Phil Rogers' Online Marketing

Different Priorities

2011-07-15T11:36:00.002+01:00

My plans to blog on here on a daily basis went completely to pot. I'm not going to offer any feeble excuses - I just kept forgetting, or didn't have anything interesting to write about.
Having signed up with an online marketing coaching program (see previous post), that, and other commitments have had to take priority. Part of the course involves setting up a blog and posting to it daily, so it kind of took the place of this one.
I am expecting the next installment of the course any minute now, but I suspect that I have already completed the tasks on it as I have been able to predict what is coming next.
I believe this installment will be about "monetizing" the blog with things like Google AdSense and maybe Clickbank products, which I have already done.

In the meantime, I have just released the latest version of Squeeze-U-Lator, which will now let you wrap ZIP files.

Does Google PageRank Mean Anything?

2011-07-11T00:09:00.000+01:00

I once read that Google PageRank was fairly meaningless and had no bearing on a site's position in the search results. This came from Google itself.
A lot of online marketers and so-called SEO experts swear that it makes all the difference, especially when you have incoming links from high PR sites.

The question is, does it really have an effect? After all, the "Page" part of the name doesn't refer to web pages; it was named after Larry Page.

Furthermore, PageRank is only one factor in determining the position of a page in the search engine results page (SERP Rank). It is said that there are over 200 factors involved in calculating SERP Rank, so can PageRank have that much of an effect?

One of my blogs managed to reach Google PR3, and I was really pleased with that. But in the last couple of rounds of PR changes it fell to PR2 and now to PR1.
The strange thing is during that period and the few months before, I spent a lot of time ensuring that the blog had fresh, original content that was of value. Basically doing what Google recommend that you do.
And since its PR dropped to 1, it has had an increase in traffic from Google of around 68%.

So I'm still not convinced that PageRank makes a difference. And to be honest, if I'm getting 68% more traffic, I don't really care what its PageRank is.

Aghh! The Frustration!

2011-07-08T11:06:00.000+01:00

Well I tried to find the time to do what I planned to do last night, but then I remembered that I needed to rearrange a lot of furniture to make up a room for some students who will be staying with us for a few weeks.
I got so involved with that, i completely forgot about a phone call I was to receive from John Thornhill at 8 o'clock.
And speaking of John Thornhill, I registered with his coaching course a week ago, so I am avidly awaiting the second of the 16 installments. Having said that, I kind of know what's involved in week 2, and I thnik I've probably done all the tasks already.
The coaching program has a forum, to which I contributed some posts yesterday, to help others who are struggling somewhat. I always like to help others that way, because they might be able to help me with something in return some time.

Traffic to my main site has increased and continues to remain at that higher level. As a result, I have seen a lot more hops on my Clickbank account as more people view products that I have linked to. Actual sales remain about the same, but this higher level of activity is surely going to bring in better results eventually.
What I need to do is identify some better products to promote, and I am considering writing some software to help me identify hot products in the Clickbank and Click2Sell marketplaces.
I see that as not only a useful tool for myself, but a product that other people might be interested in owning.

Back on Track!

2011-07-07T12:25:00.001+01:00

Ah! I remembered to post on this blog today - that's 2 days in a row. It's because I decided to get myself organised, and set up a routine. However, it's easy to break a routine, so there's no telling how long this will last.

What have I done today?
As I tend to write this blog at lunch time, I'm using "today" to mean "in the last 24 hours".

I planned to get my software product modifications done, but failed. I was just too tired. That's the problem with having a day-job as well as an online business. The Day-job gets in the way.

I wrote a review of a product being sold on Clickbank and published it on one of my blogs - one that deals specifically with Clickbank and other affiliate marketing.

By the way, since I started posting at least once a week to that blog, traffic has increased by 2.5 times. In fact today I got the same amount of traffic that I was getting before, but in the first 2 hours of the day.

I had another two ideas for software products. I made quick notes of them, but really need to write down full specifications for them.

I thought of an excellent marketing strategy for one of my associates. He has developed some software aimed at musicians, including a free demo version. I suggested that he approaches some of the music magazines and offer his software for inclusion on the cover disc that comes free with the magazine.
The software has been "Squeezulated", so that it needs Registration. This means that anyone who wants to run the software will have to sign up to his mailing list. I wouldn't mind getting a large number of the readership of a magazine subscribing to my mailing lists. That's what I would call laser-targeted sign-ups.

What Am I Planning To Do Today?
Hopefully, I'll be able to get my software product finished and issued.

I also plan to write some specifications for the software products that I thought of yesterday.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and men...

2011-07-06T10:24:00.000+01:00

So much for the idea of keeping a daily blog of how I'm doing in my online business. Failed after the first day.
This is mainly due to family pressure - I hardly got the chance to sit down at my PC over the weekend, so I didn't really have much to write about.
I see this as a good thing though - I enjoy the time with my family - I just wish I had more of it (time, that is!).

