Internet Marketing or Not?

Is Traffic Python the real deal?

2009-10-07T11:01:00.002+10:30

G'Day Folks, I've been rushing around all over the internet in my usual un-focussed way spinning my wheels and making little progress.

I gotta stop that.

I still haven't made a sale via the 30 day challenge site but that might be due to the keywords I chose. I found an additional function in Marketing Samuarai which shows the MSN Commercial Intent thingy. While I'm not a huge fan of this tool as I pointed out on someones blog due to the sometimes quite flakey results it did show that the keywords I had targeted were very low in OCI.

As a result of this I have set up another test blog on a different keyword that shows a higher OCI. I didn't do it quite as thoroughly as the first one and I used a Blogger blog to host the site which limits some of the things I can do with it but it is at #34 and rising.

In the hunt for places to park a backlink I came across Traffic Python and joined as the promo is pretty good.

Having joined though I am wondering if the hype doesn't match the reality or if I just found it early. After checking with Alexa to see how long this has been around I can see that its only 6 months old so perhaps it need to age a bit. Anyway, the concept is good. I think it will only last for a couple of years at best, a bit like banners. When the general public have seen them a lot they'll stop clicking on them.

When was the last time you clicked a banner? However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't check it out and decide if it might help you get some traffic. You shouldn't ignore something because it might have a short lifetime, get in do it but don't make it your only source of traffic.

I found some rules for internet marketing that I think are worth sharing.

Post pages, get backlinks.

Google rewards persistence.

Test and Track.

If you have an under performing site and you can't make it go, sell it - and then monitor it so you can see what the buyer does with it, you might learn something.

Do you have any others to add?

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Damn, that was fast.

2009-08-19T23:23:00.003+09:30

Now hear this. Go do the 30 day challenge, it just might change the way you approach internet marketing.

Here is my experience so far. I registered the domain name, set up the site, added the first post and played with a tool called traffic bug, also a 30 day free trial through the 30 day challenge.

The next day I wrote a properly SEO post and added it to the blog, put a link to the site in the previous post. I also set up Google analytics and created an ad.

The next day I wrote another article and submitted it to Ezine Articles and another the next day which I submitted to Scribd. Before the Scribd article was online this site was in the Google cache and was at #3 for phrase match search on the keywords.

Today, after submitting the Scribd article I checked again and, for phrase match, my site is #1. So that's from new to #1 in 3 days. Now it will drop out again, probably, but I will keep adding articles and links so I expect it will come back in a week or so and be rock solid at #1.

The 30 day challenge, Market Samurai and traffic bug work folks. I haven't made any sales yet but my first natural search visitor clicked through on the ad so that's a 100% CTR at this stage. Let's see how the conversions go. I am expecting a high conversion rate because it is a low cost, high demand product.

So the site again is on sea fishing lures and you can check it out via that shameless plug. Then go check the 30 day challenge. I'll post when I make a dollar or atleast keep you updated on the progress of the site.

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This is definitely worth doing.

2009-08-17T13:20:00.003+09:30

I found this site a while back but didn't pay a lot of attention to it because I am totally fed up with the never ending BS of people trying to sell "How to make it big on the Internet" type crap. You know the stuff, you proabably are getting an inbox full of join our training program/membership site/blah blah blah and it'll only cost you $27/$97/$2,500 per month/per session. take our knowlege and make $37,456 in your first week, see how this plumber/deaf dumb unemployed surf bum/12 year old girl did it and you can do it too.

Some of these probably are good and maybe even worth the money but mostly they are just as big a scam as the Vanuity rubbish. Most of these people, even if they have made money online, really have no idea how they did it. It was mostly just dumb luck.

The 30 day challeng is very very different. For a start, it's all free. Even the programs that they suggets you use are free for at least the 30 days of the challenge. They also have produced a massive amount of training in both pdf and video format, there is an active forum and the moderators are also active on teh forum. They'll often get back to you within 12 hours of your question.

I must confess that I didn't pay much attention to this until about day 8 of the training when I came back to the site looking to see where they were up to and discovered what is possibly the best research tool available. It saves week and weeks of work.

If you join the 30 day challenge you will get a 40 day trial of this tool. What's it called? Market Samurai. An it'll help you find niches ripe for the plucking.

For example, anyone who has done any market research in the fishing market would realise that this is a huge market but also has massive competition. Without being able to to extensive research into the market you wouldn't find the micro-niche that I have found and set up a site to test.

Have a look at sea fishing lures, this is my newest site, currently has only one holding post but this will change over the next week. Yeah I know, don't show anyone your niche but you have to build links to the site at some stage. When you do you are showing your site to others. So what? The way I figure it there is plenty of traffic and markets on teh internet for everyone. If you only ever attempt to steal other peoples work then you will always be destined to be second best. Learn the methods and then implement them for your own benefit.

Go do the 30 day challenge, you just might learn something useful.

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Here's one of the good guys.

2009-08-01T22:21:00.004+09:30

I remember reading in one of Chris 'Affiliate Project X' McNeeneys' ebooks or emails, I don't remember which, about an affiliate of his who was kicking ass in sales. That affiliates name is Andre Chaperon.

Today I found Andre Chaperon's website Affiliate Bully. Now before you all head over there I am going to give you a couple of links to something very special that Andre has done.

I'd like to tell you a bit about this first. Andre's page is about a number of tools which will help you create profitable adwords campaigns. Once they are profitable you can then leverage them into MSN and Yahoo campaigns and begin working on organic traffic etc.

The thing is, Andre really does have good information and brilliant tools but there is something very special which I am giving you links to, he has given two complete step by step ways to make money with free tools, Clickbank and Adwords. He shows how to pick good keywords, how to choose the product, how to set up the campaign, how to track your ROI and how to make your campaigns profitable. All for free, not even an email address as cost. And this is seriously good stuff. You could just visit his site, plug these two links into your favorites and visit regularly until you are making money.

OK, OK, the links are Affiliate Bully Reloaded and Clickbank Case Study and do your self a favor. Visit Andre, read the case study, follow the steps and finally make some money.

I have already set up one campaign using this information, I don't have the split testing set up yet but will manage that very soon, like today. I have tracking set up.

OK, I'm still using free tools for that. I use Google Analytics for lots of tracking, even on this blog and I am very pleased with the results. I am going to set up the split testing using Google website optimisation. I haven't used that yet so this is a good time to try it out. Seriously, check out this site and get stuck in this is one of those really good deals where you can make money with your internet marketing.

Those links again are Affiliate Bully Reloaded and Clickbank Case Study

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You Won't Believe What I Was Given and Now It's Yours

2009-07-26T22:10:00.002+09:30

What if I did you a favor, something big, something powerful and
proven to help you grow your business which you would usually have
to pay for and instead of paying for it, you simply pay it forward
to 3 more people as full 'payment'.

You may think there's a catch.

No, there isn't. World class copywriter, Trevor Crook gave me his
10 hours of Copywriting Blueprint audios, his proven blueprint for
creating compelling sales copy and letters which he usually sells
for $197.

Trevor gave it to me as a favor because he has started a
revolution to help one million entrepreneurs in the next 30 days
and you and get a brilliant gift to help you get more sales plus
you can help change history at the same time.

You do not have to buy anything. There's no gimmicks.

Too may people want to 'take' in today's world instead of giving
and this is a recipe for a complete disaster.

When you understand the 'Laws of Reciprocation' like I do, you will
understand how much your life will change when you give freely
of yourself without any thoughts of getting anything back in return.

Trevor has explained this in more detail and you can find out for
yourself and get Trevor's favor to you. Go to:

Pay it Forward

Warmly

Brent

PS. When I first read Trevor's letter, I thought he was insane so I
would take him up on his offer to give you his copywriting blueprint
right now before he changes his mind.

Go to:

Pay it Forward

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Can being open be a danger?

2009-07-07T10:19:00.003+09:30

I was just reading a blog post about the convergence of blog software and social networking at ReadWriteWeb and, while I like the idea, am concerned about the personal security ramifications.

I know that we are all nice people who wouldn't take advantage of the fact that I can quickly and easily find where you live, can see when you are away from home, I have your telephone or cell number and can call you the check that you are away from home (or at home, depending on my motivation) but there are people on the internet who are not as nice as you or I.

I understand that, when it comes to doing business online, you want to know that I am a real person with a real address and a real telephone number to call. I have reservations about giving all that information 100% correctly so what I usually do is give a slightly generic address. It's still accurate but won't allow anyone to just arrive unexpectedly.

There are other issues quite apart from personal security.

What about the careless, thoughtless or inappropriate post? We all say and do stupid things sometimes. We are all blond for 5 minutes each day, don't exceed your limit (with apoligies to the blonds). With the internet any stupid mistake can live forever. This can come back to haunt you when, in a job interview, your prospective new employer asks about your thoughts on green house gasses or other ethnic groups?

Perhaps you had a bad day at work and you posted some comment about the boss doing something dumb, dodgy or illegal? Or you happen to mention that you think a fellow employee is cute, stupid, thick, good in bed. How's your job going to last and how do you think you'll get another?

The risks are huge, there is nothing private on the internet. Always post as if you are in a huge room with 30 million other people, some of whome are listening and reading but you don't know which ones.

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Making Money on the Internet

2009-06-29T21:30:00.003+09:30

I was doing some keyword research, something we should all do on a regular basis, checking what comes up in the search results.

I came across a nice post which referenced this site ShoeMoney as the best source for making money online information. Unfortunately for me I spent way too long reading. Jeremy, great site but I really need to be doing my own stuff OK? I'll be back but not tonight.

The site that directed me to Jeremy's site was this one link and there are some excellent ideas here.

A word of caution, you will never make any money online or off if you are not focussed. Here is another internet marketing secret, pick one market and work it until it makes money. If you keep chopping and changing chasing the fast easy money you will almost always fail.

If you manage to make any money with this it will be purely because you fluked it and you'll be almost certainly unable to repeat it, certainly not deliberately.

As far as I am able to identify most of the so called gurus are in this position, they fluked something that worked but they still don't know how or why.

I remember one guru that I actually paid to teach me how to make money online who didn't even complete the course of instruction and disappeared with my money. He called himself Mr. X, should have been enough warning for me but he came with a recommendation from The Internet Marketing Summit.

He fell into a system that made money for him but he was just lucky and was unable to repeat the same success with his next attempts so he tried to teach others but was unable to do that because he had no idea what he was doing.

Disclaimer: I am not a guru, I write about what I am learning, not all of it works consistently even for me. I think I'm getting closer though.

OK, here's a couple of other links for you. How to find extra money in your current finances. How to Generate Emergency Cash from the internet.

Keep at it folks, more coming.

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Internet Marketing and Making Money are not the same thing.

2009-06-28T12:14:00.005+09:30

I don't know how many people are actively involved in internet marketing but I suspect that there are 100,000s who are active with possibly millions who have dabbled or not even got started yet but who would like to have the steady passive income that seems to be available.

I don't usually read other peoples blogs because they interfere with my online activities. If you spend all your time online reading emails and blogs you won't ever get anything done.

My advice to you would be to do the activities that will make you money first, then read the emails and blogs.

So what makes up the activities which make you money? Really only a few things, keyword research, get content, get links. If you do that you will make money. One other thing that will help. If you have one site which makes $5 per week you might think that you have failed. Not true, you have a successful site - now make another 1,000 sites like that and you'll be making $5,000 per week

I found this excellent blog post that you should read. 102 ways to get backlinks will open in a new window. Why read this, simple really if you don't get links to your site you won't get any traffic and I can prove that see this post and understand that the single most important thing you can do for your online marketing efforts is to generate backlinks to your site and to the pages within your site.

After years of following the "avoid the Google slap" and "how to trick Google" idiots I realised that Google actually loves you and wants you to make money. Not only that but they provide, free of charge, all the tools and information you need to find profitable markets and how to target them. They also provide you with the content that they like that you can use.

You don't need to buy tools, you don't need to buy traffic, you don't need to pay for hosting, you don't need to know how to build a website or any of that stuff. You probably will want to learn some of that later and you will want to have your own hosted websites later so you can sell them but you don't need any of that to get started.

Learn to find good markets, find out what keywords will bring the right type of traffic, write content similar to the pages listed high in Google for your keywords and get links.

Too hard? Then go do something else because this is the easiest and cheapest business model you'll find anywhere on the internet or off.

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Another interesting email from Google

2009-06-23T19:26:00.003+09:30

I had an email from Blogger telling me that their auto anti spam software had identified my latest blog as a spam blog.

They didn't tell me what they found to determine that but they did say that I should log in and fill in their capture stuff to prove I'm human. I would like to know what triggered the email so I don't do it again.

Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not complaining. I am quite happy that they are actively working on stopping the spam blogs and the auto blogging idiots.

I am confident that after they review my blog they'll accept that it isn't spam, it's just formatted differently to most. You can have a look at it here on my blog about beef jerky recipes, you'll have to click the link called continue because of the current block but you can get through and see the blog.

The difference is that, since I am aware that most visitors to any website don't scroll down the page at all, on this blog I am experimenting with putting the ad block above the fold. Does this make it a spam blog? I don't know but according to the rules of blogger I don't think so. The way I read it indicates that the main characteristic of a spam blog is lots of links and very little content. Because of the ad block there are lots of links at the top of the blog but there are full articles (200+ words) below the fold which are on topic and not keyword stuffed.

According to the Amazon ad block there are 18 links back to Amazon in that ad block so that is probably what triggered the problem. It'll be interesting to find out what the ruling is.

I'm off to make more backlinks to my sites. Seriously, this is probably the absolute best thing you can do to generate traffic. I saw a site today which has a #1 position in Google SERP for a very competitive key phrase which only has 16 links according to Alexa and the keyword phrase isn't even in the domain name.

