It’s definitely not easy to get a successful site up and running when it comes to affiliate marketing so why not use family to help. Sure, you could find a niche that works extremely well right off the bat and not have to do much work, but for 90% of us that don’t get that lucky it can be kind of a downer when we don’t make any money, but why not turn the holidays into a profit center by using your family.
In general the winter holidays are a good time for affiliate marketers, but if you don’t have the visitors and still want to make a little extra cash you should give this method a try. I was completely hounded by my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, girlfriend, etc… pretty much everyone, for gift ideas for Christmas (and my birthday since it’s in January) and of course I can never come up with anything. So this year what I did was scoured Amazon for any movies, video games, clothes, electronics, etc. that I wanted and sent an email out to all my family members, but in this case I made each link my affiliate link. Sure, it kind of ruins the surprise on Christmas morning when you have already checked your affiliate records and know what everyone has bought you, but considering I’m almost 30, Christmas just doesn’t have the appeal that it did when I was younger.
So while I got things that I truly asked for, I also made a few bucks from the affiliate side of things when my family bought them for me. I’m not going to get rich off of the few clicks and purchases they made, but the cookie lasts for a while and maybe they’ll go back on and pick up something else which will lead to more cash in my pocket. This month is actually my best month in 2 years with the Amazon affiliate program, although a lot of it is due to the fact that I restructured one of my sites to take advantage of it, but the family definitely helped out.
So if you’ve got a birthday, anniversary, whatever… coming up and people are asking what you want, shoot them an email with your affiliate link and see if you can make a few bucks on top of getting what you wanted.
Recently a couple of my sites have been getting large amounts of traffic every month, but that wasn’t translating into adsense clicks so I decided to play around with location and size of the multiple banners on the sites. I’ve always tried to go the route of making the ads look like they are a part of the site design as opposed to looking like ads. This is fairly easy to do with the text link blocks, but a little harder to do with the actual banner size advertisements.
What I found in testing is that while the 300 x 250 banner above the fold on the upper right side of the screen did “ok”, the 728 x 90 ad boxes at the top of the page between the menu header and the content have been drawing more clicks than any other ad I’ve put on the sites. Most of the 728 banners have been image only ads (not text) because text in that area of the site just looks funny to me. Either way it seems to be working for the time being. I’ve gone from getting 1-2 clicks a day on these sites to getting between 12-20 a day. In the case of these sites, this is a huge increase in clicks which equates to a fairly big jump in revenue. Obviously it’s still not a lot of clicks, but it’s definitely an improvement over what they were doing in the past so I’m not going to complain.
With sites like elance.com, odesk.com, findafreelancer.com and more it is easier then ever to get a freelancer or amass and deploy a large workforce at a moments notice. This can be a huge benefit to you and your company as it mainly just relies on the project manager to know what they are doing and understand how all of the cogs of the wheel fit together. It has actually allowed me to create cheap websites and profit from jobs more than having an in-house team to do things. It has gotten to the point for me where I am now trying to bring on an internal person to manage this deployable workforce so that I can continue to go out and find more of these highly profitable websites to build. There have been 5 main things I have learned from doing all of this shit on my own for a few years…
1. Look at portfolios
For the love of god do not hire someone who’s work you have not seen. I don’t care if someones best friend used this person and you are supposed to just trust them on a whim, dont do it. That best friend might have been building an alligator taming website and you are building a site about free popsicles. They are different, will have different requirements, and might not need to look the same. Most developers have a “style.” Make sure you see it before you offer up your cash.
2. Read the reviews
People have used this developer/person before right? If not, find someone else. Do not use someone without reviews. Look at both the good reviews and the bad reviews, I often find myself caring more about shitty reviews than people’s good reviews. Don’t ignore what people said but don’t take it as gods word, sometimes they are dumber than you and your preparedness would have avoided the reason they were pissed. Read the reviews and use them.
3. Understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
If you think you do, you don’t. You must be SURE of what you are doing. Do not wager that you will get exactly what you need from your minions because you will not unless you know exactly what to tell them. Do not think you are smarter than you are.
4. Look for a jack of all trades
Someone who also understand how the different parts of a site fit together knows more than someone who is just a designer. Often you can find a designer, coder, optimizer, javascript genius and more all in one elancer. Sometimes these people can be more expensive than individuals but their knowledge is worth your extra coin.
5. Don’t be a cheap-ass
This is where people who have no idea what they are doing get into crazy messes, spend boatloads of money and end up with half a project that doesn’t do shit. Unless you understand what you are gaining from “cheaping out” and using a workforce like this it is a bad idea. It is not about saving tens of dollars, its about saving thousands of dollars, its the same reason someone will buy a prebuilt computer or build their own. You can generally get a lot more bang for your buck handling it on your own, but if you dont know what you are doing,and fuck it up, than what are you gunna do? You’d much rather send it back to someone and say “FIX MY SHIT.” Same is true here.
These lovely little tips should help you navigate the world and harness the power of these deployable work forces.