This is the beginning of Day 6, but as it's only just started, we'll call it my Day 5 report.
As I said, very little happened over the weekend (Days 2 and 3), except for a small AdSense income - about enough to buy a large cup of coffee. I have actually reduced my use of AdSense over the past year as the amount you get paid is quite poor, so I see anything that I get as a bit of a bonus nowadays.

On Day 4 (Monday), I spent quite a lot of time viewing videos and reading ebooks about various online marketing techniques. Most of them were items that I'd acquired some time ago, but never got around to studying. Some, I had read or viewed before, but reading them or watching them again several months later has been beneficial. It's easy to miss something the first time around - especially in a video.

On Day 5 (Yesterday), I registered a new domain, www.philrogersonline.com, which I shall be using as part of the course I registered on last week (see previous post).
The course tutor has not revealed what we will be doing with the domain, although he has hinted that it will be a blog (yet another to maintain!). Whenever I register a domain, even when I'm not ready to use it yet, I usually install Wordpress on it and make a post on it. That way, it gets pinged to the blog directories and starts to get indexed by Google etc a lot more quickly. This new domain has been no exception and it now contains a simple WP blog.

I have noticed that traffic from the search ehngines to one of my sites, CB Intuition, has increased considerably (at least 50%) since I started posting new content on it at least once a week. It just goes to show that keeping your site fresh with new content really does have a positive effect. The site appears at #20 in Google for the simple keyword Clickbank, which I'm quite pleased with. It ranks higher for combinations of other keywords plus Clickbank.

What am I Planning to Do Today?
My top priority is to finish a couple of changes to my software, Squeeze-u-lator, and release the latest version.

Have I made any money today (in the last few days)?
Yes. I had some clicks on AdSense.

A Month in the Online Life of Phil Rogers - Day 1

2011-07-01T14:25:00.000+01:00

A new month and a new plan. Let's hope I can keep it up!

I have decided to go back to the original idea of blogging (web logging) and keep a daily log of everything I do online for the month of July 2011. If I can get into the habit of posting, and maintain the momentum, I might even keep it going into August, September etc.

So here we are on Day 1.

What have I done today?
I started this series on this blog.
I signed up for a 16-week course on Online Marketing. It starts off for absolute beginners, so the week 1 material is really quite trivial for me. It's quite good to be reminded of the basics though.
I read one of the hundreds of ebooks that has been gathering virtual dust on my hard drive.

What am I planning to do today?
I have a few software projects on the go. There's one which I need to improve slightly and release before we do a big marketing push on it. I reckon that's going to take up a couple of evenings work.

Have I made any money today?
Not yet, but we're only half way through the day.

Progress, Development and Targets

2011-06-29T14:58:00.000+01:00

I can't believe how quickly the time flies. I had good intentions of keeping this blog regularly posted, but those plans seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Anyway, what has happened since the last update?

Progress
I've released another update to our software product, Squeeze-U-Lator, and there's a couple more changes in the pipeline. All our customers get free upgrades when these new features are added, which I'm hoping will give me a good reputation.

Along with Squeeze-U-Lator, we recommend a 3rd-party product, MYOS (Make Your Own Software), for which we earn a decent affiliate commission on sales. The two products complement each other very well, so it makes sense to promote them together. Both my colleague and I have made at least one sale of MYOS each, which is a nice bonus to our mainstream product sales.

I've noticed a sharp fall in AdSense income over the past few months, but an increase in Clickbank sales, so I now know which one I'm going to concentrate on.

Development
Having said that we've made a couple of sales of MYOS, I feel that it could be a lot more. The problem as I see it is the MYOS sales page. It's really quite off-putting in places, especially when it smugly asks you whether you "qualify to be an owner of MYOS" as if you have to be granted permisssion to buy it. The software itself is not exactly difficult to use, so you don't have to be some kind of rocket-scientist to own it.

So as a software developer, I worked out how MYOS works - again it's not rocket science. I am now nearing the completion of my own version which actually has some better features. I wrote the bulk of the program in 2 days which shows just how simple it is. MYOS is quite a few years old and now has new owners. I suspect that it will never be developed and improved, but my version will, and as on previous products, we'll offer free upgrades.

We plan to launch this product at a price at least 25% cheaper than MYOS, because I think that MYOS is somewhat over-priced.

Targets
My objectives in lfe change with whatever is going on around me, and my targets for earning money online change with my current financial situation.
Like many people, I have several debts, and my ability to repay those debts quickly has been diminished by rising prices and a non-rising salary. If my debts were cleared, the amount of extra money in my pocket every month (because I wouldn't have to make any more payments) would be considerable.

My primary target now is to clear all my debts as soon as possible using money earned online.
My secondary target is to consistently earn enough money online to replace the salary of my day-job, which will then give me the option to quit. The key word there is "consistently". It's no good making $30,000 once and not being able to continue to make money afterwards.

I figure that once I have cleared my debts and then earning an average of $150 (£100) per day, I'll be in a position to quit my day job and concentrate on my online business. That in turn should increase my income, and I'll finally be free.