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How not to get Traffic.

2009-06-20T19:11:00.008+09:30

One of the problems of being as unfocussed as I have been in my attempts to create an income online is that I sometimes forget to do certain things that are crucial to gaining the required traffic.

One unforseen benefit of this though is that I have a number of websites and domains around which I continue to pay the fees on and now are aged domains, if that is a benefit.

I was working on a website that I have held since early 2007 and generates small but regular adsense income. The reason I was there is that I am setting up a new project and was looking to generate some backlinks for it. I wanted to write a couple of articles to plug links to the new project.

When I was there I thought I might check the stats on the other subdomains and discovered this.

The url is blocked out to protect the innocent. What this shows, for those of you who don't read their stats, is that the day I set the page up I triggered 8 hits. No-one has seen the site since 11th July 2008. Absolutely no traffic which shows exactly why you MUST HAVE LINKS TO YOUR SITES if you want any traffic.

On this domain I have several other sub-domains which have links and the total traffic to all the sub-domains and the main domain is around 10,000 hits per month.

So folks, traffic tip #2, create at least one link to your page or no-one will ever find it.

Remember traffic tip #1? Adwords links do not create backlinks or search engine rankings on their own.

In the interests of creating a link to my new properties, which actually already have links 'cause they're in the menu, this is the page I was building recipes for Beef Jerky and this is what is called a contextual link.

Apparently the search engine robots like these because they are part of the content of the page. This link would carry more weight if the content was also about beef jerky or recipes but it isn't. The bots will follow the link though and find the new page.

Because there is a menu structure on the site the bots will also find all the other pages but not the sub-domains if there are no links to them, as you can clearly see from the graph above.

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How to make Money on the Internet.

2009-06-03T12:33:00.005+09:30

I am still learning this stuff after all these years but I am beginning to have some understanding of what is actually required.

For example, despite the claims of companies like Omni Business Solutions and other thinly disguised scams, you don't need to spend large amounts of money to make money.

You may need to spend some but in general you can begin to make some cash before you have to re-invest some of that back to leverage your income to greater heights.

You will need a website but these are available for free, click on this link car auctions above to see one I made last night for no cost to me at all.

Now I need to do more work here but that is a good start. As you can see I have set this up as an affiliate site which means that I don't have any product creation costs or any customer issues. It is also a slightly modified Blogger blog and you can get the information on how to set these up at this site.

So what do you really need to make money? You need a group of people who want to buy something, you need to be able to supply that something and then you need to be able to let that group know how to find your something.

Seriously, that doesn't look too hard does it? And it isn't. What goes wrong then? How come so few people are making any money online? After a couple of years of only making a dribble of income I think I can give you a few clues.

I fell for the line that it was hard work, I fell for the line that I needed to buy that latest wizz-bang product, I fell for the Vanuity/Omni Biz solutions BS but more importantly I didn't used that neck-top computer and actually look at what was really required. In short, I over analysed all the information I was fed and failed to see the truth.

The unvarnished truth is what I wrote just above, you need potential customers, you need a product and you need targetted traffic.

The Devil, as they say, is in the details. In this case the details are also simple. You really need to get the book from Geoff Shaw, this is the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to profit I know. I have been using these methods for a little over 4 months now and I am totally impressed. I have taken a blog from almost no traffic (around 20 visits per month) to significant traffic (around 20,000 visits per month) and another from 5 per month (on a good month) to 80,000 per month in the same time frame. Geoff explains it simply, with examples, in his book Get Google Smart.

What you'll discover is that getting traffic and backlinks are so simple and easy that you'll have ample time on your hands for surfing the net, chatting in forums and still make money. Geoff shows you what he is doing right now to create a new $200,000 per year income, no sneaky hidden tricks or getting all his 'Guru" buddies to promote stuff for him. Actually I'm not sure he even has any 'Guru' buddies.

Adding a bit more detail, do keyword research to find out what people are looking for - Google can help you here for free, find a product which satisfys those people, try Clickbank, PayDotCom, CPA offers etc., set up a free landing page, use a free Blooger blog, send visitors, Google can help you here as well and I'm not talking Adwords.

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Looking backwards can be instructional.

2009-05-20T14:07:00.003+09:30

I have a website which has been online since 2000, right now I can't remember exactly when I started it but that isn't relevant to this post.

On that site there is a page of links to various affiliate sites and programs. Since then only one of those has closed down and the link no longer works (well I changed it actually but you get my drift).

Keeping that in mind, go have a look through your collection of ebooks in your digital library, blow the cyber dust off and search them for links. Follow those links to find out how many of those "must have tools, memberships etc." still work.

I have found that most of them no longer work. Those that do often point to pages which are not relevant or have been taken over by those junk parked domain sites where every link is adsense or similar.

Incidentally, I never click on those links and have been considering that I really should report them to Google as they just clutter up their results pages with internet plaque.

The interesting thing about these links is that you probably paid good money for the ebook or gave away your email address for them and they cannot even be bothered keeping the links live. In some cases it is because the links were to affiliate pages which no longer exist and it is impossible to recall all the ebooks to update the links. In others it is simple because the owner of the domain didn't make enough money to even pay their hosting fees.

Remember when the big buzz was to write an ebook, plug in your links and give it away so it'll go viral and you'll get 1,000s of visitors for free? I probably have 100s of these type of ebook. Mostly the content is crap, rehashed or just plain wrong and, of course, the links don't work.

So what can you do in your ebooks to prevent this happening? Ultimately you must control your links, all of them. It's smart business to do that in any case because you can make sure that all your links point to the same site and funnel the link juice into one place rather than scattering it or boosting the sales page of someone else.

So here's a plan or two. Create a blogger blog, create a review post for whatever product you're promoting with a link to the sales page, a email sign-up form, an image of the product and nothing else. Set your blogger site to only show one post per page and use the link to the post in your report, ebook, forum posts etc.

If/when the product stops being available you can either produce your own or change the review to recommend a different product and change the links from your page.

That's plan one, plan two is to register a domain with a nice generic name and build nice redirect php pages with your main keyword as the page name. Like this http://mygenericdomain.com/left_handed_widget.php the redirect can be either an immediate redirect or, and better, a landing page with product review, sales page, contact details collection etc and a link to the actual sales page.

By doing this for every product of yours or that you are promoting you'll never lose the value of the work you do to promote. Realistically you should collect details from all your visitors, you can't do that but you should try. The main focus of your marketing should be to build a list, not sell a product. It's much easier to sell a product to your list than it is to keep finding more new custoemrs to sell a product to.

I have a new blog running at wealth management tips which I have recently put an email collection form on. It's a really crappy form and the offer is rubbish. I am not happy with the autoresponder that I am using there and went looking for a better one.

I just couldn't find a good one which allowed me to do what I want an autoresponder to do. Even the free ones have limits on subscribers, number of emails in a sequence, or won't do both sequential emails and broadcast emails to the subscribers. The paid ones also have limits and then want more money. I just wasn't happy with the functions and capabilities of the paid or free ones available so. Yep, guessed it, I am writing one. Beta testing of the basic functionality will begin soon. I'll post again when I have something online for viewing and, yes, it will be linkware. Free in exchange for a link to the site.

Proposed functionality:
unlimited subscribers
unlimited sequential emails
unlimited broadcast emails
double optin with logging
genuine email checker (no junk emails blocking up your list)
customise the form
short url links
form view tracking
subscription click tracking
email delivery tracking
email open tracking
link click tracking
customer editable profile page

and there are a couple of other goodies which I am not yet prepared to disclose.

There are some bits which aren't strictly autoresponder functionality but will be useful to marketers. Build landing pages, track product downloads etc.

More later, it isn't completed yet but is getting close.

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The Australian Budget Speech.

2009-05-12T19:38:00.004+09:30

I promise I won't do this very often but I am just too angry to ignore this.

That pompous little peon, once described as a Rooster, is railing against the Opposition and big noting himself and his party as the responsible financial managers when they have taken an economy and budget which was in surplus and debt free to a massive 4% of GDP deficit and a $200 billion debt in the space of only 18 months.

How irresponsible. Look at it this way. If you knew that your were facing a significant drop in income, would you go out and borrow more than your income and give it away to charity? No you wouldn't.

Any sane, sensible person would, if they really wanted to help those less fortunate, work out a way to get some work done and provide a paid position for those who needed it. This relates to governents doing infrastructure projects which create jobs, employment and develops skills.

Not his mob, just give away cash.

Enough.

On a lighter note and a source of some amusement here, our smallest dog was heard growling at something. Investigation revealed that she was growling at the Honourable Wayne Swan, Australian Treasurer giving his budget speech.

We laughed, she normally doesn't pay any attention to the TV at all, not even Inspector Rex. She is more discerning than we originally thought.

For more positive information about your finances get rid of your debt and learn to create wealth.

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I looked at my stats. What I saw was amazing.

2009-04-17T13:12:00.003+09:30

This is my "Authority Site' (more on this later), the url is http://www.wealth-management-tips.com and has been online but doing nothing for about a year. I set this up after purchasing the course from a well known blogging master and followed the instructions but didn't get the traffic I expected. I did get volume but it was all rubbish, high bounce rate and no link clicking.

I found, or was sent, a link to another site as happens and yet again bought the product on offer Get Google Smart.

Once I read this ebook though I got really interested. I converted the above site to conform with the suggestions and put the suggestions into action. See, that's the difference between me and a lot of other marketers, I actually do try the products and suggestions, most just hope that by having the information on their computer that somehow they'll magically do the work for them. Sorry folks, can't and won't happen.

Back to the main thrust. Adding content to this site is done in three ways, all absolutely easy and takes almost no time to do. I am, at best, an intermittent marketer. I prefer to spend my time writing software tools for my use, see last post for my current project. I hadn't checked the traffic stats on the http://www.wealth-management-tips.com blog for a couple of weeks but I did last night just before shutting down my computer for the night.

What I saw was simply amazing. 10,000 pageviews in a single month, over 400 unique visitors about half are rss feeds, the search engines are falling over themselves to catalogue the site (there are currently over 2,500 posts of which I wrote perhaps 20).

I looked at the visitors from search engines and discovered that most of them came from search terms I didn't use but I was on the first page of results for. The main site keywords Wealth Management Tips not in quotes in the USA results I am on page 1 of Google. This site is growing on it's own, it's posting content that is unique, some that is duplicate but is all related to the overall theme of the site. I have a bit more work to do to be able to convert this growing traffic to income but I am now totally confident that this method works and is highly unlikely to be "Google Slapped" because it is delivering exactly what Google wants, regular updates, relevant content, not keyword stuffed, not overtly commercial.

That link again for you Get Google Smart please, if you want to make money online, go get his book. It will transform your attitude to marketing and your ability to make money online. If you don't stiff me on the commission and let me know your receipt number I'll give you a copy of my Google Search tool.

It's worth having, I use it almost every day rather than the Google search page because it puts all the advanced search functions, and a some you can't get access to easily, at your finger tips. No, it's not currently for sale, no it's not currently available anywhere except by asking me. Yes I am planning on selling it, later.

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Another New Project

2009-04-15T12:58:00.004+09:30

While setting up my Wealth Management Tips site as an Authority Site (more on this later) I needed an autoresponder with some useful features. What I need it to do is send a series of emails to the subscriber as a double opt-in and allow me to also send the occasional braodcast email to all subscribers.

I have access to a couple of autoresponders which will send an initial email for confirmation - double opt-in - and then allow me to send broadcast emails to all subscribers. I can't use those to send an email course. I have an autoresponder program which will allow me to set up an email course but can't send a broadcast email to all subscribers and it isn't double opt-in.

I searched online and it is possible to combine both in a paid service but there are limits to the number of subscribers and/or emails before you start paying more per month. There was no free service or software that could do both that I found.

So, I'm writing one. I did think about out-sourcing it but decided that I could buy the service for the cost of getting one written. In any case, I want to be able to give this software away not sell it. There is one feature that I came up with which I probably will sell as an add-on module to the free package because not everyone will want it. And I won't be saying more about this yet because it'll be a bloody good tool for marketers and I don't want any competition until I have it available.

One other feature that I want to add which is also not available on anything else but will be copied rapidly is the ability for your subscribers to modify their subscriptions, not just un-subscribe. What I have in mind is the ability to stop, pause, re-start, re-start from part way through a mailing, change to other subscriptions, change the email address they are getting their emails to all from one simple page.

Once you add to that the ability to track delivery, clicks on the links in your emails and sales from sent emails then you'll have a marketing tool to behold. The addition of the extra, as yet un-announced function should make this and absolute must have tool.

There is one fly in the ointment, usually is isn't there, I have some concerns about the ISPs and/or web hosts allowing the sending of the emails. Some of them are quite @#$%^&*( (I don't have a good, polite word for this) about bulk emailing. Aparently it's all spam. Not true of course so I might have to do some research and find a couple of good ones to host the software. Something to be solved later.

For now, if you would like to be a beta tester, let me know. There's nothing available yet but will be soon, i.e. weeks not months.

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Experimenting with traffic generation.

2009-03-04T12:13:00.003+10:30

Another of my intermittent posts.

I have been experimenting with some different traffic generation methods and using Google analytics to see what is going on.

I have had some form of Google analytics on one or more of my websites for some time but hadn't explored the brilliance of this product. I read in, yet another ebook I bought recently, that stated that Google actually wants to help you.

I hadn't thought about it but that is actually correct. The various Google slaps have not been about stopping you making money, they have been about stopping those who don't deserve it making money.

What I mean by that is there are a number of marketers who work very hard to fool the search engines into indexing what is in effect crap or no content but which has a high "relevancy" for the keywords used. I put the word relevancy in quotes because the content isn't relevant it is just keyword stuffed.

