Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg Start a Gay Relationship

Firstly, I’m not suggesting Matt Cutts & Matt Mullenweg are gay or having sexual relations, what I’m referring to is the big gay totally-blown-out-of-proportion hoo-har in the Wordpress community about the use of ’sponsored themes’.

Sponsored themes can be used by anyone who uses Wordpress, free of charge, with the actual design of the themes supported by advertisers whom pay to have their URL at the bottom of the theme. The designer or creator of the theme receives money for their handy work.

Well that’s cool - right? Yeah, you would think so.. I mean, look at Template Monster where designers put Wordpress themes up and charge $300+ for the use - what sponsored themes for Wordpress do is allow anyone to use great looking themes for free, the only ‘cost’ is keeping the advertisers link at the bottom intact. You know, like software supported by advertising.

A bit like… search engines (and their staffs pay packets) supported by advertising.

A bit like… Wordpress supported by Matt Mullenweg creating un-related pages on asbestos, debt consolidation etc to game the search engines not so long ago using the high PR power of Wordpress.org from guess what? Having the ‘Powered by Wordpress’ link on every single damn un-modified Wordpress blog out there.

So I really don’t get why Matt Cutts or Matt Mullenweg have beef and are speaking out against sponsored themes. Sure if it was themes that were malicious or had hacker exploits in them, remove them from Wordpress.org etc - else just ensure sponsored themes are labelled, explain what that means and leave it as such.

Sponsored themes rock-on, not everyone can afford the cost of custom themes or the high price tags on Template Monster, and most ‘free’ themes are garbage, it only takes a brief look on Alex King’s popular Theme Viewer to notice that.

How Many Turds Have You Thrown at the Money Wall?

Exploring why old online business projects failed is crucial to fine-tuning our knowledge as marketers, and in them lies the secrets to future success.

I’d like to tell you about my most prominent failures and in return invite you to have your say at the bottom of the entry telling me and anyone else who reads this yours - I’m positive we can all learn from each others mistakes.

Personally I can think of 3 failures, or turds as I call them, that I have thrown at the wall of internet marketing success, not making the actual stick.

The fact I can only think of 3 inspires me as 3 isn’t that many at all - giving much hope to my current projects in development that I have applied the skills learned from the 3 failures I’m now going to mention:

1. Content Websites using Google Adsense

I believe I got in to this game way to late - I was under the impression that with quality content that wasn’t duplicate, which I had freelancers write for many, many websites that it would be possible to rank for hundreds of search phrases that weren’t searched for much.

Unfortunately while I had brief success with MSN Search due to it’s lax algorithm and favor of websites hosted in the UK, Google wasn’t having any of it.Even with plenty of back links built using free directories and paid directories and frequently updated content, the new sandbox (at the time) kept all of the content websites from ranking for anything at all.

I perhaps made a few hundred dollars with content sites and Adsense, and a few thousand dollars when I sold them as they weren’t making enough for my liking - never more than $8 per day.

2. Ecommerce Online Store using Google Adwords

As previously mentioned in my blog this was a venture that led to my bankruptcy. I imported select collectible items from the USA in to the UK and sold them using Google Adwords, which worked briefly until the errors I made in buying a lot of useless stock caught up with me and I headed right in to debt.

I’m re-starting this venture with more smarts this time 5 years on - time will tell if it becomes another turd welded on my wall of failed projects.

3. Pregnancy Fitness Guide on Clickbank

This wasn’t too well thought out - I ended up trying to market a product created for women who had just had their baby (it was on losing weight after pregnancy) to women who were still pregnant.I modified the guide to include information on having a healthy pregnancy but hit a stumbling block.

It was quite some time ago and I lacked some serious knowledge on marketing and sales copy etc. I sold the website and guide eventually for a few thousand dollars and moved on.

Have a think about your most prominent failures and share your thoughts on what went wrong using the ‘Have Your Say’ link to the bottom right of this post.

Creative Thinking & Why Shoemoney is a C.U.N.T.