So I just hit 900 dollars a month on spending for PPC with Google across all my campaigns so I think its going to be coming time to take the AdWords Professional Test. I took a look at what exactly you get from aligning yourself with Google in such a way and the benefits are many. Starting with the fact that you can now post an AdWords certified image on your site (great for perspective customers) but just for passing the test you get a 100 dollar credit for your accounts, free money is always welcome. You also get a professional status page which is like a mini-profile for people to look at and verify that Google is indeed backing you. And last but not least, to quote Google, you get a “warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment.”
The test itself costs $50 to take and inorder to even be eligible to take the test you have to build and maintain a minimum of $900 dollars spent over 90 days. Assuming you have built this up, the test should be too hard as you are already maintaining a decent amount of money in before you can even take the test.
Ill most likely do some research for a few days to make sure im “up to snuff,” no reason in wasting the $50 fee because i didnt feel like being prepared. Look for my results soon.
It’s safe to assume that if you are reading this article, you are interested in making money. Be it money earned online or money earned offline, earning your keep can make you feel just as good as shooting your arch-nemisis with a net gun. However, making money is only one side of the coin, if you are going to be raking in the cash, you need to make sure that it isn’t running back out. You see, part of why internet moneymaking remains profitable is because you are able to start with such a low overhead. Once you see a decent ROI over time, you can then up the ante and start dishing out some money for AdWords campaigns and the like, but you want to spend your money wisely, and that includes budgeting and saving. There are several ways you can track what you have coming in vs what is going out. For a while i was using Mint, but for whatever reason, it seems not to ever be 100% accurate. It sometimes forgets to send me my balance text messages and it doesn’t connect to my BoA accounts correctly, so ultimatley its use has come second to me just logging into my Bank of America account and doing it that way. At any rate, when you are consious of the what you are spending and can put it in an actual dollar amount, you can inadvertently save where you might have otherwise spent.
Another tip for this upside-down economy. If you cant control yourself with your credit cards, why not ask the issuing company to lower your credit limit? I had a $17,000 limit for no reason on my Mastercard. I never spent over 1k/month, so i called them and had them drop it to 8500. I know its still not close to the 1k i spend a month(average) but it allows for half of thew wiggle room and potential trouble from the larger credit line.
Overall, just make sure to spend only the money you have. Just becasue things are cheaper now, does not mean they need to be bought. Its great to make a lot of money, but even if you do, be sure to save wisely, not just spend wisely.
Twitter has become an essential part of social marketing these days and you are starting to find more and more businesses utilizing this new technology as a way to connect with their clients or demographic, but with this sudden influx of users comes a question…. Do you follow people that follow you?
When I first signed up for twitter early last year I obviously didn’t have many followers, but with the apps available on the iPhone, I was able to see and interact with people within a certain amount of miles of me, which helped a lot when we went on our baseball roadtrip last year and didn’t know good places to eat, etc. But I started noticing that whenever I would follow someone, they would immediately follow me back. It was nice, because then I knew people were actually getting my tweets, whether or not they were reading them is a different story. So I decided to give this idea a try and setup a few Twitter accounts for some of my web sites, then I used the search function and searched people’s profiles looking for related keywords or interests and then I would proceed to follow them in hopes that they would follow me back.
And yes it did work. I quickly had a couple hundred followers for some of my websites which I would then feed links to trying to get people to visit the site. After a while though I stopped using this method because it seemed to me that people who were just following me because I follow them are probably going to be less inclined to click my links than the people that actually made an effort to follow me, plus now I was following an obscene amount of people and couldn’t interact with all of them.
That was then…. it seems like things have started to change in the Twitter-verse. Not as many people are following people that are following them. It could just be the influx of celebrities joining Twitter and obviously they can’t follow everyone that follows them, but I know personally I don’t follow everyone that is following me. I just feel like if you want to know what’s going on with me, that’s great, I appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s not that I think I’m any more interesting than the next guy (cause I’m definitely not, just take a look at my tweets @treding) it’s just that I like being able to communicate with the people I follow and I truely do want to know what’s going on with them. So if I had thousands of tweets coming up everytime I opened Tweetie on my iPhone, I would probably miss 90% of my actual friends’ tweets. Yes there are apps for the computer that help with this problem by allowing you to create groups so you can keep people apart and I do use TweetDeck at home for this very reason, but I’m not always at home so people like Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy are constantly flooding my Tweetie screen making it very likely that I missed some stuff that my actual friends are saying that might interest me.
So with that I’m asking this question, Do you follow everyone that follows you (as long as they aren’t spammers of course)? Or are you like me where it’s great that people are following you and want to know what you’re up to, but you don’t really care what they are doing so there’s no reason to follow them?
I think Twitter is moving away from the follow me follow you idea from a year ago, but what do you guys think? And feel free to post your Twitter names below if you’re looking for random followers.