Here is the type of content that is used

This business article is about your business.
Any business but particularly small businesses or new businesses must have
a business plan. A business without a business plan is doomed to fail.
These days any business should conside building an internet business as well as
their normal business. The advantage of an internet business is it can be
a home business where you do most of your business at home on the
internet. There are many advantages to a home based business...

as you can clearly see, while this almost reads sensibly, it is massively keyword stuffed. It doesn't provide any useful content but would, once upon a time, have ranked very well on the result pages for business. These days it may rank well for a while but would soon be deleted from the rankings and rightly so.

This is typical of the generated content that many people are attempting to use to build massive adsense sites, actually it is better than most because I have trouble writing completely nonsensical content but the Markov engines don't.

Of course, you the visitor won't see this content at all it's only for the search engines, you'll be redirected to a completely different site which may, or may not, be relevant to the keywords you used. This is where you find you have landed on a parked domain with a page of just links, no content at all and even the links are generated by the keywords you searched on.

The internet is filling up with garbage and the search engines don't like it because it drives people away. Did you know it is possible to generate a multi-thousand page website in a matter of minutes? From registering a domain name, setting up a host, putting your website online, getting indexed and traffic which makes money can take a matter of hours only.

The sites get dumped in weeks but the perpetrators of this rubbish make 100s of these sites a month and massive amounts of money. They work so hard to produce nothing that they could spend the same amount of time working within what the search engines want and actually make more money without having to keep on repeating what they are doing. Unfortunately for this business model the search engines are getting much better at detecting them and shutting them down faster.

I diverge from the reason for this post. I have been using a method of content generation which is quick, guaranteed to be what the search engines want, unique, keyword focussed and can generate quality backlinks.

I set up a blogger site to play with this, I did stuff the title with keywords a bit and it has been online for about a week. But, it is getting organic traffic (about 10 uniques per day) and growing. This is the link to Making money on the Internet with Google how's that for keyword stuffing legitimately?

Have a look at it and tell me what you think, I don't care about the appearance of the site at the moment so don't comment on that bit, just tell me what you think of the content. Does it look like it would provide some value to the visitor or not?

Time to stop and wait for some comments.

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Unsecured Loans or Payday Loans are getting more popular but they are dangerous.

2009-02-24T12:28:00.008+10:30

unsecured loans: Ohio HB 545 Can't Kill Payday Loans: They Live!
Personal Money Store Financial News Blog - Spokane,WA,USA
It capped annual interest rates at 28 percent for the high risk, unsecured loans, which is not a workable profit model. It isn't oblivion, but it's close. ...

unsecured loans: Short Term Loans for Unemployed:
Assisting in Removal of Fiscal ...
Search By Headlines (press release) - Reno,NV,USA
Mind it that you have to keep valuable assets in order to
avail the secured short term loans. On the other hand, unsecured loans are helpful to recuperate ...

As you can see from the above entries unsecured loans are easy to get and they are offered as either ubsecured or payday loans all over the internet.

If you think that you really need to get one of these type of laons there is a very good chance that you acnnot afford to go down that path at all. The interest rates on the unsecured or payday loan is so high that if you default or can't pay your payday loan it can quickly blow out to a massive problem.

As far as I can tell, the only reason to take out an unsecured loan or a payday loan is if you don't have any debt currently but need just a little bit more money/cash than you currently have on hand. If you need a payday loan to cove an existing debt then you are begging for trouble.

For help eliminating yor debts you need to visit the debt relief section of this web site.

A little light relief.

2008-11-24T10:15:00.002+10:30

G'Day folks, just solved an interesting puzzle.

I was sent an email today with a password protected spreadsheet attached which I will upload here tonight.

There are a number of clues to work out the numerical password. Once you have worked out the password you can unlock the spreadsheet and add your name to the list of people who have worked it out.

I found a couple of people in there I know which is interesting. There must be several hundred copies of this floating about the internet by now so I have put a link to this post in the spreadsheet as well for the solvers to add a comment, if they wish.

I think the progress of the spreadsheet from me should be most interesting. Anyway, good luck with the puzzle if you downloaded it from here and welcome to the ranks of the solvers if you got here from the spreadsheet.

By the way, I know how easy it is to crack password protection in excel as there is really no protection at all. So don't, OK, just solve it properly.

Cheers

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Hey, I got Analytics working properly...

2008-11-16T22:26:00.002+10:30

And I can now see that I really do have some visitors here. Welcome.

That seems really weird actually, saying welcome to visitors after all the previous posts when I thought I was talking to myself. It now confers some responsibility to me to actually say things that might be useful, damn, talk about painting yourself into a corner.

Revisiting a previous post about an inter net marketer who shall continue to remain nameless and a dodgy redirection stunt he was playing, he now has one of those crappy fake 'live operator' scripts running which offers a discount but not for the affiliate.

I have actually had a gutfull of the stunts so here is the good news. Stuff them, if you really want to buy a product and you can find it in Clickbank then create your own link and buy through that. Check out the discount by moving your mouse outside the page, like you were going to close the window (this triggers the script) but make sure that when you land on the sales page that your affiliate name is on the bottom of the page so you get the rebate.

These days I only buy through someone else's link if I think thay have actually provided some value or that have a bonus I want. I have no desire to reward people who I think are just "flogging" products.

You can be confident that the owner of the product still makes their normal cut and are happy with that, it is only the crooked affiliates who get done, and they deserve it.

Keep up the good work, there has to be money out there somewhere.

In closing, well it just occurred to me that you might be interested, I have found that there are many of the Gurus who don't tell you the whole truth about how they generate their traffic. I found a forum, where there are some intersting names, that deals exclusively in what some would call black hat marketing.

I don't call it that, it is all marketing. Search engines may not like some of the methods used but since they continually manipulate the results to suit themselves, I don't have any problem in playing their games back. Apparently, neither do some quite big names. I won't name them because many of the others may be doing similar things and, unless you name them all, naming some wouldn't be fair.

That probably came as a surprise to you but it's true, they don't always tell you the truth.

The other thing that you'll probably be intersted in is that the only way to make money online is to provide a wanted product or service to a constant stream of targeted visitors.

There are some bits that make a difference to the conversion rates but that is pretty much it. I plan to expand on that after I have reviewed everthing else I have written here so I can at least have some semblance of continuity and credibility.

Cheers for now.

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And yet another call...OmniBiz|Vanuity|Education Sales and Marketing, all Scammers

2008-11-08T09:48:00.005+10:30

I didn't post it here but the week before last I had another call from Joe Sever, again in the morning before work and I told him about being blacklisted and asked why he called me.

He than claimed that he hadn't called am and that another comapny was using his name and that he was now very angry.

I must be all kinds of sucker because I sort of believed him. I asked him to email me so I could email him the contract that I had originally signed with Vanuity.

Thinking about it later I realised that he was BSing me and that I wouldn't be getting either a call from him on Saturday or an email.

I wasn't proved wrong this time. He didn't email or call.

This morning I had a call from someone else who claimed to be working with Google Snatch. He also dropped Joe Sever's name into the introduction.

Now I have had a fairly tough week and was in no mood to put up with another bloody salesman type so I was very short with him. I asked him who he worked for and he told me Google Snatch, I said he didn't and asked again who he worked for.

Finally he told me that it was Education Sales and Marketing - the crooks.

I then informed him that I had been put on their blacklist and they were not to call me. He asked why and I told him they were crooks and that I wanted nothing to do with them.

Typical salesman, he tried to argue the position and said that I had signed up for their program by buying a book online. Watch out for this ploy, they have all tried to use the "but you asked for this" line. Not true, buying a product online is not an invitation to be upsold by a scammer.

Do this from now on. Use any sequence of numbers which comply with the phone number pattern ie 1234 1224 rather than your phone number. Leave out part of your address so you can't be tracked. Unless you are having a physical product shipped to you they do not need that information and have no right to it.

They also all work on the "but I thought you wanted to make money online" routine. My answer to that today was "Yes I do, but not with you".

Ultimately today I got rid of him by telling him that I had had a tough week and that I had no interest in being harrassed by him. This is actually true, this has been the toughest week of my life and I really wasn't in the mood to play games with them. Otherwise I might have kept him on the line for sometime and got through to the supervisor again so I could get him p#$%^&d off with me a second time.

With luck they'll never call me again. If not I think I'll have a recording device available and post the audio here for fun.

Short post today, I'll conclude with a warning. Do not put your phone number on any form unless you really have to, do not put your full or accurate address on any form unless you have to, do not bother to talk with anyone who calls you and offers to mentor or coach you to make money online unless you personally know them.

You have been warned.

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Omni Biz Marketing|Shanklin|Vanuity are scams!

2008-10-25T13:02:00.009+10:30

Get a real Internet Marketing opportunity Site Sell

I am embarassed to admit that I have been scammed. Big time.

I was just going to lick my wounds and leave it be but they called again this week after I bought an eBook from Google Snatch.

I emailed Latif and got a relaitvely non-committal email back. I will be emailing him the link to this blog because I don't think he is aware of these scumbags activities.

The initial contact was several years ago and I succumbed to the high pressure tactics and paid $2,500 plus the monthly hosting for a very crippled OmniSiteBuilder.

THe difference between me and many of those other people who have been scammed is that I am reasonably experienced online and knew everything that my mentor tried to teach me, in fact I actually taught him a couple of things. Should have got some money back for that.

I built the website, with 6 or so pages, followed all the linking instructions except the pay for stuff and did everything the mentor said I should do.

There is no-where on their site to view your traffic stats, this is extremely important to growing your site. There is no-where on their site to redirect your domain - this is theft, you paid for it and you own it but you can't get it so either you abandon your site and stop paying for the hosting or they continue to leech off your credit card while not providing any information to you.

When I asked about traffic stats they suggested Google Analytics - tells you nothing if you have a low traffic site, tells you nothing about robot visits or any other information. That was when I cancelled. Should have done it much sooner. Should never have started.

This weeks call was in the morning as I was heading to work so I told them to call back Friday afternoon so I could take the call Saturday morning - I even got up early enough to be awake for the call.

Should have done more research.

In the initial call I was cautious as I thought the spin sounded familiar but they dropped Google Snatch into the conversation and I like Latif's work so I kept listening. Then Joe Sever told me the URL of the website. Alarm bells rang, lights flashed and I remained icy cool.

He also dropped the names Susy Wong (?), Mike Lasik (?) and Keith Wellman as being directors/owners. (Correct me if those names are wrong).

He also told me his bosses name was a Mr. Fagin, I nearly chocked on my coffee laughing without making a sound. I know it isn't spelt the same but the Mr. Fagan from Charles Dickens novel "Oliver Twist" is a thoroughly unpleasant crook. After having spoken with the Mr. Anthony Fagin at Omnibiz Solutions today I can assure you that there is a resemblance.

After letting him rable for a short period I told him that their system doesn't work. He told me that he himself was making "6 figures" from his own website (so why scam people?) but wouldn't reveal the URL so BS.

He then accused me of lying to him and Joe and wasting their time - please people, if they call, waste their time you are saving another person from having to listen to their crap and reducing their income so do it. Call it an investment in cleaning up the internet.

What a joke, them calling me a lier. Nothing they tell you is true. Check the list of client sites, look them up un Alexa.com for ranking, go to Yahoo and check back links and you'll find like I did that their promotion sites don't get much traffic, most haven't been worked on for years and they cannot be making much money.

Everything they attempted to teach me was old news, most of the links in the ebook they sent me don't work. The discussion got a little heated when I called Mr. Fagin out and told him I wasn't going ahead and that I had already been scammed by them. He claimed that I could have got my money back via the credit card company but I was attempting to salvage something by maintaining the website, mistake.

After he hung up, Joe rang me back to abuse me for lying to him as well, I can guarantee that I didn't lie, I did what they do insinuate an association with one thing while telling the truth about something else. They specifically accused me of lying about wanting to build a business on the internet, I do - but not with them.

Then I was told I would be blacklisted by them and would never be allowed to work with them. I stopped Joe at this and told him to make sure that the blacklist would make sure I would never be called by them again.

Since they got so nasty about being misled they probably have some idea about how I and 100s of others feel. I am also expecting, because they'll read this at some stage, that they'll attempt to retaliate with some king of spam campaign or similar.

They are the worst kind of American, the give the rest of the country a bad name in international eyes and people like these are the main reason Americans are not loved like they think they should be. Far too many American business people take advantage of others and believe that it is their right to do so.

Do they teach ethics in High School or College? Perhaps these are the people who cheat in the ethics exam.

My apologies to all the honest, hard working Americans who read this. You are also being preyed upon by these scum bags.

Regardless of the company name, if someone calls you and tells you that they can teach you how to make a living/fortune on the internet from scratch in months, they are scamming you.

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I hate it when they're right.

2008-10-05T17:10:00.004+10:30

I had an email from Mark Widawer. I have been a customer and recipient of his emails for several years and he usually doesn't talk rubbish.

Anyway, this email and his blog post are about saying that smart people fail in their online marketing because they are too smart for their own good and what you have t be is stupid like the gurus. Just do the things that are requird to get one project up and running before starting a second project.

Not I hat this because I keep trying to not just set up a new project but don't quite follow the steps laid out in the 'blueprint' I paid good money for. When I don't get the results that I want I abandon that one and begin another.

Have a look at these projects I have on the boil ( actually, slow simmer is probably more like it).

