Make Money Guide

Random Ramblings

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:50:55 +0000

Rambling 1: Video Marketing Is The New Article Marketing…

Some of you will remember what article marketing was like in the beginning. The days when you could submit an article and generate thousands of uniques to your websites, get 1000’s of backlinks per article, that kind of thing?

Obviously those results don’t exist in Article marketing anymore although it is still a great way to promote your sites. But you know what IS becoming like that now? Videos!

If you think video submission = youtube you’re way off. Video submission sites are springing up all over the place and if you can learn to (or pay to) create simple videos to promote your sites you’ll see a flood of backlinks, new traffic from places you didn’t know existed (including of course all the sites that will put up your video on their site) and more.

Something to think about…

Rambling 2: Duplicate Content Schmooplicate Content!

I’m so over everyone talking about duplicate content this and that; duplicate content isn’t what you think!

It’s been said time and time again: The biggest sites on the web are content AGGREGATORS, they gather content from other places – do you think digg.com produces its own content, Google? You think those guys suffer from the duplicate content penalty?

Even on a smaller scale – a friend told me about some of his tests then my own tests confirmed it. We’ve started blogs with nothing but other people’s articles from ezinearticles.com – we’ve done a little promotion and gotten great results – one site even got to 100 uniques a day within a couple of weeks JUST using other people’s content.

Point: Don’t be afraid to use NON unique content. Don’t BASE a site on it – Unique of course is always best but don’t discount it either! There are plenty of uses for it even outside of posting it to your site that you can easily take full advantage of.

Rambling 3: Take a Long Term View of SEO

You are probably better at SEO than you think…

Thing is there aren’t really any secrets to SEO past a certain point. If you keep doing the things everyone knows how to do, over a long period of time, say 6 months to a year, you will get rankings in markets you would never have dreamed possible.

The things I’m talking about are: Having your page properly keyword optimized, Producing new content, submitting consistent articles to a number of directories, acquiring quality backlinks from relevant sites, either reciprocal or one way on an ONGOING basis (use link exchanges, buy backlinks, request them from webmasters, create content for them like we mentioned) and others.

Most people do these and give up when they don’t work within a couple of weeks, thinking that there must be a better secret. These things work, you just gotta keep doin em!

All Traffic Isn’t Created Equal

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:21:47 +0000

This is something I had wanted to write about somewhere for some time then when I saw Dr Mani make a post in the Warrior Forum to exactly the same tune, I knew it was a sign that this was something had to be done.

What I mean by the title of this article is that quantity of traffic and quality of traffic are two different things.

It’s one thing to want loads of traffic and even loads of TARGETTED traffic (we all know the difference between targetted and untargetted) but targetted traffic from different sources comes with different conversion rates, different value and at a different price.

What brought this back to my mind was the tests I’ve begun performing recently with Social Network marketing. In short, what I found first hand, and of course not surprisingly, was that traffic from social networks doesn’t opt in, click ads or buy products like traffic from other sources.

Now does this mean we don’t do Social Network marketing? Heck no. Social network marketing can give enormous amounts of exposure to your sites, build your backlinks and potentially put you in touch with people, sites, companies you may have never done before.

What it does mean is this:

When trying to get traffic to your niche sites you shouldn’t rely on any form of traffic as your SOLE source. Instead what you should do is focus on the methods of traffic generation spending most time and money on the methods that provide the highest rates of conversion.

What ARE the most converting forms of traffic? Numbers 1 and two are Search Engine traffic and PPC Traffic. After those? Things like Articles, Content on related sites and ezines like we spoke about, banner ads all kinds of things.

What you should ultimately do is test multiple traffic courses and make your own conclusions as to what you should spend the most time/money on relative to how well they convert into cash for your site.

The principle of all traffic not being equal even applies to things like social network marketing. As my tests have confirmed, traffic from one social network isn’t equal to traffic from another.

