants are placed. With upwards of 300 pages, a site can often rank highly for many important keywords, and receive a large amount of free (I should capitalize the word as FREE) search engine traffic.

Wiley sites are usually just a page or two, generally either just a page devoted to pre-selling a product and then a link to the affiliate merchant. Or else a couple pages, one a rather long sales letter explaining the virtures of your own product, and a small order page designed to capture the credit card, or upsell to a more expensive version of the product that the customer has already decided to buy once the first page wore down their defenses.

Both concepts are very good, the Wiley mini site can be done quickly, and many of them can be done in a short period of time. But to my way of thinking, Martell sites are the best, even though they take longer to initially put together. If you pick a good solid niche market, do the proper keyword research to come up with a lot of popular keyword phrases, put together a page for each, link them together properly, and then wait for the search engines to bring you the traffic, you can have a business that will provide income for many years.

Earlier this year, I bought the James Martell book and took it for a ride. I put together my first Martell style site, which is a nutritional information site, and have waited for traffic. James says patience is often necessary, especially in competitive markets, and I suppose nutritional supplements qualifies as a very competitive market. So I've been patient, after all now that the work has been done, there is no longer any expense of time or effort, the pages will reside in cyberspace for the long term.

I suppose if I had to do it over again, I would make my original site a less competitive niche, but it's too late now to worry about that.

James occasionally tells stories about his struggles when he was just starting, and about his students who have become successful. Their fondest memories are always of the very small unexpected first commission check they received after waiting for months for the search engines to rank them. I can't say that the $25.00 was my first income from that site, quite the contrary, but still and all, it was unexpected and very exciting to deposit yesterday. If what James says about his other students is true, it is just the start of very exciting things for that site, and it certainly has pumped me up to get going on my next "Martell-style" web site. Many of his students are allegedly making 5-figure monthly incomes from building multiple web sites, each with 100 or so pages.

I guarantee you, it isn't easy to get the first site up and running, and it's no fun waiting for the first check to arrive (but if you take advantage of Google AdSense, it can happen very quickly if you do the work required). The good news is the 2nd site is easier than the 1st, and the 3rd is easier than the 2nd. The better news is that after you have a few up and running, and income from the first coming in, you can invest that income (if you desire) into outsourcing a lot of the content writing so that the 4th ...20th sites take almost no time at all. More about that at another time.

If you have any desire at all to set up an income stream that just keeps on coming, I hope this entry will give you some encouragement. I do personally earn enough from my web sites to pay all my bills, but still and all, that first unexpected $25 from that first Martell-style site, certainly made my day.

Goals and an inspiring affiliate story

I got up this morning to a white lawn, yes the first snow of the year, much earlier than we usually get it in New Jersey. The air is so fresh and crisp today though, it was almost a pleasure to scrape the ice and snow off my car's windshields.

Yesterday I pointed you to our Introduction to Affiliate Marketing page, if you missed it, check the archives link over to the right hand side of this page.

Today is the second lesson in the course, which is technically about affiliate marketing, but today's lesson could be helpful in other endeavors, personal or professional, also, as you'll see. It also includes what I think is an inspiring true case story about someone whose life was changed by affiliate marketing. I hope you like it.

So without further ado, let's look at "Opportunities in Affiliate Marketing".

Although yesterday and today's blog entry have both been about affiliate marketing, I might not continue this e-course on consecutive days, I might mix in other random thoughts as they occur, so if your skill level is beyond what you feel this course is about, check back anyway, or you might miss something that is more down your alley!

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

We've talked some about using Google AdWords to send traffic to web pages. The pages can be either yours or someone else's, Google doesn't care. If you have your own web site it can be an excellent way to cash in on new hot trends, or fads.

For example a couple years ago, they came out with micro RC cars that all the kids wanted, it was one of the hottest toys of the year. I was able to find a supplier at the right price, was easily able to add a page to my web site to take orders, but I knew I needed to get traffic to that page immediately, I couldn't wait for the search engines to find me and take my chances about getting on the first page. I just knew that the fad would die off the day after Christmas.

