Since I last created a post to this site, I’ve been busy developing strategies on how to make more money from the ‘net.  I’ve tried a few different approaches with varying degrees of success and have come to the realization that only 2 things really matter when it comes to making money.  One of the variables is easier to manipulate (and should be!) and the other has more to do with how much money you want to spend to see things through.  Sure, it is possible for the 2nd variable to occur naturally but it will take time.  If you’re like me, you like to see results quickly.  So, here are the two variables:

1- A captive audience – This is your target audience.  You design your website and fill it with content so that these people find your site and make a decision to spend money through it.  I say “through” it because you’re most likely building an affiliate site so you’re not selling anything.  Your website visitors see your content, and decide you are trustworthy enough to click on a link and go spend money at the target site.

The ‘captive’ part of having an audience is the bit that’s really interesting.  You are able to almost completely manipulate your audience so that they are captive.  If you are anything like me, this part stinks.  I have no artistic ability and really struggle to make a website design look good.  I spent a lot of time going through design iterations and end up settling for something that I know is less than optimal…but then I spend a lot of other time creating good content on my website so I think that things balance out.

2- Traffic.  This has been my mantra: “Traffic is the new gold”.  I believe that if you have enough visitors to ANY site, you’ll end up making money.  If you’re selling something desirable (like a Nintendo Wii) and get average traffic, you’ll make money.  If you’re selling crap and get a bazillion visitors, you’ll make money.  It all comes down to traffic.  If you have a budget of $100-$500, you can create a lot of traffic rather quickly (Google adwords, paid ads on relative websites, etc…) and hopefully build from there.  However, if you are a cheapskate and don’t want to spend any money, you have to earn your stripes and do hard-core work that will take months to give you any results.

Right now I’m still working on factor #1.  I am getting organic traffic to my websites and need to create a more captivating environment for these folks to decide to spend money.  In the future, I plan to grow the number of websites that I have and will also have a budget for marketing.  This is all still trial and error for me but I believe that I’m on the right track.

So Davey Z and I found out today that we were unintentionally violating the terms of service to one of our big search engine marketing campaign programs. This campaign apparently didn’t like us using our domain name to promote them. That’s why our link stopped working roughly a week ago. During this time, I had been working with my affiliate manager to figure out what the problem was but we didn’t figure it out until today.

Up until today I was really happy with my affiliate manager at Azoogle, but the fact that it took him 3 days to tell me why the link stopped working is really unacceptable. I know, I know, I’m still a small fish. I brought in less than $1000 last month so why should he care about my problems, right? Regardless of size, I think he should have been more responsive.

So, lesson learned. Read and understand the terms of service fully before spending money on a campaign. I don’t think we’ll lose any money other than the money we paid for clicks for a few days, but other than that we’ll be in good shape.

What did we get out of this lesson?

1. Pay attention to the fine print. The campaign’s terms and conditions clearly told us not to use a domain name that contained their name. We ignored that and did it anyway. Our mistake. I don’t think it was worthy of an immediate ban but I guess that’s just how they work. No sweat. We won’t lose any sleep over this. There are plenty of other campaigns out there….it’s their loss, ultimately.
2. Check your campaign links every day. We could have saved a few click dollars if we had checked up on our links every day. It tooks us 4 days to realize that our link wasn’t working, and therefore we lost out on PPC dollars. This money, ironically, was our first attempt at scaling this campaign so we were bummed when we found out our link was dead. We didn’t lose all of it, so we’ll find another campaign for sure.
3. Stay on your feet. What happens when you get tossed a curveball? Do you let them throw you a strike or do you swing for the fences? Stay on your feet, keep your eyes open for new campaigns, and have a backup plan in case of emergency. Davey Z and I have talked things over and we’ll meet tonight to hammer out our new plan just in time for the weekend.
4. Learn to move on. Don’t let little setbacks like this keep you down. Sure, we were only running 2 campaigns. This one was our “big” one…it generated most of our income last month. Oh well. Big whoop. We’ll find something else and kick our strategies up a notch.

I learned a few lessons this past week about affiliate marketing. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you don’t face the same problems that I did. Remember to stay on your feet, pay attention to your campaigns, and most importantly, don’t ever give up!