For example, on digg.com you’ll find it very difficult to drive traffic or make a sale but on a social network more like stumbleupon.com you’ll find a different group of people, a little easier to create high rankings posts too, and easier to sell to. Every different medium online contains different groups of people that come with different implications with regards to conversion rates and monetization.

Don’t be too quick to discount a source of traffic and don’t be too quick to focus ALL your energy on a particular source of traffic. Remember they’re all different and have advantages and disadvantages.

Fast Money Vs Real Business

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:12:28 +0000

Here’s another insight that you aren’t gonna want to hear

In my mind there is a distinction in online marketing between activities that are fast money and activities that are online business building.

Every sales letter you read today promises you that you can make the amount of money you want in X small period of time. Some of them really can allow you to achieve the results they claim and some can’t but that’s not the point for now.

Here’s the thing:

Marketers are faced with an interesting dilemma.

They can choose to sell the truth or they can choose to sell the magic bullet. The magic bullet is the solution that as a culture we are conditioned to want. INSTANT RESULTS – MONEY NOW! – IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION…

If you’re a marketer you can’t sell people on products like “how to take your time and slowly build a real and solid business that will support you and your family for the rest of your life” because no matter how good such a product is, people like you won’t buy it!

The thing is that on the internet BOTH exist…

There ARE ways to make fast money. I can show you how to setup a niche mini site, start getting traffic and pulling sales within as little as a couple of weeks.

But there are also ways to make slow money. A consistently growing, real business that while it won’t make a dime for 6 months or a year, will eventually eclipse the income of a fast money operation 100% of the time… But no one wants to learn that!

The only people who do learn it are the ones who work it out for themselves by chatting to other people who have done the same thing.

Anyway, here’s the point of what I’m trying to say here: Know which category you want to be in!

If you have a job and want to set some things up to complement your income, great, look for opportunities that are geared towards that… fast money with little effort.

But if you want to eventually devote all your time to your online business and build something real and lasting, look for help in how to do THAT when you’re browsing for products to buy.

At the same time, you’ll hear a lot of people say “I started making real money when I stopped trying to “make money online” and started building a real business”. No matter what kind of site you’re making or what you’re doing, view the thing as a real business.

Offline businesses will start up in full knowledge of the fact that they won’t turn a profit for 2,3,4, 5 years! And we whinge when we can’t “make money online” within a few weeks?

Whatever activity you’re partaking in trying to make money, think of it as a business. I mean take into consideration how scalable it is, how you might be able to mass produce the same result or amount of cash, how you can automate the system to free up your time, how you can use leverage to increase your profits, how you can use that activity to attain the income goals you have. These are important things to think about when entering any opportunity.

The truth is “making money online” doesn’t exist. Running an online business does. Making money online happens quickly – Building an online business happens slowly. What you choose is up to you.

Micro Niche? Maybe Not

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 12:13:42 +0000

One of the ways I got started is by targeting ultra micro niches. It was an extremely powerful strategy, to locate keywords that were very specific and had low competition compared to search volume.

This is a great strategy and plenty of people have now used it to start quickly generating good cash quickly.

At the same time however, there is a lot to be said for going against all the advice you hear online and targeting a bigger more competitive niche.

Here’s the thing, well a couple of things actually:

1. In a micro niche, your site is always going to have a ceiling. There will come a point with your micro niche site where you reach the top of the SE rankings and you can’t get any more traffic. It’s not so bad as it’s easy enough to move on to a new micro niche site but like we said before, it’s easier to double the traffic to an existing site IF THAT’S POSSIBLE. In a bigger niche there is no ceiling. The money might not come as quickly but your potential for traffic and income is infinite.

2. Competition can be a good thing! Having no competitors is great for search engine traffic but competitors can become your allies if you use them right. More sites in your niche means more opportunities for Jvs, for traffic trading, for partnerships, for content trading, just more opportunities for traffic in general.