Personal Wealth been online since 2000.
Personal Wealth Education Online not even completed.
The Travellers Portal done for my holiday but nothing done since.
Spam Killa wrote the software for my benefit and offered it cheap to you.
Clickbank Payday have been driving traffic via adwords, not good.
Good Oil honestly I don't remember why or how I picked this one up.
Puppy Training this is and adsense site but with an affiliate link as well.
DUI Lawyer another adsense site with affiliate links.
Wealth Management Tips one of the newer ones, and almost auto posting wordpress blog.
Relationship Rescue Master my latest project.

and there are others. Scary when you look at it all. I haven't included this blog or the one I haven't posted anything to since about 2006. I haven't included the ones I have actually shut down and there are a few of those as well.

So why embarrass myself like this? I suppose it is mainly because I know that I'm not the only one to collect domains and sites without making enough money from my efforts to even pay for it all.

Don't give up, but do get a lot more stupid in your efforts. Just focus on the things that work. There, I said it, now I have to do it as well.

What works? First up set up your site with split testing. It doesn't have to cost any more than the cost to set up a domain and a host which can be done for less than $200 per year but I would recommend that a newbie spend a bit more and get a lot more help seriously look at Ken Evoy's Site Sell I know that the cost of joining the Site Sell system appears high but the tools, forum, email help etc are what has kept me renewing for 5 years. I built my first site based on the information in the first edition of Make Your Site Sell. It isn't Ken's fault that I haven't yet done the required work.

My problem is that the proper way to build sites and traffic is slow, unfortunately for me I have had ample time online to do it that way and I didn't so I've been spinning my wheels for the last (cough) years and still not gained any significant traction. Yesterday that stopped and I began doing what I should have been doing all along.

The process is simple. Choose a niche with active buyers in volume, choose a domain name that has in it the keyword or key phrase you want to target, build each page targetting just one keyword/key phrase, build the intra site links properly, put around 400 words of unique content on each page, use split testing on page/title/paragraph/images etc. to determine what the best response rate is for that page (this depends on what you want the visitor to do, it might just be to read the next page as well) and then drive traffic to your site.

Notice there is nothing about becoming an html php or javascript expert. There is nothing about becoming a professional copywriter. It is actually stupidly simple and that's the secret that we have all been looking for. Just do the basics, keep doing the basics until you have the site as profitable as you can make it and then move on to the next project.

In the next post I will put some more details about how to choose your niche, the one after setting up your pages, then split testing and then driving traffic.

Good Luck

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They've done it again, perhaps

2008-09-19T10:27:00.003+09:30

While checking my Adsense account recently I discovered that the value of the clicks had gradually climbed from the $0.003 that I was being "rewarded" with to $1.30. OK the traffic to the site was low and the clicks were correspondingly very low but the value of each click, as you can see, was high.

Good plan I think, lets send some of the traffic from the second tier sites to these pages and see how it converts. Now I wasn't expecting the high CTR I was getting from the organic traffic but I figured somewhere around 1-2% and calculated that that could be profitable.

So I set up two campaigns on two different sites and turned them on last night. Almost instant traffic, not high quality but the CTR was in the ball park (I just checked) but the value per click has dropped like a stone to $0.007. Because I know from past experience that Google don't report instantly it is distinctly possible that the click value could rise significantly in the next 24hours so I'm not killing this campaign just yet.

It is possible that the value I am seeing right now is for only a small percentage of the clicks or just a holding value while their software/people check my site out for quality score.

I think that it has value, I read their guide lines manual and know that they do the "take off the ads - is there anything of value left" test and there are only 2 ads per page, not 2 blocks, just 2 ads. The rest of the content is original, I wrote it and it isn't highly optimised so should be rated as natural.

You can check out the landing page I am using for this campaign here core secret to wealth.

One thing I have done is change the domain name. I decided it was time that this site had it's own domain name so I registered www.your-personal-wealth.com and will now be driving traffic to that. I probably should have done this years ago but I've been slack. The old URL was a subdomain of my main site even though this has been the main part of the site since about 2000. The old URl was http://personalwealth.kentberry.com.au so you can see why I changed it.

Bottom line is this (crap, that sounds like KRudd) because it is a new domain name for Google that may explain why the clck value is low, I might try another campaign to the old URL to test that. Maybe I need to set up a 301 redirection to the new domain name. I don't know yet. In any case, the traffic to the old URL was so low that a new domain probably won't lose too much except the age value.

Good Luck

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And it seems they were vidicated

2008-09-17T22:47:00.004+09:30

After an investigation by Clickbank, who were extremely professional, they determined that there wasn't a problem with the link. I also checked the link and it was working correctly so it seems that the problem may well have been one of a mistake reather than malicious.

I am happy thet I dealt with it in the manner I did. No-one should be condemmed for making a mistake, particularly if they take steps to correct it. Clickbank were, as I said, very professional. They dealt with my email promptly and neither criticised me or the publisher. Just checked the complaint and that I was using a correct link.

I might just begin promoting the product again and find out if I can get a few more conversions.

OK, new program. I have been using the second tier search engines to drive some traffic and, while I can get a lot of traffic, none of it seems to convert particularly well. It is cheap but not very useful.

I have also been writing articles and that has actually been working, a bit. I sure as hell haven't been making a retirement income but I have been making some sales. Interesting though, not every article makes money and I didn't put tracking on every article so I don't really know which ones made the sales and which ones didn't.

Big tip folks, tag every article differently for each directory as well as each article so you know where the sales come from. This will make it much easier to repeat the successes and ignore those which don't work. Working being defined not as clicks or being added to ezines but as sales.

There is another benefit of writing and submitting articles and that is the back-links you generate. It appears that the real secret to SEO success and getting a good position on the search engine results is the number of back links you have from many different sources. The keywords in the link i.e. making up with your ex is the keyword you get listed for but the site which gives you the link isn't particularly relevant.

Put links on article directories, forums and comment on blogs, even this one, I know that you won't get any traffic from this 'cause there is no traffic to get but I also know that the links count because Yahoo tells me so.

My current focus is to grow my search engine positions through back links. I am having another attempt with the second tier search engines but I think that their conversion rate just isn't good enough even at the very low cost per click.

Good Luck

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And now I have reported this person to Clickbank.

2008-09-08T22:37:00.002+09:30

Yep I have. See what happened is that I was still sending traffic and still not getting any sales. I had a very close look at the landing page. What I was planning was to take the entire page, chop out the offending sign-up page and run it on my website as the landing page.

When I went to change the "buy it now" links I found that the links went through a tracking script not direct to clickbank. No real problem with that except when I followed that link after using my affiliate link and found that the affiliate credited with the traffic was not me but "none".

Now this is possibly a problem with with the tracking script but since the product is all about how to use Clickbank and get around the tricks the Guru's use to steal your commissions I have me doubts about this being accidental.

So this amounts to blatant theft of affiliate commissions and I reported this fact to Clickbank today. This is a breach of their conditions and allows them to block all this publishers income and suspend his account and prevent delivery of his landing page. There just might be a very loud scream.

So why am I not revealing the name of this publisher or the product? Well I believe that Clickbank should take action and, if this is proved to be accidental, no-one should be burned at the stake for an error.

However, if Clickbank fail to act and/or they determine that this was deliberate I will post the name and product details here. Not that anyone will see it but I will be the first person on the internet to really pick a crook and publicise it.

I will then generate as much traffic as I can to this page and I will also detail exactly what was being done so you can see if the product you are promoting is doing the same thing. I think that this is an isolated case but it should not be allowed to continue.

Good Luck.

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Sometimes I wish you visitors would stop using stealth mode...

2008-08-25T12:35:00.003+09:30

That has to be the explanation surely.

It just isn't possible to have a website/blog online for however many years this has been online and still not have any visitors.

The real curiosity is that I have visited this site from different computers and different IP addresses but still they don't show up in the stats. How can that be you ask, well strictly speaking that would be asking because you aren't here are you.

Tha answer is that it can't be. I posted a video on a site of mine and the only link to it is in a single email I sent out to two people. That video has now been viewed 200 times. Part of that is the viral power of a funny email - hmmm, something to test. But another part is that perhaps the search engines have found it as well. I just did a quick search but couldn't find it in the 1.6 million results Google threw up for that phrase so who knows.

Personally I think that the algorithm for the analytics might be a bit harsh. None of the sites that I can get to the raw stats on match the analytics stats. Don't know yet, may never know not sure if I care enough to really track it down.

I'll just keep on posting here to see what happens. At some stage some real visitors may show up and talk to me.

Anyway, gurus, there is one who I have been promoting a bit until clickbank began to show real stats. Now they are showing how many visitors you actually get from your links to the product. About time I say but get this, the product I was promoting with limited success and claims a 7.4% conversion rate, mine is closer to 0.7%, shows that I sent 60 visitors for no sales over a period of time less than 30 days (I don't push it hard as the ROI isn't good enough). Now 7.4% of 60 is 4.44 so I should have converted at least 2 and possibly 5 based on a conversion rate between 2% and 8%. What is going on here I asked myself and went looking at the landing page - this particular a#$%^&e has only put a capture above the fold offering a free download for an email address. He is stealing all my and your visitors. You can only make a sale to those who ignore the freebie. You have to watch them all the time or they'll rob you blind and then sell you another ebook to "fix" your poor conversions.

Want to know who this is? Go check your landing page, I would be prepared to bet that there are a lot more than just the one I have been caught out with. There is a fix. But you'll have to comment to get it.

Regards

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Aha! Zero traffic on Analytics.

2008-07-09T21:54:00.003+09:30

I put a link on a Social Networking site that doesn't seem to have been noticed. That's fine, one link doesn't cut it.

Hey, on another blog of mine I am getting some good traffic which is ramping up. I also wrote an article on a reasonable keyword phrase. The article is only about 2.5% keyword optimised and reads sensibly. Almost 100% original as well.

Currently that article is at #9 on the 1st page of Google for that phrase out of 2.6 million pages. Now I am impressed with that even if you're not ;-)

I now have a number of projects to pursue to get more traffic.

Write more keyword focussed articles.

Build some more software programs to give away.

Spread them both all over the place.

The idea is that by generating articles and software I will generate back links and traffic from both of these.

I will be targeting the other blog at wealth management tips rather than this one but I intend to put a link to this blog from that one.

Anyway, more 'ron.

Regards

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Well there you go then.

2008-07-03T23:28:00.003+09:30

Yet again I am posting here for my own benefit. I have just been on the Google Analytics site for this blog and it show that I have not had any visitors, that's in the last 6 months.

Now I find that actually a fascinating statistic. I have pages on other domains that are not SEO'd or anything that get visitors. I have pages that have no links to any other page that get traffic.

I am getting google ads which are more relevant to the post content though so that is an improvement over earlier posts where I only ever go public service ads.

I posted on another blog a video which had been emailed to me, very funny but definitely not PC. I emailed the link to only two (2) other people and that video has had over 20 views in a week.

See, people follow links. This site is linked to from other sites and pages which get traffic. So the question becomes, is there really no traffic at all or is the filtering of the analytics software discounting it? I can't answer that but they probably can.

I just read a document which claims to be the training manual, or part therof, for Google's page reviewers. It has the appearance of being genuine and the information makes sense. If it is genuine it confirms what I have believed for some time, that Google really do review some pages manually.

It appears that they are more likely to declare your pages spam if you have adsense ads on them, so they are targeting the arbitrage people. That makes sense really, if you have to pay money then you'll be a bit more careful with the ratings.

Overall though what they are looking for is actual content. Which brings me back to this blog. This is all original content, not updated as regularly as it should be but original none the less, so why doesn't it get some visitors?

I suspect that it is in the "we don't like you" basket. So what I think I might do is seriously drive traffic at this blog and track the links to see what shows up on the analytics pages.

Reporting later...

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Article Marketing - Is it dead?

2008-05-19T21:49:00.002+09:30

Article marketing is touted as the best way to get ongoing free traffic to our websites. I have to be honest here and say that I probably haven't really given this method of generating traffic a fair go.

I have produced some articles and posted them without any noticeable traffic from them. I am sure that I really should write a lot more articles to test this before I can it but, even though I actually can write coherent prose and I do have a better grasp of English and Grammar that most of those who create websites, blogs ebooks etc. I actually find it difficult to write a 600 word article that is SEO and keyword optimised.

To then create three or more non-duplicate articles on the same keywords for submission to the article directories would take me approximately 2-3 hours for each one.

For me, the notion of cranking out good articles in 20 minutes is completely alien. So I explored the 'article spinner' tools but they generate real crap. No-one should have anything to do with them at all, in actual fact Google have an ability to identify the articles that have been spun by the 'fingerprint' they leave. When they do catch them out they trash them from their index fast.

Having said all that I do use some tools to help with writing articles. I have just started using WordFlood, I am still in the 14 day trial period and I am not sure that I am prepared to pay for it yet. It is, however, pretty good. I also use DupeFree Pro which I think I like a bit more, partly because of the different way it assists you to create an article the same but not a duplicate. Did that make sense?

Anyway, DupeFree Pro is free. Get it from here. WordFlood costs only a small amount of money and I can't find the link for you so do a search.

Regards

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A bit more on getting SE Traffic and a gift.

2008-05-13T22:49:00.002+09:30

Another thing I recently discovered is that the Search Engines no longer count any site with less than 50 pages. This blog is now up to 36 pages and the adsense ads are actually beginning to show some relevance.

OK, I just added a Social Bookmark link to this blog. I am proposing to run a give away for the first 50 people who visit this blog.

I just finished a small report last night, it is in pdf format and is on business names ideas, the same techniques can be used to pick a domain name. At this stage I don't even have a download link for you so you'll have to leave a comment asking for it with your email address so I can send you the link when I have set it up (probably tomorrow night as it's already 11:00PM now and time is up).

You may ask why I am persisting with this blog when there isn't any traffic, the answer is that I figure if I can get traffic to this one then traffic anywhere else has got to be a breeze ;-).