Shoemoney, aka Jeremy Shoemaker, is a huge online financial success, from being debt ridden to earning over a million dollars per year, and it’s time for me to call him out as a C.U.N.T.

That’s right - he’s a Creative, Undeniable, Naked* Talent.

* The naked refers to the admission he works butt-naked in his basement developing uber-code. I suspect he may be telling porkie’s there, but experience tells me these developer types can be very, very strange.

To get to the point, I’d like to explore creativity and its helping hand in success, and the reason I’ve chosen Jeremy to head this entry is that I have heard him on numerous occasions emphasizing creativity as a primary tool of success plus I’m going to use one of his success stories as an example.

Let’s get started - what is creativity?

This seems like a dumb question to ask, but it’s not. I believe it’s important to understand what creativity actually is and break it down in to specific examples.

Creativity isn’t just thinking of a new idea or cooking up some weird hair-brained scheme, and you don’t need to wear a funny hat or roll a doobie to get the creative juices flowing.

The Dictionary definition of creativity is: “The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations”

For our purpose as cash-hungry online entrepreneurs, let’s add “..and turn them in to products or services that have the potential to generate revenue”.

In the simplest form, taking old websites, services or product functionality and using modern tools and technology to create meaningful new forms of interactions and delivering content or services to website visitors or prospects.

In the example below with the recently launched Auction Ads (by Shoemoney), the now-standard contextual method of advertising by Google Adsense (which was very creative in itself) is combined with the idea of serving up ads from eBay’s affiliate program to form a “meaningful, new method” of delivering advertising and generating revenue for our websites.

It’s smart, it’s creative and yet so very, very simple. I don’t know much about the business end of Auction Ads, but I suspect this technology could be sold to eBay for an extremely large and disgusting amount of money if that’s the route Auction Ads wish to take, though I don’t get the impression that’s what is going on here.

Example number 2: The Rich Jerk E-Book, a get rich online package.

The Rich Jerk E-BookThere are hundreds if not thousands of get rich quick packages on the Internet. Most are marketed the same, have similar names and don’t jump out and grab you at all - The Rich Jerk by Kelly Felix not only jumped out and grabbed you - it insulted you, smacked you around the head and called you a loser while boasting what a wonderful life The Rich Jerk had.

It provoked a response that shocked but also made you laugh which had this great charm about it and made you curious about what it contained inside. It was a concept, idea and above all else a product to fall in love with before you even purchased.

The Rich Jerk quick became the best-selling product on Clickbank and continues to be amongst the top few get rich products out. Can you say C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E? There was only one, again, very simple ‘tweak’ to the old get rich quick mantra, and that was in the branding and marketing used.

The same information contained in the Rich Jerk can be found in most packages, yet they will never attain the success or status of the Rich Jerk.

Applying creativity to your own products or websites

It’s clear if we get our creativity on there is potential for making some really nice money online. If you own your own websites of products (or are stuck for new ideas), here’s what you can do to get the ideas flowing:

Check out successful and innovative products in closely related or other industries completely - you can venture as far away as possible from your niche and explore. Look around, what services, features or technologies are other companies using on their websites or products that you could apply to your own?

Do you run a website with a discussion forum? Think about features on Myspace that you could apply to your own forums that will improve interaction with your members. Don’t go all out and buy a script that emulates Myspace, but pick a few features and implement them.

Do you run a membership website that sends out tips on property investment? Why not take the standard property search and develop a service that searches property for sale in their local area with specific attributes for investment buyers, which e-mails them between your tips, creating more value and ensuring better retention levels from subscribers. This could be a whole new website idea in itself.

Once you get in to the right mind-state, being creative becomes easy. Write ideas down, research them, check the market if one exists, don’t be afraid to try something new - that’s what it’s all about. Out with the old, in with the new.

You can even dive in on a limited budget, so there’s no excuse. If you need coding done, bring in a programmer from college or university who could do with a few extra bucks or who would be interested in becoming a partner or a share-holder and would do the work for free. Creativity doesn’t just stop at thinking of new-fangled website and product ideas.

Step outside that box and get your creativity on - I know I am.