Often overlooked by beginning companies, buying additional domains that relate to your products and services, and hosting blogs on them can be a valuable tool in creating valuable backlinks to your site. Lets say you own PetesOrganicDog.com and sell dog leashes, collars, dog bowls, poop bags, and more. Now, lets say you buy organic-dog-collars.com and natural-dog-products.com and host simple but related blogs on each. As the search engines spider those additional sites and see that not only a block of relavant content is pointing to your domain but an entire site on your topic favors your brand, it weights those links heavier. Also, aging links are often seen as the most important in search engines, and if you control the keyword rich domains, you can always make sure that your links stay valid. This also helps you create your own ring of sites, which has the potential to rack up a lot more valid traffic, and also helps you put yourself more in control of your important links.
I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted here and we genuinely feel bad about it, but nobody really reads it so I guess we can’t feel bad about it… But then again if we posted more maybe more people would read, it’s a vicious cycle, but we’re going to try to put a stop to that. We will be posting more starting now and hopefully you guys will enjoy what we have to say.
Does Social Media have a place in a Business to Business enviroment?
I was just in a meeting at my day job where we have been discussing some changes we are making to our website that will help our customers find what they are looking for. The software/logic that we have been using to run the website’s search hasn’t been the greatest mainly because we never tweaked the software used to drive that aspect of the site. So over the past couple weeks we have been working towards better logic to drive customers to find the products they are looking for. So in the meeting we had today about this situation social media was brought up. With Twitter making headline news pretty much everywhere these days I knew this topic was going to come up sooner or later (if I wasn’t the one to bring it up), but then it got me thinking, does this really apply to our business model? And would it really help anything?
I don’t like to get into too much personal information about where I work, but I work for a decent sized family owned company that acts as sort of a middleman for a specific industry. We buy from manufacturers and also produce our own goods and sell them to one industry that has multiple installations all over the world, not necessarily run by the same companies, just the same industry. These installations then offer a service to the public. That’s probably a terrible way to describe it, but hopefully you get the idea.
Looks like Google has added a new method of making some money on your websites, but this time it’s websites that you have nothing on. They have introduced Google Adsense for Domains, which is basically just parking domains with adsense ads all over them. I just set it up on a few of my domains, some of which had content at one point and some of which that has never had any content on it. So we’ll see if this method makes any money at all. It can’t hurt since the domains were just sitting with GoDaddy parking them for me, so why should they get all the money.
The open-source ecommerce solution, Magento has just released a new version in time for all those online Holiday stores(woot!!). You can download the update within the Connect Manager in the admin portion of Magneto. It includes:
and more, its pretty slick, i sound like an advertisement – but im not, its that great. Here is a fancy little video showcasing the Google Website Optimizer options within 1.1.7.
Full 1.1.7 Patch Notes here.
Who is going to be picking up some of these new .tel domain names? And yes, the article below is from 2006 when the .tel started making it’s move, but the sales are finally going to be happening. Check below for the dates.
An Internet regulator has approved the creation of the .tel domain, the company that proposed the domain announced on Monday.
Telnic, which proposed .tel to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000, said the domain will give individuals and businesses a naming and navigation structure for Internet communications.
The idea is for people to use .tel as a way of communicating directly with the person or company behind a particular Web site, using technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol, e-mail or Short Message Service (SMS). Telnic used the examples of AdamSmith.tel or Hertz.tel.
“The .tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication, with emerging technologies like voice over IP,” Telnic’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi, said in a statement.
“The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VoIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over. By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached,” Mahdavi said.
Telnic, whose mission includes developing a text-based naming and navigation system for Internet communications, hopes to start awarding .tel addresses in 2007.
A similar initiative, called ENUM, already exists. It uses an architecture based on the Domain Name System to resolve telephone numbers to domain name addresses.
Last week ICANN rejected the adult-oriented .xxx domain, a move that was welcomed by adult industry insiders but criticized by the European Commission, which accused ICANN of bowing to pressure from the U.S. government.
Sunrise Registration (Trademark Holders Only)
Pre-booking available Now to December 3, 2008
Sunrise Registrations open December 3, 2008 & continues until February 2, 2009
Landrush Registration (Open to Everyone at a Premium Price)
Pre-booking available Now to February 3, 2009
Landrush registration opens February 3, 2009 & continues until March 24, 2009
General Registration (Open to Everyone at a Standard Price)
Pre-booking available Now to March 24, 2009
General registration opens March 24, 2009
source: CNET
I just read an interesting article over at Tech Crunch about online ad growth grinding to a halt and at first it had me a little worried, but after I read what they were getting at, it didn’t bother me as much. The article is really short so head over there and read it really quickly, it’s more charts than words. First of all the article is only dealing with the 4 large companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL and we all know that you don’t rely on one type of ad on your websites to pull in the cash. Not to mention that the economy all of the world is in a steady decline right now and therefore not everyone can be pulling record profits like the oil companies. If you look at the graphs in the article, these companies are still growing, just not as much as they had the previous year. With everything that is going on right now in the world, I think any growth for a company is good.
Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.
So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.
source: Tech Crunch
Word on the streets…