Internet Marketing Gosu

I got a lot of requests to write an ebook similar to the step-by-step guides I made for How To Attract and the post detailing my first experience with internet marketing.

Well, your request is my command.

I have been doing pretty good with eBay Partner Network lately and I’ve helped a few other people start making money using the same method I’m using, so I figured I would document the process and make it into an ebook.

I just finished it today. The book right now is 32 pages and explains both how to do everything using only free tools as well as how to optimize it with paid tools. I tried to explain everything clearly and use screenshots where they’d be of help.

Before I open this up for anyone to buy, I’d like to get some reviews and critiques on it. So now I have E-Junkie set up to limit the total sales to just 5.

If you are one of the 5 people who gets the first copies, please keep in touch with me. If you can give me your good honest opinion of what I can do to improve the guide, make it clearer, or whatever… I’ll give you a free copy of my next book to review.

I know some of you are saying “Yeah right, ONLY 5 copies, that’s the oldest marketing trick in the book. Make it look like there’s short supply so we’ll be more eager to order”.

I assure you that is not the case. I don’t care AT ALL about selling this book for a measly $5. Hell, I would give away free review copies, but I’ve learned that it’s hard to get an honest opinion from someone who receives charity. By charging at least a little for it, whoever is doing the review will want to get their money’s worth and is more likely to dig into the book and find stuff that someone who got it for free wouldn’t.

Anyway, like I said, if you are one of the 5 who gets a copy, PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK! Catch me on aim as dufman247.

Thanks,

Eric Ihli

Being able to write a good e-book fast is a skill that is very important if you ever want to go far in Internet marketing on a short budget. Short little e-books are good, so that you can offer your users something in return for them giving you their e-mail. This helps you to build an e-mail list. If the e-book is good enough and has enough content, then you can sell it by itself.

So, how do you write an e-book fast. Well, one way is to practice typing and be able to type more than 100 words per minute. But that just gets past the typing part, you also have to be able to do research.

The best way to get around both of these problems is to write an e-book on a topic that you are very familiar with. This minimizes the amount of research you have to do. And if you are not the fastest piper in the world, do not worry. Simply get a speech to text program like Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This will let you type as fast as you can talk and speed up the process of writing sent tremendously.

Here is a simple little secret that will help with your niche research.

Step 1. Go to www.google.com

Step 2. Type in your seed word.  Seed words are words that people would type in when they are looking to solve a problem or find out information.  Seed word examples include phrases such as: How to cure, how to build, tips for, what to do when, how to fix, building, guide to, tutorial for, etc…

Step 3. Insert the following text AFTER your seed word.

site:ezinearticles.com ”This article has been viewed 2000..199999″ “Article Submitted On: * *, 2009″

This will search for articles on ezinearticles.com that have been viewed between 2000 and 199999 times that have been submitted within the past year.

The reason this works so well for finding niche topics is that every article you get has already been proven to have a lot of views.

I hope this helps you find some profitable new niches.

Cheers,

Eric Ihli

Take a simple idea, and take it seriously…

I think that rule applies strongly to internet marketing, especially if you are a beginner.  There are so many different options to choose when it comes to how to make money with internet marketing, it is easy to get caught up with information overload and not get anything done.

Take a simple idea – list building, article marketing, yahoo answers, etc… – and take it seriously.  Don’t dabble in it for a week and then move on to the next thing.  Choose one simple idea and perfect it.  Dive into it until you are better at it than 95% of the other people doing it.  Do it more acccurately, efficiently, better.  It’s not complicated.

Here is a quick little video I made of how I go about niche research when entering a new market.  I kind of just wanted to test my new microphone.  But, I also do have this idea of building an entire site and recording the whole process.  Jonah made a World of Warcraft guide and recorded himself leveling from 1 to 60.  The whole process took like 4 full 24 hour days and he recorded the entire process and sped up the boring parts.  I was thinking I could do the same thing for internet marketing.  Record the whole process of building, monetizing, and getting traffic.  I’ll fast forward through the social bookmarking/article submitting.  And, when something important happens or I have something to say, I’ll slow it down to normal speed and discuss what is going on.