So I set up a quick campaign on Google AdWords, and 15 minutes later had traffic coming to my page for anyone looking for micro rc cars, in fact we had orders the same day.

But, if you don't have, or want, your own web site, or if you don't have, or want to stock a particular type of item even if you have your own site, you can certainly take advantage of someone else's inventory. That's what is called affiliate marketing.

To introduce you to the wonders and potential riches of affiliate marketing, I've put together several pages of material, we have an email course set up for it, but since we know and talked about the problems with email subscriptions, I'll use this blog to send you to the course, day by day. Here's the first lesson, your "Introduction to Affiliate Marketing".

During this multi-day course, we hope to educate and inspire you to join us in the ranks of those earning money selling other people's products. Enjoy today's lesson, and feel free to post a comment on this or any other blog entry by clicking on the button below. We reserve the right to edit or delete inappropriate comments, of course, but within reason we welcome any or all feedback.

Selling eBooks for Maximum Profit

I've spent the last few hours trying to find my next product to sell using Google AdWords. If you look through the Clickbank marketplace, there is just so much to choose from. Lots of great eBooks that I would personally love to own, and the authors give you on average 50% of the selling price as a commission. Some go to as high as 75%

That got me to thinking. If you're an author of an eBook, you have 2 ways to make money. You can sell your book yourself, and get 100% of the price. Additionally you can list your book with Clickbank and give up 50% or more. Why would somebody want to give up half the profits for their hard work?

Simple. Thousands upon thousands of independent business people are Clickbank affiliates, and automatically an affiliate of every author that lists there. So those authors in effect have a sales force that is ready, willing, and able to find buyers for the books. Would you rather sell 100 copies of a book that costs $47.00, and keep all the money? Or would you rather have 100's of other people sell a total of 1000 copies of the same book, and keep half the money? I know which I'd choose.

Of course, until you have that eBook written, you don't earn any money at all, except by selling somebody else's creation, which can be a challenging task, and that's where this discussion is headed.

The people that make the big bucks online have certain characteristics. Most of them have contacts, in other words they know people that will make them money. That might be a mailing list full of people that trust them, many of which are waiting to spend money on the next product that they announce. Or they might have a much smaller list of other professionals that they can create a joint venture with, who will announce the product to their list in exchange for a piece of the profits. Without your own big list, you need to work with people that do have the lists.

But most of all, the successful people have created something of value. That could be a software product, a full fledged eBook, a smaller report of value, or even a hard copy publication.

Do you have the ability to create a product? Many people will answer that question negatively, but you really shouldn't short change yourself. You'd be surprised if you read the biographies of the people who have become prolific writing eBook after eBook, software product after software product. Many times, they didn't even create the product themselves.

Today I'd like to introduce you to an exciting opportunity. There are 3 very special products that will help you become one of the Internet movers and shakers. If nothing else, you should visit the web sites that I list below, even if you want to leave your credit card in the other room. Trust me, you'll become very excited and have a much higher opinion of your potential after visiting these sites.

First, here's a guide to writing your own eBook in as little as 7 days, it's title is (appropriately) "How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook ... in as Little as Seven Days" by Jim Edwards. This has been a best seller for years, and is highly recommended.

The next resource that will leverage your time, and enable you to spit out best sellers as quickly as you can think of them is called "Ghostwriting Goldmine". If you have ever wondered how some people have time to create so many products, or so many different web sites, this is how many of them do it. They hire others to do it for them, and take all the credit and most of the money. This report is a real eye opener. If you don't have the time or confidence to create your own product(s), this is what you need to look at first.

And my final recommendation for the day is the priciest (but something that could start you on a new career). It's called "How to Write a Book on Anything in 14 Days ... Guaranteed!", and will show you how to create best sellers for any market, fiction or non-fiction, hard copy or downloadable, personal or professional. If you think you're not capable of creating the next "Chicken Soup" empire, maybe you should read about this product before you turn off your computer for the day. This formula will work for you even if you're "only" looking to get published so that you can advance your professional career.

