Making Internet Marketing a Sideline & Getting a Job

Posted in: General, Marketing and Promotion, Business July, last year

After much booze and contemplation I’ve reached the conclusion that there’s a point when you must jack it in (albeit not completely), if only to progress and get on with some sort of life!

After 5 years of some success (but not enough to live off) it’s time to get a ‘real’ job.

I’m demoting Internet Marketing to a sideline and I’ll be working less and less on it as I work a normal day job to support myself.

(This replaces a blog I wrote saying I’m jacking it in completely which I decided wasn’t true after sobering up a little) :)

Have your say (4 comments) 4:15 am

How Many Turds Have You Thrown at the Money Wall?

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Business April, last year

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.

Have your say (no comments, be the first!) 12:44 am

Vendor or Affiliate: To be or not to be?

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Affiliate Marketing, PPC - Pay Per Click April, last year

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.

Have your say (1 comment) 3:15 pm

Faceparty.com Super Free Advertising Trick for the UK

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion April, last year

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.

Have your say (9 comments) 12:36 am

Membership Websites; What’s The Catch?

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Membership Websites April, last year

It’s the dream - a steady and reliable income from the Internet that you can count on, month after month. Forget flaky search engine rankings and ever-improving algorithms designed by uber-nerds to induce stress, anxiety and frustration in online marketers.

On the face of it membership websites seem to offer the holy grail that is residual income. Unfortunately there’s a catch. Oh, there’s always a catch.. but you knew that. We all bloody know that. Membership websites just aren’t that simple.

I’m considering starting up a couple of membership websites later in the year and I’ve been doing a lot of research on the subject a long with a lot of head scratching. It’s far more complicated than it seems on the surface.

Members will not stay with you forever

The first thought I had when thinking of membership sites was ‘If I have 1,000 members paying $10/month that’s $10,000 in revenue each month. Fantastic!’.. this however, while exciting to imagine, is not the reality when you dig in to it all.

The fact is, members that sign up will not last forever. At some point they will unsubscribe or simply not wish to use the service any longer no matter how great your content or website is. This goes for any membership site meaning the income isn’t that steady after all, and there will be an average life-time value of each paying subscriber.

So much for the dream of residual income. What you’re basically doing by running a membership site is instead of selling a product one-off for $27, you’re hoping to extract a larger amount off each member over a longer period of time. Let’s say $67. This means you can either spend more money to acquire members or a similar amount and earn more off them than you would of selling them a single one-off product.

That’s the primary catch over with; don’t be fooled in to thinking you can relax once you have a level of paying members. They will drop off at a certain rate each and every month, meaning your income dwindles unless you’re actively promoting and advertising for new members. This is a complicated process to keep a track of as you would need to know:

Finding out the above figures will take months and hundreds of members, meaning cost, time and effort before you even know if the membership site you’re running is even profitable! Of course, if you’re acquiring members via free methods of advertising and creating the content for your membership site yourself, this isn’t a problem and it’s all gravy. That probably isn’t going to be the case though, so let’s look at the costs in creating content and break even examples.

What to create a membership on

Personally I believe if you’re asking people to subscribe at a monthly fee, you must look at targeting groups who you definitely know can afford to pay monthly. While a teenager who wants to make money may be able to afford The Rich Jerk e-book from the money he received for his birthday for a special one-off price of $9, they certainly couldn’t pay $9 the month after, and again after that.

I would look at markets such as investment, stocks, gambling, leisure, sports which are expensive to play etc and markets that generally attract the wealthy or people will money to spare but also includes an active interest and not a flash in the pan hobby they may not care about in a few weeks - common sense tells us this will reduce drop-off rates and increase the length members are subscribed to your membership website.

The cost of content creation, membership fee’s and your break even point

Alright, you’ve chosen your market and decided to offer personal advice as you’re a successful stock trader with a record to back it up. People want your tips and are willing to pay you $19 per month for them.