3. The things that have LOTS of people interested in them generate more emotion and more desire to buy. How to remove ants from your house might be a great micro niche but it will never generate the level of emotional intensity or desire to buy stuff as dragonball Z cards or weight loss products – not to mention the amount of searches there are for the two.

4. In bigger niches there is more traffic to grab at. On a subject like Heartburn, there are so many people in all kinds of places all over the internet looking for and finding information on the topic that to get your hands on small parts of it isn’t as hard as people make out. For example one strategy you can use involves your article submissions:

The bum marketing strategy for example involves submitting articles based on long tail keywords so that they get ranked for search engine traffic. What you can do instead is (captain obvious) submit the articles based on big keywords like weight loss so they show up in people’s searches IN ezinearticles.com for the term weight loss and generate traffic from that. You won’t get ongoing traffic but you’ll get a nice big burst to start your sites life with.

There are many more benefits to “anti” niche marketing if you’re willing to stick it out and commit to building a real business but let this serve as an idea generator.

Niche Marketing for The Future

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:09:41 +0000

This is something we’re hearing about a lot lately: here’s my take.

The simplest and most obvious change we’re experiencing at the moment (and this has actually been happening for a long time) is the evolution of what is considered quality in the eyes of the search engines.

Where the goal of niche marketers was once to impress the search engines, every day it becomes less about that and more about impressing PEOPLE.

This is common sense stuff.

It’s been said many times that the search engines make changes every day to have the results they’re showing in their rankings be the ones that are the highest quality, meaning the ones that real human beings will find the most valuable, the most entertaining or the most informative.

While I have no doubt people still make money with spam pages, content scraping, and other techniques that involve getting low quality pages and sites into the search engines in large numbers, I also have no doubt that their days are numbered – to a lot of people, their days are already gone.

I’ve heard horror stories of people spending figures like $20 000 on mass campaigns like this to spam huge numbers of quality sites onto the web and having one flick of the Google switch rendering their entire investment worthless.

Even if you’re not creating low quality sites and content on that level, the same applies. If you’re putting up a blog trying to get search engine traffic and there is no inherent value for a real human being, your site isn’t going to last long.

That’s what works, that’s what lasts. Sites and content that have real value for real people. Who do you know that’s made big money online without providing value to anyone? What popular website do you know that provides NO value for anyone?

When you’re writing content or creating niche sites, ask yourself – in what way is this content/site valuable to the people I’m trying to target. If the answer is “It isn’t, I’m just trying to get good SE rankings”, forget it. You may as well not make the site.

And valuable content sites aren’t difficult to make! Even with the model I originally taught of, using blogs to promote products as an affiliate… If you write a review that helps a customer to make an informed decision on a purchase, you will make a sale. If you write a sales pitch or a poor english pile of fluff of an article, you won’t make sales even if you DO manage to get traffic.

Point is, think QUALITY. Whatever you can do to increase the quality of your site will always make you more money. Think about human needs and what people want. Is your site satisfying some human need? The need to be in the know, the need to be entertained, the need to avoid pain or gain pleasure… If the answer is yes then your site will be providing value.

Quality Vs Quantity

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:11:04 +0000

In web 1.0 quantity ruled. If you could make a little site that earned you $5 a day, hey all you needed to do was reproduce that site 1000 times and you had an incredible income. Again, those days are drawing to a close…

While there are certain ways of doing things online that make this methodology profitable, for most people it’s not the way to go. Here’s why:

As the internet grows, all the niches or keywords that you could once get ranked for with a small site that required little effort, are becoming more and more competitive. Whatever a term, there is going to be someone or some group of people who are devoting all their time to optimizing a site in JUST that niche or keyword… How are you going to beat those guys with your small no effort site?

Again it still works but with each day the 1000’s of sites theory I believe becomes more and more volatile.

Where the multiple sites theory comes into play as this…

I have always taught people in method like Niche Marketing On Crack and Niche Empire Generator to make a lot of sites. Why?