That's it for this time, good luck and have lots of fun!

Google AdWords Tip - Split Test Everything!

Google AdWords makes it so easy to make money that it's frightening! Here's how:

1. they allow you to be shown to the precise targeted visitor you want, by allowing you to specify the exact keyword phrase that you're willing to pay for.

2. you can bid as low as a nickel a click.

3. you don't pay a cent unless and until you get a visitor to your page.

4. your advertising can be showing within 15 minutes of your filling out a form (as opposed to a traditional magazine ad that can take you 3 months to get published.

5. and today's subject is, you can split test easily to make sure you're not leaving money on the table.

Split testing means alternating the showing of 2 or more of your ads. In the simple example of 2 different ads, visitor A will see version 1, visitor B will see version 2, visitor C will see version 1, etc.

After a reasonable number of clicks on each ad (50 will do), you should see a pattern as to which ad pulls a better response. If version 1 gets a 2.5% click through rate, and version 2 gets a 2.9% CTR, it seems that version 2 is the winner. At that point you delete version 1.

But are you done? No. Now you make a new ad again, constantly attempting to beat the winner, constantly trying to improve. The best way to do it is to make just subtle changes every time. Like just change one word in the heading. Or just change the way you capitalize the words. If you change more than one thing between version 1 and version 2, you don't know which change made the difference. Maybe if you changed 2 things, change 1 made it better by 2% and change made it worse by 3%. So just change one thing at a time, pick a winner, and move on.

After enough split tests you'll begin to see patterns, so your experience level and ability to write good ads the first time will improve. But there is always room for improvement.

Successful marketers with Google AdWords (or other forms of advertising) are constantly split testing, analyzing the results, picking the winner, and challenging the winner. That's how they become successful, and so can you.

Good luck, and until next time, I wish you nothing but the best.

Firefox browser review

I read in the morning paper yesterday that the first official release of Firefox was coming out yesterday. The review was very positive, so I figured I should take a look.

For those that haven't heard already, the selling point about Firefox is that it is more secure against hackers and spyware than Internet Explorer. That should be enough of a reason to try it out.

But after a quick download, which you can get at the Mozilla site, I found lots of nice surprises. First of all, after going through the painless setup, upon first execution it asks you if you want to import your Internet Explorer files (cookies, temporary files, and most importantly of all your "favorites" which Firefox calls "bookmarks").

Once it goes through that task, the time it takes to start up is much faster than Internet Explorer, very noticeable.

The thing I like the most, which I found after playing around a while, is their "open in tabs" feature. What you can do is set up a bookmark folder of your most frequently used pages, and then instead of accessing them individually, click on the "open in tab" link, and it will open up every bookmarked page in that folder. You can then easily go back and forth between all your favorite sites painlessly, and extremely fast.

I'm sure there's a lot I don't know about Firefox, but what I do know is I do like it very much. The main selling point is it's more secure against hackers and spyware, but there is so much more to it. And it seems to have given me back a lot of my computer power to boot.

I recommend you give it a try, you don't have to make it your default browser right away, but you might want to after working with it for a while.

Today's quick tip for AdWords

I don't have a lot of time to type today, but I just want to share one tip for those struggling or getting frustrated with Google AdWords.

Conventional wisdom keeps saying to find as many keywords as possible for your campaign or ad group. That can be true to an extent. But if you're just starting out, working on a budget, trying to find out what works and what doesn't work, here's a better idea.

Find out the main 1 or 2 or 5 keywords you want to target. Then create an adgroup in your campaign for each of those keywords or keyword phrases. Use exact match (in other words put [ and ] brackets around the word or phrase). In the adgroup, make sure you put the keyword/phrase in the title, and if it doesn't sound messy, put it also in one of the description lines.

When the searched keyword is in your ad Google will automatically make your works bold, and they'll stand out. That can easily double or triple your click through rate, and could mean you'll get more exposure while paying less than your competition, or get listed higher than your normal maximum bid would normally allow you to get.

