Internet Marketing or Not?

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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