Because I know that when making small sites like that, promoting products as an affiliate, running advertising etc, you’re going to have hits and misses. In fact like a lot of things it follows the 80/20 principle – only 20% of the sites you make are going to account for the majority of your income. MOST of the sites you make WON’T be hits.

What I mean is that you need to make a lot of sites to test which niches and sites are the most profitable, then when you’ve discovered that, you can go on optimizing those sites rather than continuing to guess and check!

The question you need to ask yourself if you’ve found even one great site/niche is: Will it be easier to double my income by doubling my traffic to this existing site or starting a new site with the same model? The 80/20 principle considered, the former is almost always easier!

In any case… hopefully this is something to think about

Smart PPC Advertising

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:25:46 +0000

PPC or “pay per click” advertising delivers instant traffic to your web site. You no longer need to wait for your site to get picked up by the search engines or drive yourself crazy trying to stay in the top ten listings!

Examples of major PPC search engines include:

http://www.overture.com / Yahoo Advertising

http://www.adwords.com

http://www.kanoodle.com

http://www.goclick.com

http://www.7search.com

Minimum starting bids across these services range from $0.01 for 7 Search to the highest of $0.10 for Overture. There’re two basic methods of placement you should know about. The original model, developed by http://www.overture.com, works as follows:

1. The merchant develops a list of keywords relevant to his site.

2. He places a bid or cost per click on each of those keywords. This is the cost he’ll be charged whenever someone clicks on one of his links.

3. He crafts a standard “meta description” for his site, and this description appears just like a regular link would in search engine listings.

The higher you bid, the higher your listing appears in the search results. Overture delivers your listing across its network of partners which include: MSN, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infospace, CNN and dozens of other smaller portals and search engines. Your listing appears across all of these sites any time someone runs a search on them using the keywords you bid on.

Google Ad Words works in a similar fashion, except your listing does not appear as a regular link. Instead, you craft a headline and description which appears on the right hand side of the search listings (unless you pay premium listing)

PPC advertising isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Once you master it, however, your business will flourish. The biggest challenges you face include:

1. Competition for inexpensive keywords

2. Learning how to write effective ad copy to increase your click through rate

Now most affiliate marketers who use PPC advertising will just do this: Go ClickBank™ Marketplace and choose hot-selling products and promote these on PPC search engines, thinking it’s the easy way out.

See for yourself, the words underlined in red (Aff) means they’re affiliate ads:

Yes this makes it hands free as you don’t need a website of your own or even a subscriber list. Simply ‘invest’ in PPC ads and maintain a ‘portfolio’ that gives the highest returns….

Boy is this wrong! It goes against the perpetual profit model. You want leveraged results and continued lifetime profits from one-time action. You need to capture names so you can promote to them even after your PPC campaigns end.

The bottom line is this, why send your traffic over to affiliate owners and let them capture the leads YOU paid for when you can.

If The Search Engines Collapsed Tomorrow

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:21:23 +0000

Here’s something a lot of people don’t know…

Search engine traffic accounts for only a TINY percentage of all the traffic or people that are around online. I can’t remember the exact number but I believe that less than 10% of all the traffic online is search engine traffic. That means that 90% of people who use the internet aren’t going to Google and Yahoo to get whatever they want…

Pretty staggering considering how much time niche marketers spend on trying to get traffic from the search engines huh?

So what other ways are people getting traffic?

Well there are lots but the one I want to mention briefly here is by leveraging the traffic of other webmasters. You see, there are sites out there in your niche that are already getting traffic. They’ve already done the hard work to get into the search engines or paid for advertising on other sites or used offline advertising or any number of things to get people to their sites. Rather than do the same yourself you can simply leverage or borrow their traffic. How do you do that you ask?

Basically you have to do favours. You have to offer something to another webmaster that will benefit them in exchange for them sharing their traffic with you. Here are some ways:

Way 1: This is by no means new but something that I personally have used to get some great traffic to our sites. What I do is offer to provide free content to owners of other websites in your niche, whether they have ezines or blogs (some kind of site they are continually updating) in exchange for them providing your link. Essentially it’s article marketing but to real sites rather than article directories.