Anyway, more tomorrow and a link. Will probably be on the kentberry site but I'll decide that tomorrow as well.

Regards

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How to Use Craigslist

2008-05-11T12:53:00.002+09:30

Google loves Craigslist. Most marketers use Craigslist to generate backlinks and traffic but there is at least one person who has worked out how to make a living by the same methods other people have mastered on eBay.

He has detailed his methods in a new ebook to show exactly how you can make up to $5,000 per month part-time just with Craiglist sales.

An all this is without any product or website of your own. Most Craigslist ads are free so the return on investment is brilliant.

You've just got to check this out for yourself. Craigslist eBook
.

Next post will be how to use Craigslist to generate backlinks and traffic.

Regards

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More about Clickbank Payday

2008-05-08T21:20:00.003+09:30

If you want to make money with Clickbank it is important to generated targeted traffic to the sales page. One way to do that is Google Adwords BUT 95% of wannabes do it all wrong.

Mostly that is because they have bought all the old books about how to do it the old way that don't work any more.

Mike Hill's book Clickbank Payday is current information and he shows you what works now.

There are a few other things you need to know. One of these is about Google's 'Quality Score'. Generally Google don't tell you everything you want to know about how they decide anything but it makes sense that your keywords, adsense ads and landing pages must match.

For example
keyword = wheelchair

add = Wheelchairs for Everyone
We have the Best Wheelchairs
Wheelchair parts and New or Used
www.wheelchairs.com

landing page = [Title] Wheelchairs for Everyone
[Headline] Wheelchairs.com can supply wheelchair parts,
new or used wheelchairs for all shapes and
sizes. All ages, all types.

You'd probably think that this site had something to do with wheelchairs.

Google would like this one. The reward is cheaper clicks. That's a summary of the Quality Score, there is probably a bit more but that's about all I know just yet.

Think about that next time you are setting up a campaign. Try using SeoQuake on your Firefox browser and look at the way the seobots will see the page.

Regards

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Can you Make Money with Clickbank?

2008-05-04T14:08:00.002+09:30

I actually have made some sales and made a little money with Clickbank. It is interesting that I have not manages to make enough money to quit my job yet but I am learning more all the time.

For instance, I bought the Clickbank Payday book from Mike Hill and learned a couple of interesting things about making money with Clickbank. I have implemented them in the website I have linked to above. The thing is that I am beginning to realise that to really understand how all this goes together I did need to buy a bunch of books.

Despite their claims to fame and claims of success most of the 'Gurus' actually make the bulk of their money directly from the list they built several years ago and the additions they get now by their cross promotions with each other. They do make money with Clickbank but not generally in the way they tell the rest of us.

This effectively keeps them well ahead of the rest of us. So what can we do to catch up? I have determined that what I have to do is generate lots of traffic.

I know, this is the cry from many, many people and they'll all tell you they know how to do that but it isn't as simple as they claim. Again, the 'Gurus' who tell you how to get 10,000 unique visitors per day probably don't get them from where we are being told they do.

One of the tips given in Clickbank Payday is to track your visitors and results. If you really want to make money with Clickbank you'll have to track not just the sales but the keywords which generated those sales. You need to know which of your promotional tools generated those sales and which parts of your sales or landing pages generated those sales from which keywords.

That is a massive amount of tracking but it is essential if you wish to optimise your traffic and results. What I have done on the new site is create a different cloaked link for each of the links to the sales page. I have two sets of keywords with two sets of ads sending traffic.

What I need to do now is work on generating traffic. I will put a link on my other sites using different cloaked links. I am planning some articles and I think I will buy some traffic. Even crappy conversions will make money and using crappy, cheap traffic will help optimise the landing pages so the better traffic will convert even better.

Regards

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Does Procrastination Kill Your Success?

2008-04-14T21:03:00.003+09:30

John Delavera, one of the Internets most successful marketers, has been around forever (well, as far as the internet is concerned) asks the question AND provides a solution. Check out the snippet below and follow the link.
*****
… and DO SOMETHING with that material… There are 100s of sites today that offer you articles on various niches… Take www.StealTheseArticles.com for example… Yes I know, another site of mine, but it’s the perfect example… Here is some news too: as you will see there is no order link on that site. This is because I decided to offer the access free to members of www.turbomembership.com - later on this month… Anyway… when you go on that site you will see there are many niches offered. Pick a niche. Get 10-20 articles… then WORK with those articles and create a HOW TO guide. You can do that. Just use the content and create a How to guide. It’s easy and if you cannot do that then ask for help in a forum.
***** more...

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Nathan Neal - Traffic Broker - BS...

2008-04-13T17:20:00.003+09:30

I've been watching this site for a while, it looks like a good deal but...

"Like I said, I poured my heart and soul into the creation of this course, making it so step-by-step that even my computer illiterate friends and family could follow along. Here’s just a taste of what’s covered inside…

*
My tested and proven business plan that even "lazy" people can use to cash-in on the Internet... ** absolutely no such thing **
*
How to profit by directing people to someone else's website - even when they leave without buying!
*
How teaming up with massive "Authority Sites" (like Google!) to promote other people's products is my biggest secret to success... ** Does he mean PPC? **
*
5 types of companies you should AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE and never promote!
** let me guess, adult, casino, horse racing, porn **
*
Amazing programs that pay you money just for getting people to enter their zip code into a form! (That's right, you can get paid REAL MONEY just for getting someone to enter their ZIP CODE into a form!) ** Only for USA traffic **
*
How free content can generate 10 times the amount of traffic as paid advertising. (I'm serious when I say you DON'T need to spend money to make money!)
*
The secret to competing with big companies who spend a fortune to advertise. (Using the "guerilla tactics" I'll teach you, you don't need deep pockets to succeed.)
*
How to tak advantage of established brands for big profits. (You win while the big companies do all the work!) ** he did mention illiterate people before **
*
...and much, much more!

In fact, that’s not even the tip of the iceberg! "

he is absolutely correct, there is absolutely no information on how to get any traffic at all despite the claims that you'll learn how to be a "traffic broker".

You can't 'broker traffic' if you don't have any so this one is full of it. I would suggest that you avoid this one.

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Adsense Whizz Kid: Automated Money from Google Adsense in 2007

2008-04-12T21:24:00.000+09:30

This is actually a test of a technique I am trying out.
It is part of a Blog-and-Ping tutorial. If this results in traffic on this or any other site then this technique will be written up here. Stay tuned.

Adsense Whizz Kid: Automated Money from Google Adsense in 2007: "Discover how to generate automated income from every single website in this new and unstable Adsense environment: March 2007.

The only catch is I will be letting 125, 76, 51, 39, 18 lucky people into the secrets: the strategies that set me, the Adsense Whizz Kid,
apart from the chasing pack...

....AND now YOU: if and only if you qualify
of course....."

See the above text actually came from a different website -- AND I am not at my blog posting this.

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This is an extremely interesting experience.

2008-04-12T18:58:00.002+09:30

I just had a look at the Google Analytics for this site and there has been NO visitors at all.

What is interesting about this is that I have other sites which get traffic, not much but some, with no promotion of any sort and they show up in the search results for some keywords. Well down the list but they are there.

This site is on Google's own site and gets spidered regularly, I ping it and link to it but the analytics show nothing. Someone, somewhere must be trying to get here but nothing shows up. Makes me wonder if there is a deliberate effort to either hide the site or hide the traffic.

So I have a request to anyone who actually reads this post to leave a comment and/or send me an email at burtm10 (at) brentmilne (dot) com just to confirm that you read this.

I am also going to set up another type of traffic generating link which I will talk about if it actually works.

Cheers for now.

Hey, Where are you?

2008-03-31T13:51:00.003+10:30

I was just having a look at the Google Analytics for this blog and apparently I have had no visitors at all.

So this is an exercise in wasted time. If I thought that I was involved in internet marketing with this blog I am completely deluded. I am now writing for my own benefit.

This of course frees me up completely, with no readers I can write any crap I like and I will not be able to offend anyone. No traffic = no readers.

That doesn't seem like a lot of fun but there you have it. I guess another advantage is that I can write this at work knowing that my boss will never read it along with the rest of the entire internet community.

Dribble for dribble's sake. Despite Google's avowed dertermination to eliminate the websites with no valid content I seem to find more and more of them every day. Everytime I search for anything there are always site with nothing but links to other sites which still go nowhere with actual content. So how can they justify getting traffic?

I put up pages with content but Google wants you to have lots of links to your site to show that it is valid. Many of the internet marketing sites I look at have been in existance for a very short period of time and yet they have lots of links and lots of traffic, how?

Then I look at the pages which are on the top of the search lists and many of them have no links at all, no metatags of any description and minimal content. Who do you think is pulling who's chain here?

Anyway, since no-one will read this I can stop at any point and so I will stop here for now.

Good Luck

New Asset Management Tool released

2008-03-14T22:25:00.002+10:30

One of the challenges of developing your personal finances is keeping on track. You want to get started but lack some confidence. You find some good information and need/want to keep track of it or make some notes but you keep losing all the data.

If you had the money to protect your assets properly you would probably pay for professional Asset Managment. But I don't and I suspect that you might not.

If you are in this situation and either a beginning or more experienced investor you do need to manage your asset base as it grows. The Personal Asset Management Tool has all the basic information you need to eliminate your debts, why you need to begin accumulating assets and how to get started. It adds more resources and tools to help you increase your personal wealth and assist you to better manage your assets.

Hey, there is this really cool function, well 2 actually.

You can add your own resources to this tool, web pages, pdf ebooks, audio or video. So you can build and personalise your own Personal Asset Management Tool.

The other really cool function is that you can add your own notes to each section. So if you like or dislike a section or if you find a better definition or whatever then you can make notes and you can print them out.

Wow, that's what I thought when I grasped the flexibility and power of these tow functions. Total customisation of the asset management tool to your knowledge and skill level. A tool which grows with you. A single point of contact to your assets and the management of those assets.

And then...the price. Would you believe free? I sure didn't. But it is a no cost tool. Where do you get your own copy od the Personal Asset Management Tool? Click this link and yes, there is one for the Macintosh as well.

Good Luck and successful asset management.

Just a Quick note

2008-02-27T23:08:00.002+10:30

This is really just to have a post and keep the content coming.

I have noticed lately that my Adsense ads are not producing any income. Not that I am getting much in the way of traffic either but that us something that I should be able to change.

The very few clicks I am getting have not generated any income since November last year and I find that very strange. Does this mean that the customers were running ads at no cost? Come on, since when does Google allow others to run ads at no cost. No, I think this is more proof that Google filters all the Adsense clicks through some algorithm which checks the source of the traffic and adjusts the payout to less than you paid (to destroy any arbitrage) or to zero if you happen to be in their bad books.

It seems that I am in that situation. I do wonder how many others are being similarly scammed by this behemoth. It is similar to that other American scam machine, Microsoft. They also scam the whole world with their back door monitoring of your activity online.

Some testing seems to be in order at this stage to find out if I can prove this. It would be nice if it was possible to test the Adsense links without breaching the Terms and Conditions but I don't think it is.

On another subject, I checked my Adwords campaigns. One campaign shows that my ad is showing at an average of position 3.7 and should be showing every time the keywords are used on USA sites only. I attempted to check the USA showing of the ads but cannot see them anywhere for any of the keywords.

So it seems that we are being conned again, Google is showing geographically specific ads even if you don't ask for them. How is it possible to fine tune your ad placement or CTRs if you have no idea where or when your ads are being shown?

I have been running a program called Adwords & Keywords on a small group of keywords, just 56 of them, after 3 1/2 hours it still hasn't delivered any results. Now I know that there will be people out there who would tell me that this program is brilliant and is blindingly fast but I get this problem with everything I try to use. I have upgraded the ram in this computer but I still can't sensible run video, the keyword tools are so slow they are pretty much useless to me. I have to tell you it is all very frustrating. Nothing seems to work as it should.

I have challenged a number of the USA based Gurus to come out to Adelaide with nothing, buy a s/h computer here, set up a new account with everyone and start as if from scratch and prove that their techniques work here as well as the tell us they work in the USA.

My belief levels are pretty low right now as I found out recently that most of the Adwords and Adsense numbers talked about to sell the latest book are actually from several years ago and they couldn't replicate them today.

OK, enough rant for now. This was going to be a short post. No-one will read this in any case since Google won't list this post any more than they have the others.

Good Luck on you efforts.

Can you make money online with Adsense?

2008-02-05T22:35:00.000+10:30

There are those who will tell you (and sell you the information) that you can make massive amounts of money online with Adsense.

They'll even show you lots of lovely graphics posing as income proofs which show $100's per day. Wouldn't that be lovely? What they don't show you, claiming Google's terms of reference, is the CTR and the sheer volume of traffic required to get that cash flow. They also don't show the value per click or the fact that Google adjusts the value you get per click based on their analysis of where the traffic comes from.

Whay else do you think the reporting is delayed by so much time? If I can put a simple script on the site and get instant reporting on the activity there, why can't Google?

The answer is obviously that they can but they don't. Google clearly makes money online, they also pay out $billions per year to adsense clients so others are making money online as well with Adsense.

So the result is that there are still people making money online with Adsense. The question now has to be HOW?

With some rough analysis of what Google says about Adsense and what the SEO people say about websites indicates that, yes, you do need lots of traffic. You get this by having reasonable content that you write, add some relevant RSS for variation and then get some traffic coming. Write an article or two with a resource block to link back to your site.

The only way to get PR on your site is to have incoming links with your main keyword as the link like this <a href="http://personalwealth.kentberry.com.au/Cashflow.html" target="_blank">Cashflow</a>. When you have this in your money making article and webmasters pick it up you get backlinks all over the internet.