You should also probably include another exact match keyword in the adgroup, by placing the plural tense of it. For example, if you're selling a dog training book, instead of (as many do) finding hundreds of keyword phrases that include dog training and derivatives thereof, do this. Using one of several excellent tools, you can locate keywords that relate directly to your best audience. So set up an adgroup that has:

[dog training book]
[dog training books]

and another one that has:

[dog training tip]
[dog training tips]

and another one that has:

[potty training dog]
[potty training dogs]

Then make sure your headlines and descriptions include those words, and what will happen is that your ad will be laser targeted to the search being performed at the time, the ad will stand out because it's bold, and assuming your bid gets you on the first page, you should have an excellent click through rate.

What many experts suggest when you start a new campaign or adgroup is to set the bid higher than you would normally want. You want to get listed high on the first page of results. That will get you the best click through rate, and get you started on the right foot. You don't want to be buried in the 15th position, low on page 2 or even worse, you'll be lowing exposure and even those surfers that do make it to the 2nd page will be less likely to click on your ad.

Then, after you go a couple days, if your CTR is as high as I expect it might be, you might be able to reduce your bid and still rank above your competition that has a higher bid, since Google rates advertisers not only on bid, but also on the CTR. Think of it this way. Google prefers an advertiser that gets 5% click throughs on a .12 bid over an advertiser that gets 1% click throughs on a .50 bid. Sound crazy? Google's crazy like a fox. Consider this. The .12 ad will get clicked 5 times out of every 100, and yield .60 for Google. The .50 bid will get clicked 1 time out of 100, and yield just .50 in that time span.

That's the tip of the day, go out and make your mark on the AdWords world!

Make money with Google AdWords!

Just a short post today. It came to mind that many of you might not be familiar with Google AdWords. So I'd like to give just short tutorial today and point you to some good reading.

Google AdWords ads are those little 3 line ads (plus a link) that appear at the right of the search results whenever you do a search using the Google search engine. There are up to 8 little ads shown on each page. This is how Google makes a good deal of their income. Advertisers and/or web site owners pay Google a commission for showing those ads to searchers. It's a really ingenious and effective advertising model, much better than traditional advertising.

For example, if you were to advertise in a magazine, you would pay a flat fee for the space, regardless of whether anyone was interested or even took the time to glance at your ad. The same is true of a television ad. You could pay a half million dollars for a spot during the Super Bowl, and it might be completely ineffective.

The way an AdWords ad works is that Google will show the ads of the top 8 bidders for a search term. So, if you bid for the term "dog training guide", your ad wouldn't be shown if someone typed in "dog house plans", so your ad would be shown to people specifically looking for what you're selling (unlike the magazine or television ad). Furthermore, you wouldn't pay a red cent if the person that was shown the ad didn't click on it. If and when they did click, you'd pay Google whatever your bid price was, as low as a nickel.

Web site owners can reach a huge audience by using Google AdWords, even if their web site doesn't normally place well in the search engine results. That's a benefit to new site developers because it can take months for even the best of sites to start showing up for searches.

In addition, a lot of savvy Internet marketers make a huge income as affiliate marketers, by purchasing Google AdWords ads which send traffic to another merchant. For example, a web hosting company might be paying $80 for a new customer for their web hosting services. If you can find that customer, you get the $80 even though you don't provide the hosting service, you just send the traffic to them and let them make the sale. Some terms (like web hosting) are very competitive, you might have to pay a couple dollars or more for each click you get, but if you can figure out creative techniques to get cheaper clicks, and convert just 2% of the clicks into sales, you can do very well.

Of course there are many terms that can be advertised for as low as a nickel per click.

That's AdWords in a nutshell. If you're interested in learning more, there is a great explanation on the Google pages themselves to give you more information.

If you already knew all of this, or even if you didn't, and you want to learn more about making money with AdWords yourself, with or without your own products, with or without your own web site, you should download and read this interview about 2 AdWords success stories, the interview is called AdWords Success Interviews, just right click on the link to download it to your computer.