P.S. Jeremy didn’t pose in a C.U.N.T. t-shirt, I modified this photo from his gallery.

Vendor or Affiliate: To be or not to be?

As most internet marketers go, they spend their time using their own money and hard-learned skills promoting other peoples products for a commission. Some make millions doing it, some make a living. I do neither though I am looking in to the affiliate side.

The premise behind being an affiliate marketer is that it’s easier to promote someone else’s product rather than create your own, however, it’s extremely difficult to market other peoples products as any affiliate marketer would admit.

The list of reasons why promoting other peoples products is hard work is endless, yet it’s easier to promote others than create your own? I don’t believe that.

Let’s look at the vendor, the person who creates the services or products affiliates are promoting. When it comes to affiliates, in my opinion, the vendor can laugh all the way to the bank. Where’s the risk in allowing affiliates to promote your products, providing you have a good lawyer? :)

Sure, it may be difficult setting up a service and if you chose the wrong sort of service it could cause a massive headache with customer care - which is why I wouldn’t ever create a product or service that required support or any interaction with the customer after purchase except for if they’re requesting a refund.

The vendor also needs to invest money in good sales copy (e.g. e-books) or may need to out-source technical work (such as programming a service) which could cost in the hundreds or thousands. I believe the rewards for owning your own product though far make it the better choice. See how I’m in the middle of creating 2 products for Clickbank as a vendor. It’s not that difficult.

Here’s a question: If you’re promoting someone else’s e-book right now from Clickbank and earning $50 per day - and you know there’s at least 5 competitors on Adwords probably making a similar amount.. why not think about creating your own competing product, making it better, with better sales copy, advertise your own product and then contact those affiliates and let them try their hand at promoting your product instead?

Instead of $50 per day from promoting someone else’s product, you could be earning up to $500 or more. I think experienced affiliate marketers really ought to look in to developing their own products once they have succesfully promoted others. What better way to start, really.

Revisiting a Venture with Experience after Bankruptcy

When I was 18 years old (I’m now 24) in 2002 I ran an e-commerce store importing specific collectible items from the USA and selling them to customers in the United Kingdom.

I made many mistakes during this first online venture, which were:

Buying as many varied items as I could without thinking whether or not customers would actually want them - I was under the illusion of the more variations I bought, however silly, that I would be able to sell more. This led to thousands of pounds worth of stock sitting in a storage unit that I couldn’t get rid of and had to sell in bulk for way under the price I actually paid for them.

…There was my first lesson in to market research.

There were only a few items that sold well but I ran out of these after a few weeks and business grinded to a halt - the first few weeks things flew - I had $200-700 per day in pure profit, but it didn’t last when I run out of the good stock.

Another problem was I was using Worldpay to take payments and they didn’t send me the funds from payments for 6 weeks so I hit a massive cash-flow problem that I hadn’t planned or made provisions for, as I wasn’t able to re-stock with the items that customers actually wanted.

…There was my lesson in planning finances and the importance of cash-flow.

Due to this error of buying items that simply wouldn’t sell and not being able to afford to re-stock with the hot sellers, it meant I ended up going in to a lot of debt as I was also having to pay $900/month in rent for the office and storage (12 month contract) for all the many swords - also because I carried on living as normal and neglected the problem, which ultimately led to my bankruptcy, which I was dis-charged from last year in 2006.

…There were too many lessons to mention! *groan*

Now that I’m debt free, I’m going to start-up a similar business selling the same items but approaching the whole venture from an angle of experience.

This time around:

You may think I’m insane re-starting up a business that led me to bankruptcy, but the difference is, it’s only costing me $150 at most to test the waters 4 years later in the same industry.. and I won’t be making any of the same mistakes again.

I don’t believe failed business ventures are like ex-girlfriends, and I believe by going about it the right way, by re-visiting this particular one there’s a chance for success that I can’t let slip simply because of some very silly mistakes I made previously.

Here’s a quote I plucked off Google on mistakes which made me laugh…

“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from” - Al Franken

Faceparty.com Super Free Advertising Trick for the UK

Faceparty is one of the largest UK social networking websites with a sub 1,300 Alexa ranking and receives over a million visitors every day.