You also get traffic from those sites and from the emails that are sent out with your article included. How many articles do you need to write before you get lots of traffic? I don't know, how good at writing keyword targeted articles are you? Hey, you might have to practice a bit before you get good at it but even the articles which don't get picked up still provide backlinks so just keep going.

The other problem with making money online with Adsense is that you might only make $10 to $20 per day with your site (sure beats $10 per month but I can see why you might not be totally stoked with that) either work on other ways to generate traffic or build another site.

So, can you make money online with Adsense? I think that you might see that you can.

More about making money online

2008-02-04T23:34:00.000+10:30

Should making money online be fun? Frank Kern would say so.

Most of you would have seen the Frank Kern's Mass Control online marketing exercise in the last week.

If you bought, good luck to you and I hope it pays off for you.

Frank certainly knows how to make money online and so did all his buddy gurus. Did you get an invite to the trough? No? Nor did I. Does it bother you that those in the Inner Circle get to make a bucket load of money online and the rest of us are expected to feed the beast.

Well it does me. I want to make money online, I don't need to make $1,000,000 in a couple of hours, I don't even need to make that much every year. Making money online for me is all about replacing the day job and being able to become independent and 10% of Frank's one day payday would make a good yearly income for me.

I am going to give you a single tip here, you should put up a website of some sort , a blog is good, and work on driving traffic to it. Why? Because that is actually pretty easy to do AND that is all making money online is about.

Don't believe me do you.

Think about this, if you have traffic to a website that you control then you can write an article on a particular subject "making money online" for example, post it to ezinearticles with a link back to your post on the same subject, add a freebie in exchange for an email address if you want to build a list, a freebie to bring visitors and offer an RSS feed, have a link to a product you recommend, some adsense ads etc.

Making your money online begins with somewhere to stamp your personality and somewhere to send traffic. Once you have some content and some traffic it gets easier and easier to make money.

Stop trying for short cuts, there aren't any. Frank Kern may have made $1million in a couple of hours but he has first been making money online for about 10 years and has many, many JV partners which puts his product in front of possibly 100,000,000 potential customers.

You can't do that, yet. Start getting traffic. Then make money online.

How to make money online with a blog.

2008-01-28T20:52:00.000+10:30

Now this really is interesting. There are many people who want to know how to make money online, including me. I don't have all the answers yet but I think I found out something extremely interesting just last night.

I was talking with my daughter about SEO listings and a new tool I was playing with which gives some very interesting information.

Sorry about being a little obscure here but I need to confirm what I saw as being repeatable before I go spouting off about the "latest Google Secret". I will tell you what I was looking at though.

I did a search on Google for the phrase "make money online" and examined the first few results to determine what factors made them rate so well. Fascinating. Now, according to Keyword Elite, the phrase "make money online" is searched for about 15,000 times per month and there are about 13,000,000 web sites using that phrase so the competition is fierce.

What I learned I have applied to this post, now we wait and find out if this blog rates anywhere (currently PR < 0, ranking of ???>. I really should give you a tip for reading this post. If you want to search for the phrase "make money online" you don't need to put the quotation marks on both sides of the phrase, you just need to put the quotation mark at the beginning of the phrase i.e. "make money online is all you need and the search engine treats the whole phrase as one. Neat huh?

Something else for you, according to the gurus, making money online is easy. Just buy their latest product which has been already shared with their fellow gurus and you'll make enough money to quit your day job. What is really interesting is that in part they are right. Their guru friends will make money by buying and then selling this latest product. They market to their lists (the money is in the list - right) and all of them have quit their day jobs.

The "make money online" product that they flog you will have some of the information you need but not all of it. The next entry is going to have some more data for you on what I have learned about making money online.

Still going, Still minimal results.

2007-12-26T12:23:00.000+10:30

Well, nearly a new year. Seasons greetings to you, my reader.

My apologies for not updating this during the year. I have actually been pretty busy through most of the year and still working on the goal of making sufficient income from internet marketing to to be able to quit the day job.

The actual financial goal isn't actually very high, I just want to replace the combined incomes of my partner and I so neither of us need to go to work. I won't actually put the amount here but you can understand that it isn't actually a huge amount. none of this 'make $100,000 in the next 30 days' stuff.

OK, here is the current plan. I have created a product, I have created a website for that product, I have created an Affiliate program for that product and some emails for the registration type thing. I am in the process of creating a $7 ebook for affiliates to use to help generate instant income (100% of the sale of the ebook) and I am building brandible links into the ebook for for the product links as well.

I am also experimenting with a different type of ezine. Not too much detail right now but think of your monthly glossy magazine from the newsagent, bookstore or supermarket but delivered as a dynamic desktop program, where the content changes every month and you can still access the archived products, add your own notes to the magazine to make it more useful to you.

At this stage you can go to the website and check out the product, there is a free to use page where you can do almost everything the desktop product does, you can also download the desktop tool from links on the site.

The site is Spam-Killa.com check the site and come back here to comment, I would appreciate your feedback. If you download the desktop version, use the code 0001 when you register the package.

I should tell you that the product I have developed is a simple, 100% accurate spam blocker. A tool which will block all spam, and everything else except what is in your white list. Not only that but it deletes the spam directly from your email server before it gets into your inbox.

This tool works with all email programs and all pop3 email accounts. No tricky set up, download, register, set up your accounts and use. Unlike lots of software being sold, the developer (me) actually uses this almost every day and has since August 2007. In fact I have a tally of the number of spam emails deleted, from my own (main) three email accounts, since then posted on the website.

More details later.

So how will I know when Google has listed the Blog?

2007-03-28T20:45:00.000+09:30

Yeah, I don't know either 'cause there are NO stats available anywhere in the dashboard that I have found yet. It might be when the Google. ads finally show proper Adwords ads instead of the Public Service ones that are currently running.

I could put some script in the template and track it myself offsite. In fact I think I will do that. I will use Adspy Tracker. I am using this fabulous program on a couple of Adsense pages I have been testing and the results are amazing.

The Adsense page is not doing anything spectacular but the reporting on which ads are being clicked on and which keywords are generating the traffic is superb. This is information that Google. will not supply you.

This lends more weight to my suspicions that Google. are actually actively and deliberately ripping me, you and everyone else off. By delaying the results they deliver they can "adjust" the amount they charge per click vs the amount they pay per click.

This doesn't mean that you cannot make money with Adsense or Adwords but it does mean that you might be being shafted because you are not in their favourite customer list.

Hey, maybe that's why this blog isn't in the search results anywhere. Google. don't like negative opinions. They might be censoring my thoughts.

Time for some tracking and traffic generation from other sources. Lets see what happens.

Now there's an interesting thing

2007-03-26T13:50:00.000+09:30

I was just checking how many of the posts on this site have been listed by Google.

You know, type Links: in the Google search bar and you'll get the number of sites linking to you, this site got none. So I typed in the URL of the site to see how many pages were cached, none.

So that explains why no-one ever visits. But, this is a Google owned service, does this mean that they don't spider their own sites or does it mean that I have done something wrong here to be de-listed? I don't know the answer to that one so what I will attempt to do is to blast this site into other search engines rankings and see what happens.

Added same evening
That also explains why the google ads shown on this blog are crap or totally not related to the content. Google have not spidered this site.

Right then, I have decided to give some of the Web 2.0 traffic generation techniques a spin. I have done some pinging as normal but I need to have a go at the Web 2.0 stuff to see what traffic can be generated. Be a real good test because there is no traffic right now.

See you in the organic results...

Good Luck with your marketing.

Update For March - Reporting on the activity

2007-03-20T22:28:00.000+10:30

Well, no sales to report. More traffic but, despite the keywords, it must be poorly targetted because I don't seem to be able to attract the "click that pays".

I followed the Day Job Killer strategies, put them into action, built
landing pages, scraped keywords, borrowed ads, payed up to $5 per click
and optimised the ads to get that back down to $0.50 per click to be in
position 2-3. Generated 10% sign-up rate on the squeeze page and 1 sale
on the sales page which got refunded. No sales from the emails I sent
out to date, and that was on the market that Chris says he makes
$1,000,000 per year from.

I'd be happy, at this stage to make
more than I spend in this or any market. I have made an interesting
approach to several of the more successful Internet Marketers to mentor
me through to some positive ROI, I don't expect $10,000 per month, and
I will post the step by step process, the ads, the landing pages and
the results here.

It should be clear that I am not getting any
results on my own efforts so if mentoring turns that around then you'll
be able to track it here.

I would suggest that I would be
posting slightly delayed so that I can get some results before everyone
else floods the niche, after all, the whole point of niche marketing is
to work a niche. What most of theebooks tell you is generalisations on
keywords that they don't use, ads they haven't run, landing pages that
they have never put online and theoretical results because the GoogleTOS (apparently) forbid the actual results.

Hmmm... I have some adsense pages running, recently I have been getting lower and lower CTRs
on those pages and fewer impressions. I have also had the interesting
experience of getting clicks with no value. How does that happen? Look
for theebook coming soon.

Good Luck with your efforts

So, now here's the Truth as I see it.

2007-02-23T13:04:00.000+10:30

My Clickbank account shows that of the two sales I made, one has asked for and got a refund.

Since then 1 more sale but essentially all my campaigns are absolute rubbish and I am just losing money. I really despise this state of affairs. I have followed the instructions to the letter, I get good CTRs, I even cloned Chris' million dollar racing campaign but have spent large amounts of money for no result.

So, what is one to do?

I have set up a couple of adsense pages with proper content that I wrote and keyword optimised. I set up some adwords to test the results with and I get about 55% CTR on the visitors who arrive which is OK, the ads cost me $0.05 and I am getting approximately $0.03 average per visitor. This means I am in front by $0.01 per click, can't see myself retiring on this just yet.

I bought a video package which is brilliant for Adsense Marketing and really helped me a lot regarding the optimal positioning of ad blocks etc and the one thing which you are realling missing out on with all the other "guru's" B.S., the one thing they don't tell you about that really makes the difference.

Now I'll come back to this point in a moment but right now I can tell you that even with Perry Marshall's book, Google Adwords, he talks about CTR and how to get the best results for your ads and he shows you traffic numbers, clicks etc. but even he misleads you severely. All the "Gurus" do. Perhaps this is unintentional but I doubt it, I suspect that they don't know where they get their sales from but I am positive that they do not get them from Google Adwords. I suspect that they don't even know this themselves because they don't track their results properly.

I have sent over 2,000 visitors to a sales page which claims to convert at 2.5% but got no sales credited to me. The "Gurus" steal your visitors by signing them up to their email list and then make the sale from there or signing them up as affiliates and allowing them to make their purchases via their own affiliate link. Either way I lose money to Google and have commissions stolen by the "Gurus".

What can I do about this? In the words of Baldrick "I have a cunning plan..." I am developing a program which will suck in the sales page and modify any part of it to whatever I choose. I can track clicks on links, I can remove/redirect links, I can modify text on the page, change the images displayed etc. I might even sell this program later or not, I doubt the the "Gurus" will be at all happy with me for this but they might like a copy for themselves as well.

I don't see this as theft but as making sure I don't get robbed, I haven't actually implemented this yet as I am still testing and fine tuning but soon....very soon, and the reports will be posted here.

In the mean time the secret they don't tell you. I know, I know everyone tells you that "this is the secret the gurus, banks, Google, Microsoft, etc. etc. don't want you to know" but this really is true. They often allude to this but they never state it outright. You need lots and lots and lots of traffic to make any money online. You need to get 500 to 1,000 visitors per day.

Most of the sales pages you send your traffic to only convert around 1% so if you make $20 per sale, you'll need to send 1,000 people per day to get $200 per day. If your Google campaign is costing you $0.20 per click and you are getting a 5% CTR then you'll need 10,000 to 20,000 impressions per day to get 500 to 1,000 eyeballs on the sales page and it will cost you $100 to $200 per day to get the sales. You cannot make any money doing this. But the "Gurus" will because they are not paying anything for their half of the sale.

Is it any wonder that they don't tell you any of this stuff? You, my friend, and I have been conned and continue to be conned by these thieves and they continue to sell you the dream while only delivering it to themselves. This is fraud.

Now, Google is a great place to test and develop your ads and keywords but a really bad place to be trying to make an income from because the CTR price is just too high mainly due to the "Gurus" promotions which have pushed the prices up considerably for non-performing keywords. When you have got a good CTR on your ads you should set up your campaigns where you can get much cheaper traffic. Where can you get traffic for 1/10th of the Google click?

Head over to the Adsense videos here http://www.kentberry.com.au/presents/video and buy the package, it is genuinely worth the money. Have a look at the promotional material on the sales page and look at views side of the image, not just the income side. See how the traffic increases overnight from around 50-100 views per day to around 20,000 views per day. Would you like to be able to turn on an extra 19,900 views per page for your campaigns? I know I would. I have begun to implement these strategies and will report results soon.

Good luck.

Some Results At Last!

2007-02-06T11:14:00.000+10:30

I have been following with some interest the emails from Chris regarding his new book about how to make the adwords marketing work.

His new book is Day Job Killer and is due for release tomorrow, I suspect that he will sell around $25,000 worth in a couple of hours.

This is due to the amazing promotion he has been running for the last month or so building up the interest. If his book is 1/2 as good as he is claiming then it will be superb. Assuming I can get a link to it I will post it here tomorrow.

Now, onto the real news. I have made 2 sales in the last two days. I know that isn't earth shattering compared to Chris, who has a video up showing how he made over $1million last year but it is the first sales I have made for a total of $48 at a cost of (in this campaign) $150. Numbers rounded for simplicity.