What most people don’t realise is that there are some great sites out there in so many niches that don’t have their ezines listed in ezine directories, that most people don’t know about, but that have great readership from their blog or ezines AND that would kill for some great content that THEY DON’T HAVE TO WRITE each week or month.

In essence you do some search engine research to find the right sites, anyone with a blog or ezine is good. Then you simply mail them to ask if they’d like some free content. The best thing to do is write a bunch of articles to use specifically for this purpose, that way you can offer the site owners EXCLUSIVE content that no one else will have access to that they can publish in their ezines.

Most of them LOVE it. You provide them a great unique article you’ve written along with of course an author bio with links back to your website and it’s a major win win! Of course this is PARTICULARLY powerful in non IM type niches where site owners don’t have content coming out of their ears. If you have the kind of site that warrants it you’d be silly not to be doing this kind of marketing.

Way 2: This one’s a bit sly dog so use it as you deem fit if at all.

What you can do is make an attempt to get the site owner to give you a link back to your site. This will only work with certain kinds of sites, big guys will see straight through it and smaller guys, well it won’t be worth your time even if you can get them.

What you do is put a good link to their site on your site. You can even have a small banner made of their site on your site. This makes it look like you’ve gone to a BIG effort to help promote their site without asking for anything in return (yet).

So you put up this great link or banner on your site to their site. It doesn’t matter that you’re site is getting no traffic. You’d be surprised how many webmasters have sites that get decent traffic but know relatively little about what goes on in online marketing.

You then email them saying that you came across their site and you really enjoyed their content. You enjoyed it so much that you put up a link/banner of them on your main page for ALL your sites visitors to see

They don’t know how many visitors you’re getting so a MAIN PAGE link seems like a big deal.

At this point they’re already feeling pretty good that you’ve helped them out so much that they feel compelled to reciprocate the generosity. If they don’t reciprocate with a similar link then don’t worry, it will be the start of a relationship between the two sites that could pay dividends later down the track.

The key is in your email communication. You need to make it seem that you have as personal an interest in their site as possible. Tell them you went to their site and loved their article on XYZ. Tell them you signed up to their email list (and actually do it!) and everything. It’s very different receiving an email like that than the old “Hey I put your link up in the link pages article of my crappy site – will you link back to me too?” kind of deal.

If you’re feeling a bit sly give this one a go. If you do it right and enough you can increase your traffic in nice chunks.

There are many creative ways you can use to get other people to put your link on their sites (don’t forget good old banner advertising which if you find the right site and the right price can send you great traffic for your investment) but again the point of this article was more to lay the seed of thought that you shouldn’t rely ONLY on the search engines for your traffic.

My Secret on Internet Marketing

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:09:19 +0000

Let me share something with you…

I know you’ve probably heard stories like this before but hear me out – this is gonna be worth it!

It was an average Autumn day here in Oz. I had just picked my 16 year old sister up from work.

It was time for lunch so we walked to the nearest KFC. I ordered my meal, stuck in my bank card to pay and heard that noise that aspiring wealthy entrepreneurs in particular dred…

BEEEEEEEP!

Transaction Declined…

Long story short, I was flat broke. I didn’t have $6 in my bank account to pay for my own lunch – I had to borrow money from my 16 year old sister to pay for my meal. It was one of the lowest points of my life.

Fast forward to today…

In the past twelve months I’ve gone from flat broke to turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars in online sales – the majority of it having come from a period of just over 6 months…

How did I do it? What’s my secret?

Here’s some truth for you:

It’s not because I cracked some search engine code…

It’s not because I found the latest way to make $100 in a day with Adwords… It’s not because I discovered the untold secrets of the marketing gurus…

It’s because I had my mind right, plain and simple.

Let me repeat that:

It’s because I had my mind right, plain and simple.