They recently revamped their website and on the front page, instead of the standard advertising banner that they used to display, they now allow members to TXT in their user names from a UK mobile phone and they will feature the profile as you can see below:

This is obviously a prime location and needs taking advantage of!

Notice the profile on the far left of the scantily clad woman - well let’s take a look at the statistics on her profile, shall we?

The profile was created on the 4th of April, they are obviously using this ‘TXT’ trick to advertise and already the profile has over 72,000 views - climbing at around 30 views every 2 minutes (and that’s just now at 1:23am UK time, it would get far more during peak hours). It works out around 18,000 visitors to the profile every day.

I did a little test on Faceparty a while back and around 2% of the visitors to the profile clicked through to the website I was advertising. That means, 18,000 x 2% = 360 visitors.

The key factor to succeeding using this method is obviously the default thumbnail that you use for the profile - you’re looking for a high CTR (visitors to click-thru’s to the profile) so a woman in a suggestive pose or dressed wearing little will work wonders here.

What this particular advertiser is doing - and it’s very clever - is asking guys to TXT in her member name to Faceparty - so instead of paying £1.50 per time, they’re getting guys to do it and keep her in the advertising block for free.

Now, in their favorite websites field they list the website they’re funneling traffic to which is www.sexxxy-ads.co.uk - where they list women the men can allegedly hook-up with for sex by calling a number which costs them £1.50 per minute. Obviously, the guys will be kept on the phone as long as possible, either by staff or an automated service (probably the latter, I haven’t actually called the number).

So let’s wrap this up:

If you create a profile on Faceparty and ask guys to TXT your member name in to Faceparty with a rude incentive, you get prominent advertising by way of a featured profile on the front page and thousands of views per day, generating hundreds of visitors to a website of your choice - absolutely free. By creating many profiles and doing a similar thing on them all, I believe this has potential to generate hundreds of pounds/day.

Get on the bandwagon quick before it’s too late.

The Pedophiles are coming

In my entry “Search Terms Pedophiles Use To Get Themselves Off” I listed popular search terms pedophiles and perverts use to find photos of naked children.

I should of expected this really but now they’re coming to my blog using those terms.

Here’s the analytics from the traffic coming from Google:

That’s one group of people I won’t be creating content for.

I also did a little more research and used Google Trends on the term “nude preteen girls” and found that New Zealand, Pakistan and South Africa are by far the leaders when it comes to people searching online for this crap:

Membership Website Software, Billing & Hosting

The other day I mentioned what to think about when starting up a membership website and how it isn’t as easy as one may think at first. Continuing on from that first article I’m going to explore the software available to run membership websites and the few options available for receiving recurring payments, along with the importance of a good hosting company.

Software available for running a membership website

From the research I’ve done the biggest player with the most trust and credibility with a large user base is Amember. It’s currently on offer for $139.95 and to me it looks like the VBulletin of the membership software world - and at that price there’s little reason to chose a sub-standard, cheaper alternative. It’s just not worth the risk.

Let’s look at some of the key features of Amember:

It really is the dogs bollocks (that means frickin’ awesome). It supports over 60+ payment processors including the popular ones like PayPal, 2Checkout and CCBill. You can view the full list here. I’m going to compare these payments processors in a minute.

Amember also offers a free 30 day trial which I tested out. It’s simple to install even for a novice who hates anything technical like myself, and if it was in the least bit difficult to install I wouldn’t even be writing about it and I would hate it like an e-mail form script I tried to install last week and give up on. Yes, Amember is easier to install than a simple e-mail form script. Credit where credit is due…

What you basically do with Amember is create web pages, example www.domain.com/members/index.html - which then becomes a product that you insert in to the Amember administration area. Then you set-up the membership levels so members can access it. You can also set-up other products that only certain members can access, etc. It’s all very easy.