I found a pretty good niche for traffic and enthusiasm, I have got my ads working. Actually, I cannot believe what I did this morning, I actually changed an ad which was giving me a 2.4% CTR. Why? The other ad is giving me a 4.5% CTR so I am trying to beat that one.

On another campaign I am actually reducing my maximum bid because the ads are too high in the list, they are all average 1.5 (approximately) and I want them to be around 3. These are also giving me about 2% CTR at the moment but I don't have enough clicks to determine which one to change yet.

Want to know how to determine that? Go here and follow the instructions, no charge for this tip folks.

Changing tack yet again, I bought a cheap ebook on ebay yesterday but I have not yet got a download link. They have until tonight to contact me before I start hammering them all over ebay and here for fraud.

An ebook should be delivered instantly, there is no excuse for any delay so I might have been scammed on this one. Still, via eBay and PayPal, I should have no problem getting a refund and these people charge with criminal activity if that is what is required.

Tomorrow for the good stuff.

The Google Guerrilla

2007-02-06T10:59:00.000+10:30

Some of you might have seen the promotions for getting a $299 website for free. They have been coming via email and in Adwords ads from many different places.

Here is one I prepared earlier so you can see what is on offer. I have to confess that I was sceptical but I fell for the Free tag. Seriously, I doubt that any of these have been sold for any price.

The Google Guerrilla

It isn't a scam, you really do get a free website but you pay for the hosting and you pay for Yahoo marketing.

What you are really paying for though, is to market for the host. There are pop-ups which promote gambling sites, ringtone sites etc which I suspect do not have your affiliate links on them.

Because of the pop-ups and exit pops you cannot promote these directly through Google using adwords. However, I have found a way that will work for you profitably and is perfectly within Google's rules of conduct. I am still perfecting this method and trialling it with some adwords campaigns to "bench test" the system. I will post the details here when I have some genuine results.

This is Unbelievable.

2007-01-20T17:29:00.000+10:30

I set up a new campaign in Google on Thursday night (18/1/07) for a relatively high traffic set of key words.

After 10 hours I had 32 clicks, I looked at the keyword group and decided to split it into two groups with two new ads. Both sets used the same URL which sends the visitor to the same sales page via a cloaked link.

Today Saturday (20/1/07), one of my keywords has had a 200% CTR, others are above 50% so the traffic is good. But no #$%^ sales. What is happening here?

The other group is doing pretty well with CTR's as high as 33%. Total clicks sent to the sales page today is 94. The sales page claims to have a 3% conversion rate so I should have 2-3 sales by now but I don't have any, I just checked Clickbank to be sure.

So how many of you are also having the same problem, got your ads converting well, in a high traffic niche, found a good product with a good(?) sales page and no sales? Got any input for me on how to fix this?

I am also running some experiments with web 2.0 that I will report on later.

Good luck with your efforts.

Happy New Year, a Resolution.

2007-01-02T18:32:00.000+10:30

OK. I have spent a bit of time recently putting a package together to assist Newbies in their Internet Marketing and general Internet activities.

What I have done is join two organisations for their content. One provides a large number of Adsense, Clickbank, Amazon and Ebay affiliate links. You can customise your site by domain name and content so no two sites will be the exactly the same (which suits Google) but you don't need to have any specialised knowledge to make it all work. This is a paid site but it is pretty cheap, a bit less than normal web site hosting so it is good value and should generate at least the hosting fees with minimal promotional activity.

The other site is a free to join site with some very useful ebooks for the user to buy or sell.

This allows all Newbies to begin their Internet Marketing activities no matter what their existing skill or financial level.

I plan to put in a forum for the Newbies as well but that will come later if the rest of the site works well.

The link to the promotional/sale page is Marketing 101. I have called this a sales page because it still has to persuade people to join up but there is no cost to join so sales is a bit of a misnomer.

I have also set up tracking from the download links so I can log each download against the affiliate id. The point about doing full on tracking is that I can then determine if the new affiliates actually download the free ebooks.

I can't make the affiliates read the ebooks but if they have downloaded them then I can use sections from the ebooks here and in the emails I send. I can also deliver hints and tips relating to HTML, FTP, PHP, JavaScript, CGI, etc. etc.

I think that this is a way of tapping into the Newbie market. I am certain that I can assist them with learning the ropes and weaving their way through the Internet maze and helping them avoid the scams, con artists etc.

How to Successfully Lose Money

2006-12-18T14:26:00.000+10:30

Well, Christmas nearly here and still no income from the Google Advertising. I have paused all the ads for now because I just cannot get the time to spend online to fix the problems.

If you look at the image below you can clearly see that I have been generating good CTR's and a goodly number of impressions which results in a good number of hits to the landing page(s).

But, no b$%^y sales and therefore no profit.

At this stage I have spent approximately $350AUD on ads and made no profit. Why not? Clearly the landing pages (mostly the sales page now) are not converting. So is this because I am not targetting the correct visitors with my ads? Perhaps the Sales Page isn't converting or maybe the ClickBank system isn't recording my affiliate hit.

You can check if your affiliate link is being correctly recorded by ClickBank by clicking on your affiliate link and then checking on the resulting sales page. At the very bottom of the page should be your affiliate name.

Check the ClickBank FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for these and other details about your account. Incidentally, if you are not a Clickbank affiliate yet Click Here to Join .

I have been reading about Google Arbitrage and have been given an eBook which you can download for free by going here and Be Bribed for a Free eBook. I have just finished building this page and I am currently not advertising it. This is the only link online to get this one so if you are not reading this blog then you cannot get this from me.

I have some ideas about how to leverage this concept into a money funnel. I will share them with you as I put them into action but it is based on some statistics I read just recently which showed that around 60% of the visitors to any website are newbies.

The link above is the first steps of the new concept so join up to keep track of what is happening and join in. This will be a pretty good ride I think. If you join up you will be part of the ride and stand to benefit in the same way I expect to.

If there are any problems with the links, leave a comment and I'll fix it.

Seasons Greetings to the readers, good luck with your marketing and speak with you all later.

So What the Hell is Happening?

2006-11-28T10:59:00.000+10:30

I am really surprised and not a little annoyed/frustrated at the moment.

For a start, we changed Telecommunication provider on our home phone. When this was proposed to us and all the 'benefits' were explained it looked like a really good deal.

I specifically asked if there would be any change to our Broadband internet connection and was told "No, there would be no change."

Our experience, in a word, is crap. Since the change-over we have not had any internet connection. I have not been able to do anything for two weeks and I am not happy. Supposedly it will all be back together today.

This means that I have not been able to monitor my Google Campaigns properly.

WARNING: Monitor your Google Campaigns daily.

I have spent several hundred dollars in clicks over the last couple of weeks with NO sales at all. This equates to several hundred people getting through to the Landing page and not going any further or, if they do, not making the purchase decision.

So what is the problem here? I am stuffed if I know at the moment, is the landing page not pre-selling well? Are they clicking through to the next step? Is the cloaking software causing a problem with the tracking of sales i.e. are sales happening but I am not getting credited for them?

I really don't know and I am not sure, yet, how to discover the point or points of failure. I have been thinking that what I might need to do is develop a php program to handle the linking and give me some way of tracking the clicks.

I tried crazy egg as a way of tracking clicks but didn't get much useful information from that. Fortunately the click numbers are still pretty low and therefore the cost is still manageable.

But I don't like paying for clicks which don't result in sales. This is supposed to be a profit making exercise, not an exercise in assisting Google to make money.

What I am happy about is that the Google Ads I have running are getting good CTR, some as high as 25% (as mentioned before) so I am obviously getting better at writing the ads. Now I have to get better at writing the landing page but I need to be able to track it properly.

Assuming the internet is available when I get home tonight I might be able to do something useful. If not, perhaps a rude letter to the telecommunications provider with demands for reimbursement of lost funds might be in order.

Some Excellent CTRs and Some Really CRAP CTRs

2006-11-07T15:04:00.000+10:30

A little time has passed and still no sales. But, some of my Google Ads are really kicking butt WRT CTR I have several keywords which are getting ove 3% Click Through Rate (one that is 25% but I really don't think you can count 1 click in 4 views as a reliable indicator ;-) ).

I have other ads which, after 400+ views each are yet to record a click, now they must be really crap, still, no clicks means very cheap marketing. I have rewritten one of those Ads, hey, split testing means never changing the control and the new test at the same time.

I am not sure about the landing pages, the CTR might be quite good but the actual volume of visitors to the landing page is very low so I don't know yet if they can convert. Typically the conversion rate is about 1% so I would need to have several hundred visitors to even know if the conversion is reasonable and I haven't yet had that many.

However, it is very clear to me that the information I have learned from the Adwords Miracle book was well worth the money. This is the best CTR I have ever had with Google Adwords and has given me more confidence in my ability to generate an income from the internet.

Incidentally, I got an email from Chris at Project X recently with some interesting extra information and a couple of bonus books. You really get super value with this package. The package that keeps on giving.

How do you like the link cloaking I am using on this blog? The idea of link cloaking is to protect yourself from those people who take advantage of your information and marketing efforts to get all the information they want and then steal your legitimate commissions by hi-jacking your links.

I got this program from Jay but I had to make changes to the pages produced to make it work properly. I am not really happy with the package so I am not offering it here yet. I have asked Jay to make the required changes and he has said he would implement them. When he does I will post the link.

Time to close now but good luck with your own marketing efforts.

Some Results to Share

2006-10-25T13:04:00.000+09:30

Well, I have been busy on the Google Adwords site fine-tuning the ads and keywords in the manner of the Project X book and the Adwords Miracle book.

This stuff actually works! I have finally got a CTR (Click Through Rate) for some keywords that is over 1% (some as high as 3%) for the first time ever. Now I have had several attempts at Google Adwords over a period of 2-3 years and never exceeded 1% CTR. This truly represents a break through and a 300% improvement. Thanks Chris.

But...my conversions are really low because the actual traffic is really low. This is all based on averages and percentages. The facts are - for 1 sale at an average conversion rate of 2% requires 50 visitors to the sales page. If the CTR is 2% then it will take 2500 impressions (the number of times Google shows your ad) to get the 50 visitors.

If 1 sale makes you $20 then your cost to get that one sale must be less than $20 or you'll go broke i.e. your 50 visitors must cost you less than $0.40 per click. Check your campaign to see the cost of each click.

So what can you do about that? Fortunately Google have a brilliant algorithm for calculating your position on the page that is based on CTR as much as bid price and they only charge you $0.01 more than the next lowest bidder to be above that position. Improving your CTR will actually reduce your cost. How do you do that? I lashed out and bought Perry Marshall's book to find out and WOW!

I downloaded the book last night, read part of it and started making changes. It is still a bit early to know if there has been a significant change but I can see on the tracking software that there has been 3 hits to the landing page even though Google indicates that there have been no ads shown yet. It is true that you can get traffic instantly.

I also had a look at "Instant Internet Empires", no, not the old Frank Kern rubbish but a new (to me) package from Frank Lord. It is just the old Traffic Hurricane scripts with the usual "get it free, get instant traffic free" guff. Yes you'll get traffic, for a while, and then Google will ban your site forever.

This rubbish creates hundreds of keyword specific pages with lots of links to sites that all land back on your main site. Google hates this stuff because the pages have no content at all, they are purely designed to generate traffic and clicks on the Google ads. They pervert the search results and clog up servers and the internet.

But, you won't get any benefit from this at all, the traffic is all very low quality and they perpetrators who promote this rubbish are the ones who get the Google Adsense money. They win, you lose. Of course it is free, to them, it'll possibly cost you your domain name and or your host. Don't Do It!

Have a nice day, good luck with your legitimate endeavors.

Google shut down some of my ads :(

2006-10-20T10:22:00.000+09:30

Yup, they did. One of the reasons was fine and easily altered. I had $$'s in the headline and they specifically prevent multiple symbols so I changed it to $'s and they are happy.

The other one is much harder to fix as I really don't know why it happens like that. My URL points to this blog using http://marketingtruths.blogger.com just like that, no target="_blank" added or anything.

The problem for Google is that they don't like any landing page which doesn't allow the user to click the back link on the browser to go back to the original ad page and this site doesn't allow that. Why I don't know. In addition, all my current ads send traffic to this blog and only one ad group has the problem (apparently). Anyone got any clues as to why?

It isn't a problem for that particular ad group as they had only one click through anyway and I was about to change it all but, as I said, all the other ads use the same URL so there is potential for this problem to recur and I don't want that.

Anyway, back to the marketing. I have been running with the information from ProjectX and Adwords Miracle to identify good products and keywords to use.

I have a couple of new campaigns in the wind which will include my Travellers Portal site. Now, please understand that I am in the process of moving the whole site to another host (should be complete by the end of the weekend) and then I can point the domain name www.thetravellersportal.com to it and the URL will look more professional.

Once that is all migrated fully and tested (so it works ;) ), I can begin running the campaign. The idea is to use adwords to drive traffic to some affiliate products via a review page which has links to and from the rest of the site. This should help get rankings in the search engines, build traffic and generate some income all at the same time.

I am also experimenting with some link cloaking and click tracking software. I can't tell you much about it yet because I found a problem with it. I have fixed some of the problems but some of it I cannot fix. I have asked the developer to make some changes, we'll see what happens.

Cheers for now.

Some Clicks and Some Not

2006-10-16T16:39:00.000+09:30

Unfortunately I didn't get much time over the weekend to work on optimising the campaign.

When I did have a look at the results so far it is quite disappointing but probably typical of most of you. I had a few clicks (14) but no sales resulting. This of course is actually quite normal. An average conversion rate is just that, an average, so if it is 50% then you'll get possibly 50 sales per 100 visitors.