March is here and February is already over. Even with leap day and February being a “long” month this time around, I just feel as though time flew by. These few weeks have been exciting and fast-paced. They’ve included seeing the start of new ventures as well as seeing other ventures continue to work.

Online business is never boring and one of the key benefits to making money online is that you can see results and gather data very quickly. In less than 1 month, Davey Z and I have learned a lot about search engine marketing and gathered enough data to be able to anticipate and predict certain patters in our trial campaign. We hope to be able to take what we’ve learned in the last few weeks and scale our projects to make us more money this month, so that we can reinvest it and keep growing.

This is what this month looked like:

In January, my eBay sites had started off nicely, earning me roughly $3.50 per day. February showed a little bit of a slowdown for these sites, although I believe this has to do with my lack of effort in updating those sites. For the month of February, those eBay sites made roughly $2.87 per day, or about $83. Although this is a low number and I’d like to see much better results from those sites, it’s important to remember that I did absolutely no work on those sites this month nor did I invest 1 penny into buying new products/plugins or any advertising. This is $83 that go right into my technology savings fund.

In addition to the made for Ebay sites that are making me some money online, I also kept up this blog and started on a search engine marketing campaign with Davey Z. The blog’s performance was similar to last month’s, although advertising sales are still sluggish. Do you want to see your ad on my site? Contact me by 5pm on Wednesday, March 5th and I’ll give you a special rate! Thanks to Claire from Sharp Wit Designs and a few paid reviews, this site earned $40.50.

The part about this income report that I’m most excited about is the SEM report. Starting in the last few days of January, Davey Z and I launched and managed 4 different campaigns. Two of them turned out to do well and two of them turned out to be dogs. We ditched the dogs and kept the ones that worked. That being said, our total income from our SEM campaign topped out at $721.25. Not bad for our first month, eh? Our total cost for running these campaigs was $367.79, but given that we used some promo coupons to get us started, our adjusted costs came to be only $84.87, for a grant profit of $636.38. This is a great first month! We are going to reinvest these earnings and go all out in March. Hopefully to see these numbers keep growing!

2008 is off to a great start. Breaking records and learning new things, I’ve been able to add to my arsenal of webtrepreneurship. I hope that March is a better month than February; given that Davey Z and I already have a bit of experience with SEM and have data to helps us know what to expect, we hope to keep trucking along and pushing the envelope of our SEM skills.

I woke up this morning feeling somehow weirded out and invigorated all at once. I had the weirdest dream that transcended time and space, and yet it felt strangely real somehow. I dreamed that I had Jeremy over for a Coke.

Let me first say that I really enjoy reading Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog. His business sense, opinions, and radio show are very helpful and his online personality appears to be transparent; that is, what you see online seems to be what you get in real life. He seems to be genuine in his communications and although he doesn’t explicitly reveal much of “how” he does things, he does provide helpful tips to those wanting to better their craft.

One thing that I find kind of scary is that somehow, my thoughts of online exploits have started creeping into my dream life. I don’t normally remember too many of my dreams, but this one was so vivid! It started out with me meeting Jeremy at some conference somewhere. I was my same age, but he was a lot older than me. We hit it off and were talking about his latest ventures and how I could help him to do even better. As an aside, I have been working on a project that I think could help him to squeeze more money from his blog, but that’s a different story for a different time. So, the conference was coming to an end and I feel like I still had too many questions to ask him…so I got the guts to invite him and his wife and kid to come to my house sometime. He graciously accepted my invite and they showed up a few minutes later. This is a dream, remember.

Upon arrival, I was immediately embarrassed by my tiny home. Normally, I don’t feel that my place is too small, but in this dream it really was quite inadequate. Maybe it was a representation of my level of knowledge versus Jeremy’s, or perhaps it was me feeling quite small compared to him. After all, he is a very successful webtrepreneur and I am still a newbie. He’s made millions online and I’ve made only hundreds. He has over 15,000 RSS readers and I don’t yet have 100. So, my house seemed tiny. I didn’t even have his drink of choice, which according to my dream was a Coke. I offered him a Diet Pepsi Max instead.