Different ways to earn money online

I want to start laying the groundwork for future topics. So far, I feel like I've given a scattered look at different things I'm involved in, and have had trouble focusing on a central theme. There's a reason for that, which I'll probably get more into in a later post.

For now, I don't think I've established the purpose for this blog, and now is a good time to do that, better late than never. The purpose of these "every so often" postings is to give you a feel for the different ways to make money online through your computer. Personally, I have always had a passion for sitting at a keyboard and using a computer to help me do business. I've been doing this for a long time (late 1960's). Of course back then there was no Internet, no personal computer, not even a Microsoft. I wrote computer programs for a living back then. Things sure have changed.

Today, I'd like to list off the top of my head the various ways I feel someone can earn money online. Most of them I've tried, some extensively, some successfully, some not so well. Yet.

OK, here's the list:

1. sell things at auction, such as on eBay. Personally I've been selling on eBay for about 6.5 years, and do it every day. I probably spend a couple hours a day with auction-related tasks, such as new listings, sending emails to auction winners, processing orders, etc. If you want to check us out, our eBay user id is mdmsports, we do well at auctions, I'm pleased to say.

Auctions can be tough work, though. For the most part you're selling merchandise, which has to be procured (how long can you keep on selling stuff out of your attic), photographed, described, packed, and shipped. Many people (over 100,000 I've heard) make a full time living with their eBay business. Not bad, but if you look into the biographies of those people, you'll find many of them work 14 hour days 7 days a week. Not good.

2. sell information products through a web site. Thousands of marketers make a very good living selling downloadable eBooks or downloadable software. The Internet has spawned a very profitable industry. In days of old if you were selling information, you had to print it (in the case of books) or transfer it to a physical medium (for example a software program on a CD), and ship it to the customer. Now you can put a copy of your product on your web site, and direct purchasers to the download URL after they've paid. You don't have to worry about running out of inventory, or having too much.

For example, long ago I wrote a technical book about a software program I used to specialize in. In order to get a good price at the printer, I had to place a minimum order of 1000 copies. It was about a 200 page book, so the price of the printing project, the loose leaf binders into which they were inserted, and the space required to house all those boxes of paper was overwhelming, not to mention expensive. Fortunately over the course of a couple years, almost all of them were sold, but it was quite risky and initially a very expensive investment.

Today, an author can use his or her computer to type up the book, convert it perhaps to PDF, upload it, and sell as many copies as they can. No muss. No fuss. No expense. For the few occasions where a hard copy would be necessary, there are "print on demand" services available that can print as few or as many hard copy volumes as you wish. This technology has enabled anyone to self publish.

3. sell merchandise through a web site. Many businesses have been able to take advantage of the Internet to start a business or expand into new territories, by setting up shop on the world wide web. Opening a traditional store in the past always meant landlords to negotiate with, rent to pay, people to hire, fixtures and furniture to buy, and much more. I know, I had a retail store from 1989 until April 2004. If I had it to do over again, I never would have opened a brick and mortar store, but back in 1989 there was no WWW, not even an eBay.

4. use a web site to market a traditional business of yours (different from selling merchandise on line, in some cases face to face selling is necessary, but the customer can be lured into your store by finding you online). For example, the last time I went looking to purchase an automobile, I took advantage of the web. I looked in the newspaper classified ads, but didn't want to go driving door to door. So I picked out dealers with web sites, gave them a look, got a feel for their service department and inventories, found a local dealer I felt comfortable with, sent them an email, and only after I heard back did I decide to visit the showroom. I let my fingers do the walking, but not through the Yellow Pages, through the Internet. I can guarantee you that the dealer that got my business wouldn't have gotten it if he didn't have a web presence.

5. use a web site to market a traditional business of someone else. Here's where the real Internet opportunity starts to come forth. Untold thousands of people are functioning as outside commissioned sales people for companies of all types and sizes. This is called affiliate marketing, and this is probably the biggest subject area that this blog will cover in the coming weeks and months. Virtually anyone with a computer (though you might need to be of legal age in your state or country), can earn money by helping direct internet traffic to a company that sells a physical product. You don't need to make any investment in inventory, touch the "widget" your customer is buying, or worry about a single thing except cashing the commission check after a sale is made. Almost all affiliate marketers start in their spare time, and those that do what it takes to become successful can often turn a small part time trickle of extra cash into a full time income.