On average this means that 14 visitors should have generated 7 sales but they might have been all from the other group (those who don't buy) so the next 14 might all buy.

Hmmm... don't place the order for the new car just yet. The click through rate is pretty poor as well so the first place to go is to work on the CTR. To that end I have rewritten some of the ads and started a more focussed ad group with new ads.

Interesting bit of stats I saw today, on a sales page promoting Keyword Elite there is a image of his Google stats page for a number of keywords.

If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see that there are several keywords for which there are no clicks and no sales. And this is from someone who has one of the best products available to optimise your keyword results. Other keywords on the same stats page show CTR's of 10%.

The message here is that even with the best products to help sometimes the results are still crappy. I am hoping that I can improve my CTR so at least some of them hit whole percentage numbers (like 1% and above) that can only help speed up getting to the 50% who buy products.

Luck with yours...

It's Slower than I would like

2006-10-12T13:50:00.000+09:30

But it probably is more typical for most of you than the "I made $1,273.25 in 17.63 hours" hype that you mostly seem to read online.

As Chris says in the Project X manual or his sales page ( can't find it now so I don't know exactly where it is) for all the Gurus who claim these big instant sales days, all of them have spent years building a loyal following in a subscriber list that they sent this new offer to.

If you were to do this from scratch, like you and me, the results will be slower. As of today I have had 550 impressions on Google with 2 clicks, a 0.36% CTR (Click Through Rate), which is crappy. Worse, only one of my ads had any clicks. Time to rewrite some ads.

OK, I made some changes and I have more to do but I noticed that almost all the other Affiliates who are promoting this package are using the same technique which surely will pall with the searcher. I am doing some other things in the background at the moment to try to leverage the buzz into different markets which might not be flooded with competition.

I have found some but some isn't enough. After reading the Adwords Miracle ebook I have decided that I need to re-arrange my campaigns, more night work by the look of it.

Update on Project X

2006-10-11T10:59:00.000+09:30

You wouldn't believe it but...this ProjectX package is missing something that is really important.

A lot of the information is pretty good, I learnt a few new things to put into practice but it is very weak in the one thing that will really make the difference.

How the hell do you get your Adwords ad clicked on???

I have played around with adwords for a while, I know that Google will block any ad they don't like or that is getting what they think is poor results. Fair enough, they are running a business and poor ads just don't make money for them. Not that I think they are short of cash flow but they still want to maximise their profitability and they are allowed to.

It is really hard to write and ad that fits their rules, gets your message across enought to get the click and remains profitable for you.

Fortunately there is a solution and the free adwords packages just don't cut it. I have read them and tried out their solutions, they seem to be just telling you enough to get you frustrated enought to get you to buy their "advanced" package.

If you are offering a free solution you really should give me enough information to make at least enough money to be able to pay for the upgrade package you turkey...

Anyway, as I said, there is a solution an adwords product which does tell you exactly how to get the click and how to learn how to get the click for less money and more profit. Have a look at this page (click here) and see what you think. At the moment there is a special offer for Afilliates who also own this program, an almost free website to help you with your sales. Why almost free? You pay for the domain name and hosting but all the rest of the codeing etc is done for you.

A pretty good deal I think. Unfortunately there are limited spaces so be quick. I'll post my link when I have it done.

Is this more recycled crap or not?

2006-10-11T10:15:00.000+09:30

I know that there has been almost no activity on this site for some time but I plead guilty to being busy.

I was setting up a Travel site which I used a as a Beta test while I traveled in Europe for the month of September 2006. This took me about 8 months to get how I wanted it and now I have to move it to another host before I can release it to the world.

Anyway, this project has stopped me in lots of other things I was doing, including writing about how to make money online. Or exposing the scams. There are "lots" of scams out there.

I personally refuse to entertain the idea of paying more than around $200 for any product online. My reasoning is that if I buy a digital product the actual cost for the product is probably less than $500 total regardless of how many are sold.

So, if they are asking $1,000 for a product based on how much you'll make (probably not) or the sum of all the products in the package (yeah, right) or some other made up number I don't give a sh#@#$ and I won't pay. Do I miss out? Maybe, maybe not. I sure as hell don't lose money on those deals.

I also refuse to join any membership site which costs me money every month, I just don't see the value in them for me. I do for the "guru", permanent income stream, lovely.

Back to the purpose of this post. I just bought the ProjectX package and I did this because I want to add Affiliate marketing into my new site and I want it to work properly. By properly I mean make money.

My financial goals are actually pretty simple, I want a passive income of $60,000 per year. I want to retire from full time work and have my partner also be able to be with me. I want to be able to do more of that travel that we just completed 'cause it was fantastic (see the blog on my site for the adventure) and I don't want to be tied down to any particular place when I want to work. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so and I am sure that there are many of you who would like a similar lifestyle.

On initial reading I am pretty impressed with the information as presented but as always the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in this case in the cash flow. This site is the reporting site, not the sales site. Yes, I did put a link to the sales site here but if you can't see what I am talking about this won't make any sense to you at all will it?

Now I am not going to leak the contents of the package to you because that wouldn't be fair to the other people who actually buy the package or to Chris who wrote it.

I have several other Affiliate "How to" ebooks in my eLibrary which I have actually read and attempted to put into action with little result and much frustration so I wasn't initially interested in buying another but this looked different enough to be of major interest.

So, more report later when some results are in.

Here Come De Spiders

2005-08-25T21:35:00.000+09:30

Hey, the logs showed me that a spider turned up and had a "look" around.

Does that mean that the visitors will come streaming in? After all, there is no better place to buy the best widgets online.

So, more waiting, waiting etc.

And, guess what! No sales. How could that be? Now the site is spidered and is listed by some of the search engines there should be lots of visitors so why isn't there?

Well, lets see if we can find out how many people are actually searching for widgets online. If I know how many are looking and none are visiting I might be able to find out where they are going.

That information just might help me find out how to get some visitors to my site. Research, that's the thing. Just a thought, maybe some research before I started might have made this trip a bit easier.

Rule number one - Do your research first.

Off to do some research. Lets go check out some keywords - this link will open a new page at what used to be Overture.com. If you click on the "Keyword Selector Tool" link you can find out how many searches were conducted on your keywords on the whole internet in the previous month.

I searched on widget and there were only 4,055 searches in that month. Perhaps that isn't enough. Even 10% of the searchers clicking on my link would only result in 400 visitors a month. To make matters worse, on Google, there are over 6 million pages on widgets competing for those 4,000 searchers.

Hmmmm... New word for me Research might come in handy sometime soon. So, perhaps I should go about this Internet Marketing a whole different way.

Lets start with the next entry and see what happens.

What happened to the sales?

2005-08-14T22:48:00.000+09:30

Nothing, that's what happened to the sales.

So, analyse the logs I was told, find out where the visitors who visited your sales pages came from.

More stuff to learn, hey, I didn't even have a logging script on my pages. How can you analyse your logs when there aren't any logs to analyse?

OK, so I put up a logging script and tried again. After only a couple of days I noticed a serious problem with the visitors - there wasn't any. So that's why there are no sales, there is no-one coming to the sales pages to be "expertly persuaded" by my brilliant writing.

How do I get people to visit my website? Submit the pages to the search engines. Of course, I knew that. So how do I submit to the search engines? Fortunately the search engines have a page for submitting your site details. What keywords do I want? What are keywords? I know, they are the words and phrases that people will use to search for sites like mine. So, since I am selling widgets, widgets has to be one of my keywords. What else? Well any of the words which describe my widgets are good ones so lets put in lots.

That was easy, now wait for the floods of traffic.

Waiting...

Still waiting...

Now what? Back to the search engines and this time read the information. Well, the search engine spiders (little programs which visit your site to gather information) can take weeks or months to check it out before you get listed.

So it's back to sleep until the site gets "spidered".

And that is the next post.

In the Beginning there was a dream ...

2005-06-18T09:25:00.000+09:30

And like so many of us it involved making some extra money on this new-fangled internet thingy.

You would think it would be an absolute cinch to make some money when there are millions of people online and are all searching for something, they all must have some money ('cause they have to pay to get online, get a computer, get a modem etc.) and they might even have some way of paying you.

You know the maths, if I set up a website and only 0.01% visit per week, thats 10 million x 0.1%= 10,000 visitors per week and if only 10% buy my whatever then thats 1,000 sales @ $??? profit per week and I can quit my job ... Woo Hoo, lets get going.

So, I find out how to build webpages and put up a web site. For the newbies, a web site is just a collection of web pages with links between them so you can get to them all. I started with a simple wysiwyg html editor (what-you-see-is-what-you-get). Quickly discovered that it was a what-you-see-isn't-always-what-you-get html editor and it was also a you-can't-do-what-you-really-want-to-do editor and I was going to have to learn some HTML.

What? HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the code used by web page editors (human and programs) to tell your web browser how to display your latest creation.

If you aren't familiar with the look of HTML, do a right-click on this page, in the pop-up menu there will be something similar to "Show Source". This usually opens the page in a new window and shows you what the page would look like without the browser doing it's thing.

Now, you don't need an expensive program to build your web pages for you and you no longer need to know much if anything about HTML. There are many good free programs that can handle that for you. My favorites are 1stPage 2000, HTMLGate Free, Arachnophilia. I would suggest beginning with Mozilla, it is free and fast, open Composer and begin playing with pages, type in text, choose headers, plug in images, build tables etc.

I would also advise that you don't use word processing programs to create web pages as they generally build "fat" pages that take longer to load. Not important with broadband? Yep it still is important to keep the load times down for web pages - try to keep your web pages below 18kb including all images.

I'll get back to building web pages later.

Of course, with my first web page I could see it on my computer but how does everyone else get to see it? How do I get the page from my computer to the internet? My ISP told me I had to FTP it to the server - Huh? What's a server? What's FTP? OK, a server is just another computer but one that is permanently connected to the internet. It has a program running that accepts "requests" from other computers for files. If the server program can find the file, it "shows" it to the "requesting" computer which downloads it. When you type in a web address (URL) or click on a link in your browser you are the "requesting" computer. If the file is there, you get a web page, if it isn't, you get a different web page with an error message.

That's what a web browser does. Now a web browser is a program for translating HTML and displaying it on your screen. You are probably familiar with email, you get your email by using a program like Outlook, Eudora etc. There are many different email programs (also called email clients) but they all work in very similar ways, they "request" the email server program for files addressed to you, there is some chat between the two programs to make sure the right email goes to the right client and then the email server allows the email client to download all your email.

What are you getting at Brent? I didn't know any of this stuff, some of you might not as well. Anyway, this is my blog so I can write anything I like so ther nyah nyah nyah...

What I was getting to is that FTP just involves another two programs. An FTP client on your computer and an FTP server on the online computer. Mostly, when you setup the FTP client and start it, it will connect with the ftp server, do some chat like the email client, and show you a list of what is already on your web presence. So how do I get my new web page to the web?

I can do a copy/paste to move the file, I can drag-and-drop the file or I can click on the upload button. So I did that and went to check out my new page. What? Where are the images? Eventually I worked out that I needed to upload the images as well as the page. Doh! OK. So we have to upload everything we want on the web site to the server. I knew that.

Well, now I have build a whole bunch of pages, they have links from the navigation section to each page, the images are all there and I am ready to sell millions of widgets (widget is a generic term for a product). How are they going to buy my widget? Oh, I need a form for them to fill in and order the widget. Or they could just email me. Ok, the composer program can build a form for me but what does action="" mean. It seems that I need a script. When I began this online journey I found out about cgi scripts and Perl. I didn't know about PHP, Python or any of the others.

It seems that, for people to buy my widget I need more than a web site, I also need a way for them to buy. So I set up a form and found a perl script online, made the changes I needed to and uploaded it into the cgi-bin directory of my web site. Now, at last, I was ready for the money to come flooding in. Woo Hoo.

So, after several days slipped into weeks and no sales I began to wonder what had happened.

That's probably enough for this episode. Next installament "What happenned to the sales?"

Welcome to My Internet Marketing Journey.

2005-06-12T10:36:00.000+09:30

I have been so frustrated with trying to separate the real online marketing experts from the "me too, know nothing, self proclaimed gurus" and blatant scam artists who are just trying to extract money from you that I decided to begin a blogg to chronicle my personal experiences in the, possibly naive hope that some of you might be able to learn from this and avoid the many traps I have fallen into.

I'll also try to keep the sentences shorter.

Firstly, my name is Brent and I live in Adelaide, South Australia. Read my profile for more details. I am trying to keep this as open and honest as possible. This might change if I cop too much BS from others (not you of course - but 'others').

Everything on this blogg is my opinion and you may or may not experience the same results or share my opinion. You are welcome to share your opinion with me and others but blatent attempts to use my blogg to promote your own affiliate programs or sell stuff will be met with complete ignore and the deletion of your post - judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

I have been online now since 1998 and I haven't made my fortune, I haven't made $297,126.43 in 24 hours (or even at all), I am no genius and I have opinions on everything.

You might even get to read some of my opinions, no, that's wrong. You will get to read my opinions.

In any case, the journey has already begun so the next several posts will attemp to bring you up to date with what has happened in the past and where I am now. Of necessity I will talk about me and my experiences. This isn't to make me look good (it probably won't) but simply becaus I cannot talk about your experiences 'cause I didn't have them.

What I expect to happen is that you'll identify with some of my experiences and perhaps some of my solutions will make sense to you. I trust that you'll take full responsibility for your own choices and actions relating to any and all information on this blogg. By the way, that was a legal disclaimer. You agree to it by continuing to read this blogg. OK?

An extra line so you can leave this page if you choose. In actual fact I am closing this post here so I can go back to the 3D world (where the food comes from) and will add another post in the very near future.