If there is any interest in that, let me know.

embedded by Embedded Video

Download Video

Here are a few Copyscape alternatives.  Copyscape is good, but unless you want to pay to check copy, you’ll have to upload everything you want to a website to compare it. 

The Plagiarism Checker

Article Checker

Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer

This is a little tool I use to help me come up with good attention-grabbing headlines.  It seems to be pretty accurate.  I tested it with a few adwords advertisements and usually when the % this analyzer goes up, so does CTR, as long as you can keep the text relevant.

Also, pay attention to what emotions your text elicits from the readers.  If your site is a personal diary/journal, you’ll want your ad text to keep with that flow, so you’ll want it to be more spiritual rather than intellectual.  If your site is a unbiased comparison/review site, you’ll want it the other way around.

I haven’t really expanded into that many other niches yet. I’m trying weight-loss and I’m barely losing money on it. Mainly because I was overpaying for they keyword “weight watchers” for a long time because google slapped me with a 3/10 quality score for some reason… I opened up the exact same campaign on another adwords account and I the quality score was 7/10. Even on the same account, the quality score for other “weight watchers” terms like “weight watcher” or “weight watchers points” stayed above 7/10. Anyway, if it wasn’t for that, I’d probably be SLIGHTLY profitable for my weight loss campaign.

For my weight-loss campaign, I noticed a lot of the people who were ranking high on adwords were using blog/diary style sites, telling their personal story, rather than a sales landing page. So, I got www.thehealthfitnessblog.com and made a faux diary sub-page. You can see the original one here:http://www.thehealthfitnessblog.com/weightwatcher/.

The first day, I think I ended up paying $120 for $90 in sales. So, I knew the page sold, I just needed to decrease my bids and increase conversions. 

When I tried to decrease my bids though, I noticed my main keyword: “weight watchers” had been stuck with a 4/10 quality score and I couldn’t bid less than $1.25. So, I left it up at $1.25 and tried to improve conversions enough to be profitable. I never was able to though 

I thought google didn’t like my domain for some reason, so I bought a new domain and opened a new adwords account to try to start over my quality score from scratch. My new site was www.my-dietdiary.com. And again, my QS shot up to 7/10 the first day, then after a few days it was down to 1/10. All the while, other “weight watchers” related keywords are ranking 7/10+. 

Anyway, I’ve gone through many revisions and changes but I still can’t get it converting at a rate that is profitable. I’ve ditched that entire campaign for now.

My current idea is: I’m focusing on a review type site, so I can target many different products from 1 domain and not have to keep buying new ones.
www.top2reviews.com
I haven’t got a layout that I like yet. I need the site to look professional, trustworthy, sleek, web 2.0. But I don’t know nearly enough about html/css/photoshop to create it.
I tried switching my one successful campaign from it’s original landing page to a landing page with the top2reviews.com layout, and conversions went from about 1 in every 40 clicks to 1 in every 120+. So either the target audience doesn’t want a review page, or my review page sucks.

Either way, I have a lot of faith in it because I see so many other top adwords sites thriving off it.
For example, do a search for TriSlim.

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1…TF-8&q=trislim

You’ll see the top adwords guy is www.thebest3.com (yes, my site is very similar to there’s by coincidence)

If you type that domain into spyfu: http://spyfu.com/Domain.aspx?d=-6120919063984482796

You’ll see they are spending $200-$600 per day on advertising. I don’t think anyone would be running that kind of campaign if it was losing money, so I think the plan is sound. You just have to have the right products/copy and a good, trustworthy, professional layout.

Anyway, if anyone can offer me ideas on how to improve my layout of top2reviews, please let me know.

Ok, here’s the latest of my results:

About 80% of the sales have been from my 1 successful niche, and ALL of the profit has been from that niche. The other sales are losers after taking into account advertising I spent on them.