Setting up recurring billing and which payment processor to use

Here we go with my opinions again, but hey, it’s my blog - whaddya expect. :)

There are only 3 payment process I personally would consider using:

Now, they all offer recurring billing but we really need to take a brief look at each one to see which are suitable, the advantages and any disadvantages.

PayPal

The biggest advantage to using PayPal is that you’re paid instantly - funds are direct in to your account which you can use right away or withdraw to your bank account.

It’s also difficult for subscribers to cancel as you have to dig around in PayPal History, find the subscription and then cancel it from within PayPal. You could say this is a disadvantage, but if people want to leave and are having trouble - why not let them figure it out, and if they can’t, throw an extra month of subscription your way automatically.

PayPal fee’s are low when compared to other payment processors and they only skim off 1.4 to 3.4% off each transaction received.

The disadvantage to using PayPal is the many horror stories lurking around the Internet. Personally I have used PayPal for years and never experienced any problem, but then so have others and that didn’t stop their accounts going under suspicion. Accounts can be suspended for months and funds frozen if your account is under suspicion for any number of reasons.

Using PayPal for day to day sending and receiving payments is fine and if your membership site is only going to run for a few months, but I believe if you’re going to run a proper business that needs to stand the test of time, PayPal isn’t an option here.

2Checkout

2Checkout take 5.5% + $0.45 off each transaction and costs $49 to set-up - but it’s the credibility and safe-guard which makes me sway toward using 2Checkout. There are no horror stories and are well established. They pay every 2 weeks or every week and those in America, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom can have payments sent direct to our bank accounts at no cost. Other countries are supported for wire transfers.

I can’t actually think of a disadvantage - they may take a fair amount off each transaction but that’s a small price to pay.

CCBill

The choice for adult webmasters and those wanting to peddle smut with their membership websites. PayPal and 2Checkout don’t allow adult sites, and CCBill has been the favorite in the adult industry for subscription billing for years. CCBill takes 14.5% off each transaction, which comes down if you’re doing a lot of volume - but the lowest percentage is still 11.5% for up to 50,000 transactions per month.

In this case, the advantage (peddling smut) is also the disadvantage on payment. But this is one of few companies which has a solid reputation and the one I would chose if I were to enter the ‘adult industry’.

Choosing a good host with back-up facilities

If you have a few thousand of even a few hundred paying members, the last thing you want is for them all to lose their usernames/passwords and be unable to access the site, as they will head off straight to the payment processor and cancel their subscription.

Website’s, servers.. they all crash. They all fuck-up sooner or later, therfore it’s crucial to chose a host that offers daily back-up facilities. You can back-up your entire website every day, or hour if you wish. Definately don’t skimp on hosting. You will also require hosting that supports the full requirements of Amember. They recommend 3 hosting companies but Hostgater or another solid host will be just fine.

I mentioned in the previous entry on membership sites that I would talk about making sales on the back-end, but I’ll save that for another article - this one is long enough with plenty to chew on. If you didn’t catch the first entry, read it here.

Discover 2 Million Keywords In Hours Using Wordtracker

I’m going to share a technique I started using last week where-by you can extract more keywords than the 1,000 limit in Wordtracker and build a far larger list of keywords for your niche.

Let’s take the topic and keyword ‘blood pressure’ and enter it in to Wordtracker, which returns the maximum 1,000 results - 10 pages with 100 keywords on each.

Obviously there are more keywords for blood pressure behind the first 1,000.. but first let’s use the export tool and take the first 1,000 in to Excel…

Then we save the file to the hard drive and open it in Excel..

Now leave the Excel file open in the background and return to the Wordtracker query search box again.

This time to break past the 1,000 keywords barrier and discover more keywords on blood pressure we’re going to take the most popular results from ‘blood pressure’, which are ‘high blood pressure’, ‘low blood pressure’ and ‘normal blood pressure’ and do a search for each of these keywords individually.

First let’s do the search on ‘high blood pressure’ which also brings up the maximum of 1,000 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Now let’s search for ‘low blood pressure’ which only brings up 200 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Finally search for ‘normal blood pressure’ which brings up 115 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Now you should have 4 Excel files from the original search for ‘blood pressure’, ‘high blood pressure’, ‘low blood pressure’ and ‘normal blood pressure…

If you follow this to the letter, you will also still have open the 1,000 list of ‘blood pressure’ keywords. Keep that open but also open the 3 other Excel files.