So after a long time of inspecting my tiny house, Jeremy sits down and lets me ask him some questions. At this point, his face was old and reminded me of a guy I used to work with. Thick white hair, ballcap, wrinkles, and yellow teeth. However, whenever he spoke, his face went back to being that of what I see on his blog. His voice and words of advice were energetic and lifted my spirits. By the time we were done talking, my house was bigger and more comfortable. And he was suddenly drinking an ice cold Coke.

We talked mostly about SEM. He gave me some tips and told me to “go big or go home”, which is a motto that I have grasped since starting my online exploits. This dream, surreal as it may have been, helped me to wake up today with several new ideas and strategies to try in the month of March. As you’ll see in my next few posts, February has broken my earnings record and my SEM campaigns with Davey Z have done well. We still have a lot to learn but thanks to Shoemoney, I feel like I’ve gained some insight overnight.

It should come as no surprise that getting listed and indexed by Google is very important to your blog or business website. I run a few different affiliate websites and the fact that the sites are indexed by Google is the only reason why they are currently making money. Given that the sites are not performing extremely well for any particular keyword, visitors continue to find my sites when they type their searches on Google. Without Google, there would be no traffic to these websites and by now you should know that I think traffic is the new gold.

I have been building websites for a long time now, but within the last year I have been building sites with the hopes of making money online. I have tried several ventures in the past; coupon sites, tech reviews, eBay sites, affiliate sites, and blogs. Out of those sites, the most important aspect has been making them visible to other users through search engines (read: Google).

Why do Search Engines Matter?

The goal of any website is to have visitors, and to that end, there are basically 2 ways to get traffic. The first way would be to pay for traffic. This includes advertising on search engines, other websites, or through offline campaigns such as newspaper ads, television ads, or other means such as fliers or handouts. Alternatively, you could try to get free traffic. Free traffic happens when people either know your website’s address, are recommended by someone and follow the link, or find your site through search engines.

The cons of paid advertising are straightforward. Firstly and most obviously, it costs money. Many new sites and blogs don’t have a budget to advertise nor do they feel the need to advertise their site. Secondly, advertising is not always sticky. What I mean is that once your advertising budget runs out, people will not necessarily remember your site nor will they remember how to get there. You’ll get a spike in traffic while your campaign is running but as soon as it stops, your traffic will drop down to zero.

The pros of free traffic are more interesting. Firstly, it’s free. Nothing is required from you and people find you based on their needs and searches. Secondly, the hits you get are contextual and your visitors are more likely to take action (subscribe to an RSS feed, click through an affiliate link, etc…) because they found you based on results from a search they willingly performed. So here’s the question: how do you get free traffic?

The holy grail of free traffic lies with placing well in search results. Your search engine ranking position (SERP) is crucial to gaining free traffic and if you place in the first page of a search engine for a given search, you will be seeing a significant amount of traffic. Within these results, the higher you rank the more hits you will receive. In order to place well in search engines, you must first get indexed. This step is crucial and trivial, but you can do a lot to help your chances.

Use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a set of utilities provided free of charge from Google. Within GWT, you are able to submit your site to Google along with a sitemap for your site.

After finding Google Webmaster Tools, your next step should be to add your site. This is simple, just type your URL in the dashboard and click on “Add Site”.

After you have added your site, you will need to verify it. For this step, you’ll need to figure out how you want to verify the site. You can do that either by uploading a file to your server or by adding a meta tag to your index page. Either way you choose, you need to verify your page.

As the last step, you need to add a sitemap to your site profile. The first thing you need to do is create the sitemap. If you don’t know how to do this, you can either install the Wordpress plugin or you can go to the free XML sitemap generator and create a sitemap you can upload to your site.

After you have added your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and your site has been verified, chances are that your site will be added to Google’s index. For me, this normally takes only a few days but some people claim to be able to do it in hours. I call “BS” on those people and think they’re full of it.

This is how your dashboard should look like once things are all done:

By this time you should be indexed in Google and ready to receive hits to your site. Your placement will vary depending on keywords on your site and competition for those keywords but this is the basic framework for getting added to Google and placing on search engines. After this you need to work on your site in order to place well. But that’s another post.