I’ve been keeping a tally of my 7 day averages. My most recent 7 day average has me at spending $117/day on advertising and making $280/day in sales, for an average profit of about $160/day.

This was before today/yesterday though. I don’t know wtf happened to drop my sales so low. Some people claim Clickbank is skimming profits because a lot of people are reporting fewer sales. It’s hard to rule that possibility out after the bull**** that happened with UB/AP in the poker world. Either way, yesterday was my first losing day since starting. I lost about $70 total yesterday due to advertising expenses. I cut back on the ads I was testing yesterday and went back to the exact stuff that had been working the past 2 weeks to make $200+/day. The results: $49 so far today :/. I’m very worried.

I actually borrowed money for the first time in a LONG time to pay for advertising. So far, in total, I’ve spent about $2200 in advertising and made about $5800 in sales. Since the checks won’t be arriving for another couple weeks, I didn’t want to have to shut down my ad campaigns because of running out of money.

But right now, I’ve still only got that 1 profitable niche. And I have good reason to believe it won’t last long. If I can’t replicate those results soon, I’ll be back to square 1 

On a good note though, I finally got my first check in from all of this stuff.

On a good note though, I finally got my first check in from all of this stuff.

Bad quality, but it’s a $329 check from clickbank for Oct 12th-15th. 

I also got paid about $100 from CPALead to my paypal account.

Anyway, if this post is garbled or formatted poorly, I apologize. I’m trying to type it up quick so I can get back to work.

Don’t forget… #IM on irc.efnet.net if you want to chill with others trying this stuff and bounce ideas around.

The End

I hope you’ve enjoyed and learned something from these series of posts.  Good luck and if you have any questions, there are plenty of ways to get in contact with me.  Leavea comment on the blog, email me, or join us in IRC.

From what I hear, google doesn’t like .info domains. Plus, I noticed a lot of directories don’t accept .info domains. So, I bought a .com dog training guide domain to help with my big push into that market this month.

So add up another $10 expense there. I also just outsourced my first bit of work since the beginning. I’m paying someone $14 for 1000 directory submissions. I spent all day and probably only got 10 directory submissions, 40-50 social bookmarks, and 15-20 articles submitted. So, for $14 he’s going to accomplish what would take me at least 4 full days. That’s a bargain.

One of my reasons for taking focus off of pokerjuke was because I needed to spend time marketing my dog training sites. If I can outsource work like this, I think I might keep working to perfect pokerjuke.

There is a guy on the blackhatworld forums that is offering a service of downloading 500 youtube videos and rebranding them with an intro text of your choice. He’s charging $50, and I’m going to take him up on that as soon as I can get a hold of him on aim.

Anyway, still no sales today. I got about 14 hops to my dog training site, but I”m sure some of them are mine, or 2+2er’s, or article reviewers, just checking the site out. It’s taking a lot longer for articles to be reviewed than I thought it would.

Here’s a screenshot of my total $ earned so far.

So, about $250 in earnings, -$100 in freerolls, -$50 in hosting, -$60 in domain names, -$14 in advertising…. what else did I spend money on? I need to be keeping better records I think. I’m probably about break-even right now. But, considering the first 2-3 weeks of this I didn’t make anything, that means that all the profit came int he last 2-3 weeks. And, I’m sure it will increase from here on out, so I should be well in the green by the end of this month, as long as I don’t spend too much on advertising.

Is anyone else doing any of this? I know joey and elph in IRC are. I wish there was a bigger community doing this so we could all help each other out.

Things have been quiet since the freeroll. I got about 300 visits on Sunday, the day of the freeroll and about 30 return visits on Monday. I made about another $2 in surveys after the tournament was completed. But, I don’t know if that money came from people using the site, or if it was just a delayed credit to my account from a survey completed earlier.