At this point, rather than tell you that you need to TAKE ACTION or NEVER GIVE UP, I’m going to offer a practical insight on getting your mind right, the most valuable insight I know. And by “right” I mean getting to a state where your success is inevitable and your failure impossible. Here it is:

Identity

This is gonna sound a bit crazy but…

While most people believe that having money makes you rich I believe that being rich makes you have money…

Sound weird? Let me explain…

What I didn’t mention before was that as I put my ATM card into that machine at KFC, on my wrist was a $2000 gold chain engraved with the words “Living A Dream” that I still wear to this day…

Before I lost all that money I had devoted a lot of energy into making myself appear more wealthy than I was. I wore the chain as a constant reminder that I WAS living my dream already – that I was who I wanted to be. My life is a case study in Fake It Til You Make It.

Now I don’t mean that I lied about my income and taught people how to make money when I was making none like some people online have determined that philosophy to mean…

I mean I had spent money buying nice clothes, talking like I was rich, telling people I was doing great, walking confidently and spending like I could have anything I wanted.

The truth is that even when I had not a dollar to my name, at not one stage did I feel like someone who was poor!

Don’t Look at another Marketing Opportunity

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:07:22 +0000

I’m seriously passionate about this so if in this article you feel like you’re in the army and an angry general is shouting in your face – GOOD!

Here we go:

Firstly if you’re reading this article you’re in one of two categories. One of these categories is SO close to “making it” online and the other category will NEVER make it until the move to the opposing category. One category understands what this article of is about and one category denies its importance, is completely ignorant of it or doesn’t believe that they are in this category at all.

This article is about the stuff that goes on before you sit down at your keyboard – before you research a niche or make a site, before you begin any business activity or pursuit.

It’s what’s in your mind.

Think you’ve got it down pat? Think you can skip this part and keep going to the ‘meat’ of the article? Think again you worthless maggot! (Army General, remember? )

Check it out.

Joe had been trying to ‘make money online’ for years. He’d messed around with many methods, tried numerous techniques for creating sites, driving traffic and generating some cash… you name it he’d done it. No matter what he tried he’d never quite found anything that ‘clicked’ for him…

One lucky day he purchased a product as he usually did – in search of answers. After the exchange of some emails he discovered that the product vendor was particularly nice. He actually offered to coach Joe personally to making money online.

Joe was renewed with confidence! He went about his tasks dutifully, asking the product vendor many questions over the period of his first two weeks, trying to get all the steps down pat. He could feel himself moving forward and finally making progress… surely HIS time was soon to come!

Three weeks passed and Joe noticed that the site he was making wasn’t seeming to perform. He hadn’t made a sale yet, hadn’t gotten Adsense clicks and he couldn’t find his site in the search engine rankings… His confidence was quickly waning…

He went about his work more slowly, losing enthusiasm, wondering why even with all this help, things still weren’t happening. He’d followed all the advice, done everything right and it had been nearly 4 weeks now and he had nothing to show for it?

Finally after another few days passed with no results, Joe decided to contact the vendor. “I don’t think this stuff is for me Mr. Product Vendor – I’ve been trying for three weeks now and it still hasn’t worked – I have NOTHING to show for all that effort. Thanks for your time – I guess I’ll keep on plodding away until I find something that works”

Joe continues his search for the ‘magic bullet’ …

Sound familiar?

I’ve purposely withheld the names of the characters in this story but I happen to know that this exact situation did happen and continues to happen in this online marketing game day in and day out.

Now you’ve heard all this stuff before right? Success starts in your mind, think and grow rich, all that stuff… But I’m going to approach this with you a bit differently…

Make Money Guide

Random Ramblings

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All Traffic Isn’t Created Equal

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Fast Money Vs Real Business

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Micro Niche? Maybe Not

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Niche Marketing for The Future

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Quality Vs Quantity

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Smart PPC Advertising

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If The Search Engines Collapsed Tomorrow

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My Secret on Internet Marketing

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Don’t Look at another Marketing Opportunity

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