You can either create the content yourself and offer articles, videos, presentations and audio, or out-source the work to a knowledge writer or someone in the industry. Let’s say you want to focus more on advertising your website and would prefer someone else to create the content - costing $650/month for 5 original articles, 2 stock tips and a video presentation that includes time-frames of stocks and some general advice.

Charging members $19/month you would require 34 paid and current members just to break even - and that’s not the actual reality, as the cost of acquiring those members must be factored in before you’re breaking even. This can be worked out after your first handful of members, here’s an example:

Let’s say you spent $300 on an Adwords campaign in the first month targeting stock and investment keywords which got you 1,200 clicks costing $0.25 each, and there was a click to membership ratio of 3% - 36 paid members. That’s an acquisition cost of $12.50 per paid member, meaning the first month the statistics where:

Did I mention there was a catch?

Ok - let’s say in month two you increased your spending on Adwords and paid 0.25 again but for 5,000 clicks. That’s $1,250 to acquire another 150 paying members.

Assuming no members from month one unsubscribed you now have a total of 186 members paying $19/month.

Month 2 statistics:

Now we’re getting somewhere and breaking even - wohoo. :)

Ok, that’s all for now - I made my point and I’m tired as hell. I will be posting a part 2 for this as it really, really demands one. In part 2 I will look at making more revenue off the back-end, membership site software, hosting, payment processors and more…

Have your say (2 comments) 3:11 am

Steal Competitors Keywords With KeyCompete.com

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Ringtones, Google Adwords, PPC - Pay Per Click April, last year

Given that I’m running a test with ringtones, during my keyword research I bumped in to a website called KeyCompete that claim they can discover your competitors keywords by entering their domain name, or simply entering a keyword - and it pulls a list of websites and their keywords for you to download.

I paid for a days access at $19 to see what it’s like, and here’s what I managed to do…

I remembered Shoemoney mentioned a website promoting ringtones called downloadrings.com, so I entered the URL in to KeyCompete and it returned 736 keywords. Interesting I thought - how does it find these keywords? I’m guessing it scrapes the website pulling off what it deems to be keywords but I aren’t sure.

What I do know is, it seems to work to some extent:

Example of keywords it returned:

Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with just this, so I entered the keyword ‘ringtones’ in to KeyCompete and it gave me a list of websites, one being pimpmytones.net which had the largest number of keywords to ’steal’. How many? 7,259…

Here’s the first 20:

Ok - this is pretty interesting stuff. I also downloaded all of Jamster’s reported keywords (7,666) and a boat-load of other ringtone websites keywords. I reached my daily query limit but in total I racked up over 20,000 keywords.

Not bad for half an hours work, huh? Visit KeyCompete to learn more.

Have your say (1 comment) 11:25 am

Test Campaign For Ringtones Started 300 Clicks for $50

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Ringtones, Affiliate Marketing, Azoogleads, Google Adwords March, last year

As mentioned a few days ago I applied to Azoogleads to promote their ringtone offers but I also applied to Maxbounty and Jamster on Commission Junction. Maxbounty approved me minutes ago so I’ve started my test campaign with them

I created a small test campaign using $50 and I’m paying 0.16 (with any luck) per click for 300 clicks on Adwords. The campaign is very targetted therfore I’m expecting at least 1 lead. I don’t expect to break even, but 1 lead would suggest it’s worthwhile persueing the avenue I am in regards to keywords. If I get a poor conversion, I’ll call it a success, wait for when I can promote Azooglead’s offers and get serious with promoting ringtones.

Watch this space for results of my test.

Have your say (2 comments) 1:54 pm

There’s a New Jerk in Town & He’s Bigger!!!

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion November, years ago

This guy would knock the Rich Jerk on his ass in a second: The Muscly Jerk

Comments, suggestions, questions or think you can help market this product for a juicy 75% commision?

Then Drop me an e-mail before it’s listed in the Clickbank Marketplace and every other affiliate gets their grubby paws on it.

Have your say (no comments, be the first!) 1:24 am