The next freeroll is scheduled for Friday and one user has already returned, bought the password, and registered. The biggest complaint last tournament was from users outside the US having lack of survey options. So I’m trying to add options for those.

CPALead only offers a few international surveys. I applied and got accepted yesterday to the another CPA company – instantdollarz. I’m putting their surveys on my site now, but I haven’t been able to successfully test it. I’ve filled out 4-5 surveys and none have credited me. I don’t know if my link format is correct or not . And users don’t usually start showing up untill a few hours before the tournament, so I might not have much time to fix it by the time I do find out if it’s broken.

That sale I made of the dog training book through clickbank for $25 still hasn’t been refunded  It looks like that one was a success. Now that I’m confident in my website and ability to sell those books, I went ahead and re-activated my adsense campaign to get my link to show up on some searches and sites. I’ll update how that goes this time. I’m targetting some real low-volume keywords so I could keep by bids below 10 cents. I may have to increase spending because I’m not getting nearly enough impressions.

If anyone has some time to kill and would like to help me out, I really need to test the instantdollarz program to see if I have the links set right and am getting credited. You don’t even need to register an account, just go to www.pokerjuke.com and use username: sherifbobo password: blah

The credits on that account should be -20. If you do a survey and that amount changes, please let me know  $5 over pokerstars to the first person that gets credited for one of the non-CPALead surveys. (CPALead surveys are displayed in a brown-bordered poker themed javascript box. The other surveys are just plain text links. Those are the ones I need to test.)

If I get one more sale from dogtrainerpro.info, I think I’ll start writing and submitting 5 articles a day. Right now I’ve got about 15 articles out there. I want to see how they do before spending much time on it. I think pokerjuke.com has more potential so I’m throwing all my effort into it.

Ok, I love pokerjuke.com, but it’s going to take too much work and require too much maintenance to turn it into the site I want. I don’t have the time for that right now. I really want to see results this month.

The freerolls have been successfull. I’m getting about 300-400 visitors on freeroll days, making about $30-$40 (putting up $25 for the tournament, so only $5-$15 profit). And, I’m getting about 30-40 return visitors on non-freeroll days. I’ll leave that site as it is, making small updates and holding one freeroll a week. (Obviously I’d hold one every day if I could, but people eventually fill out every offer available and nobody is able to complete anymore and I stop making money. I ran 2 in a row this weekend on Friday and Saturday. I made $40 on Friday, but only $20 on Saturday since everyone already completed the offers that were given to them.)

Anyway, I think that site has hit a stand-still untill I can integrate forums into the site, make it easier to update survey’s so they have a higher payout rate, and start adding some quality content. I think the potential is there, but I’m really starting to want results now.

So, I’m gonna go all-out this month promoting my dog training book site. It made 1 sell without much work. I think with a little tweaking I can make 10 sales this month. And, once the advertising and links are out there, the sales should keep coming in. I need advice though on how to maximize sales.

Here is the site: http://www.dogtrainerpro.info

Here is what I’m doing: I’m submitting 1 unique article per day to 20+ different article sites (each site will get a different version of the unique article). The article I submit will be keyword rich. For example: “dog obedience training”, “dog aggression training”, “stop barking”, etc. The articles will have a resource link back to an article on my site that is rich in the same keyword.

I’m submitting each article on my site to 25+ social bookmarking sites using http://www.socialmarker.com

I’m running an adwords campaign (which seems to be broken right now, not getting any impressions) for each of my keyword rich articles.

At the bottom of each article on my page will have my clickbank hoplink to the dog training guide.

I need advice from anyone and everyone willing to offer it. Should I put a hoplink at the beginning of each article? Should I ditch the “content” site and go for a straight landing page and sell hard? Should I outsource article submission or any other type of SEO? How does the layout on my page look?

Any advice thanks. I’m gonna give it my all this month. Up until now I’ve been spending a lot of time learning. The php/mysql I’m sure will payoff huge in the long run. I’ve got some great ideas. But, I need to be making money now in order to get to the long-run.