6. use someone else's web site to market a traditional business of someone else. Again an affiliate marketing relationship. But this time, rather than construct a web site of your own and hope that traffic comes to you so that you can redirect it to someone else, you simply place a small and usually inexpensive classified ad on someone else's site. Typically the spot you'll place your ad is on a "pay per click" search engine. For example, Google has a service called AdWords. Advertisers bid anywhere from a nickel up to several dollars for the privilege of having their little 3 line ad shown on the search results page whenever an Internet searcher types in a specific search query. If the searcher is interested enough in the ad to click on it, Google charges the advertiser the nickel (or more), and sends the searcher to the web site that the ad specifies. Using this technique, you can spend a nickel to send someone you know is interested in your, or your affiliate partner's, web site. If a purchase is made you earn a commission, without ever knowing who the customer was. All you know is it was someone looking for the "widget" you advertised.

Of course there are other ways to earn income online, in conjunction with the things we've already mentioned. For example you can set up a web site for a popular subject that you're familiar with, over time build up a loyal following, and when you have a good amount of visitors every day you can sell advertising on your pages. The possibilities are astronomical and almost endless.

Anyway, that's the groundwork I wanted to lay here today. We'll get into a couple of these topics very deeply in the weeks and months ahead of us. I hope you stay tuned.

Until next time, I wish you nothing but the best.

Focusing on AdWords for a while

I mentioned the other day that I picked up a great eBook, called Google AdWords 123, and was in the process of following the steps that the author said would guarantee profits. Then I got sidetracked because while I was scouring Clickbank for a good item to sell, I happened onto the book about RSS. I focused on that project for most of last week, and yesterday, but now I feel pretty good about what happened. I have feeds on two of my sites, have submitted to a couple dozen RSS search engines, and am getting improved traffic on those sites already. That's a good thing.

But now I need to focus on finding Clickbank products with which to make steady profits that I can put on autopilot. I started my first campaign yesterday for the type of product recommended by the eBook (and others), and didn't do a terribly good job of listing it with Google. I know better than to do it the way I did, but I just wanted to get it off the ground.

You would think that when you only have a 25-character title and 2 35-character description lines to work with, how tough could it be, right? Wrong. Several great courses have been written about the art of becoming successful with Google AdWords. Many have built monthly incomes in the range of $10,000 a month or more. And many more have failed miserably. I plan on not failing miserably.

I subscribe to the theory that it's better on a project like this to "just do it", in other words get started rather than wait until I've achieved perfection. It's easier to improve something that isn't working perfectly than it is to get it perfect to begin with. Of course if I were manufacturing parachutes, that might be a different matter entirely.

Anyway, yesterday I slapped a campaign together, and today I'm working on pulling off parts of that campaign, pasting it into a different ad group with different ads, with different bids. Bit by bit I'll tweak it until I figure which parts are working profitably, so that I can work on improving or deleting the non-performers. I'll let you know what happens soon.

A plucky day, I found a new RSS reader

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been studying and reading all I can about RSS and feeds and blogs. I mentioned yesterday that I expect the major browsers to provide support for RSS feeds and the XML language that creates them someday soon.

Today I found a site that provides a free tool that gives an Internet Explorer add-on that enables you to read your favorite feeds directly through your browser. It's called Pluck, and it looks like it gives a lot more than RSS feed reader capability, it enables you to search several sites including Google, Amazon, and eBay right from your tool bar, for example.

If you want to try out Pluck, just click on the name.

UPDATE (Important)! After using Pluck for just a couple hours, I had to uninstall it, it was slowing my computer to a crawl. Unfortunate, because it had some nice features, but I couldn't tolerate the slow access times to other web pages. Your experience may vary, but since the Pluck software is fairly new, I'll wait a bit to see if I get reports that it's improved the performance. I can't personally recommend it at this time.