Now begin to highlight and copy & paste all of the keywords from the 3 Excel files to the original ‘blood pressure’ keyword list. I shouldn’t need to explain how to do this.

While you do this, you will probably think hey up Pete, there’s obviously duplicate keywords in these lists, and you’re right - once you’re done copying and pasting I’ll get to that. :)

Ok, so now you should have an Excel file with a list of 2,834 keywords, including duplicates, so let’s filter those out right away by following these steps:

1. Make sure you have 3 columns labeled, in this case ‘Keywords’, ‘Searches’ and ‘Estimated Searches and then drag from A-C to highlight all 3 columns and all of the keywords.

2. Click Data > Filter > Advanced Filter:

3. Check the ‘Unique Records’ box and click OK:

Now you need to be careful - you will notice the numbers in the columns on the left turn blue, and it’s at this point you click EDIT > COPY.

3. Start a blank work sheet (FILE > NEW > BLANK WORKSHEET) and click EDIT > PASTE:

Now you will be presented with a list of keywords with any duplicates filtered out. Notice there are now only 2,363 keywords:

Now have at it! I used this exact method to build a keyword list of over 2 million related keywords in around 4-5 hours. We could of kept putting more of the original ‘blood pressure’ keywords in to Wordtracker instead of just the original 3 secondary phrases and built a list far larger than this, but this was just for an example.

In my opinion this is the best method of using Wordtracker for discovering keywords to use for PPC (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, AdCenter etc).

Now, do you know anyone paying cash for blood pressure leads? :)

Search Terms Pedophiles Use To Get Themselves Off

As an ‘online marketer’ I use keyword tools like Wordtracker to research subjects and potential markets. Unfortunately when using these tools there’s massively common and disturbing occurrences which any sane person cannot fail to notice.

My personal opinion regarding pedophiles or perverts of a similar persuasion is that as long as they aren’t actively harming children, trying to groom or abuse them in any way, it’s cool - whatever. I’m sure they cannot help feeling sexually attracted to children, but it’s in their actions which ultimately decide whether I believe we should cut their bollocks off or shoot them in the face for the safety of other children.

The following is just a tiny selection of keywords Wordtracker is showing which are disturbing to say the least. I will include comparisons with other search terms so there’s an idea of the level of ‘popularity’ these search terms have:

Search Term Searches   Search Term Searches
preteen girls 10,279 >> music videos 10,181
preteen boys 2,639 >> beyonce naked 2,306
underage girls 5,276 >> web design 5,430
nude preteen girls 1,818 >> irs tax forms 1,902
young girls in underwear 1,272 >> download free ringtones 1,280
naked 13 year old girls 1,156 >> eminem lyrics 1,105
preteen girls nude 1,116 >> comcast cable 1,188
13 year old girls 1,078 >> free internet radio 1,090
illegal girls 1,047 >> free virus scan 1,032
naked preteen girls 987 >> ipod movies 981
photos of nude preteen girls 938 >> internet radio stations 927
illegal young girls 920 >> internet security 945
12 year old girls 862 >> ipod video 892
14 year old girls 867 >> car loans 844
preteen girls nude pictures 712 >> small business loans 725
naked little boys 656 >> us patent office 645
preteen girls masterbating 647 >> msn messenger download 635
nude preteen boys 605 >> download free clipart 604

preteen models gets 40,500 searches, and you know exactly the demographic that makes up the bulk of that search.

All of those search terms are very highly searched for. I don’t even go after keywords unless they’re below 400 searches. There are more people searching for photos of nude children then car loans, IRS tax forms and even music videos.

I dread to think of the long tail of these types of keywords - you’re obviously talking in the millions and it’s clear this ‘problem’ in society obviously goes very, very deep indeed.

Digg this entry if you believe it’s of interest to others

Discuss.