I now keep a chart on the wall over my desk that shows my current average earnings and my target average earnings. It will be such a pleasure to see those two ines finally meet.

Learn From What Other People Do

2011-05-23T08:54:00.000+01:00

Some years ago I acquired the software source code with Private Label Rights for a program that would let you create your own simple software applications which you could then sell or give away as you pleased. At the time, I was quite naive when it came to online marketing and I thought that I had struck gold. There was already a popular program on the market, called Make Your Own Software, but to me it was quite expensive and lacked certain features that I would have liked. Now, not only did I have the source code for a competing product, but I could modify, extend and improve it to make it better than any other versions of it out there. After all I did understand that other people would have also obtained the source code too, so it was my intention to add features that their versions wouldn't have.

As it turned out, the program was written in an early version of Microsoft's Visual Basic. That wasn't really a problem - it's not a language I was familiar with, but it shouldn't take a professional software developer a long time to get to grips with it.

As I got into the code, something dawned on me. I discovered that I had been supplied with only part of the source code. You see the program worked like this: There was the "application generator", and a "runtime" - a previously made "empty" application. Basically, the application generator took all the information that you entered and embedded it in a copy of the runtime to produce the final program.

What I discovered was that the source code for the runtime program had not been supplied. This meant that I could not change anything about the way the generated applications worked. My dream of making a super-improved version of the program were dashed, and I left the source code to gather virtual dust on my hard disk.

About a year later, I decided to see if I could write my own version of an application generator from scratch. It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought because I had no idea how to embed data into another program, so instead of wasting more time on it, I abandoned the idea.

Some years later, a friend told me that he had the source code to an application generator program and wondered if I could make some changes for him. Sadly, it was the same one that I had, and he too had not been supplied with all the source code.

That same friend had some other source code for a different application that he had had written for him a few years previously, and we decided to work on that. It was written in Delphi, which is my programming language of choice, so I was quite happy to be involved with this project. The software, written by somebody else was complete, but my friend wanted to make some changes to it. As it happens, it has changed beyond recognition now as we have developed the concept.

Incredibly, even though this was not an application generator, this program also worked by having a "generator" and a "runtime" and worked in exactly the same way as the application generator programs work - it embedded data into an existing program. The difference is that this time I had all the source code that I needed.

I put 2 and 2 together and realised that I could use exactly the same techniques used by this program to make an application generator. Within a couple of days I had developed a small test program and proved that it would work. So now I am well on my way to creating my own software product that I can extend and improve to include features not available in any of its competitors. And it's all thanks to learning from what somebody else had done before me.

Progress Report - Payment from Clickbank

2011-04-28T16:51:00.000+01:00

Since my last progress report, I've been busy putting the finishing touches to the latest release of my software, and unfortunately, neglecting any marketing activities.
This has had the expected effect - sales and income have dropped.

The only significant item has been that Clickbank have posted me another cheque for commissions earned. What is strange about this though is that I have my payment threshold set to $50, and they have sent a cheque for $44.75. It would appear that the sending of cheques is triggered by the balance passing the threshold, even though they hold back a percentage of your payment to cover refunds etc. Consequently, the amount they send can end up less than the threshold.
As my bank account is in UK Pounds and the cheques are sent in US Dollars, I get charged to pay it in, thus reducing the value of my earnings.
There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to increase the payment threshold so that each cheque is for a larger amount, and the fee for paying it in is a relatively smaller proportion of the total. The second is to elect to be paid by direct transfer into your bank account. Payments are made in your own currency, so there is no fee to convert them.
This second option has the further benefit that you don't have to make that trip to the bank to pay it in - it happens electronically. There are some criteria that you have to meet to choose this option. First of all, you have to have received 2 paper cheques within a 12-week period, and secondly, you have to be in an eligible country.
If you are not in an eligible country, it may be possible for the payment to be "wired" to your bank.

I'm a relative beginner as a Clickbank affiliate and I don't make a huge number of sales. I haven't received 2 paper cheques within 12 weeks, so I can't choose direct payments. I keep the payment threshold low because if I go through a lean period with no sales, my account will be considered "dormant" and Clickbank will start charging handling fees, thus eating into my commission. By keeping the threshold low, I can get paid after just a few sales, and minimise the amount remaining in the account that could taken by Clickbank as dormant account handling fees. When I have improved my marketing techniques and start making a lot of sales on a regular basis, I shall increase the payment threshold and select direct payments.

Going For The Big Guns

2011-04-28T16:30:00.000+01:00

It's the end of April already. My last post was some two-and-a-half months ago. I really don't know where the time has gone!
Of course, if I stop to think about it, I know I've been busy.

The latest version of my software, Squeeze-U-Lator, has been updated again and we're about to start a big promotional push on it. We're trying to get some of the big guns in the Internet Marketing niche on board. There is another product, Make Your Own Software (MYOS), that goes hand-in-hand with Squeeze-U-Lator, making a very powerful list-building toolset. We are promoting MYOS alongside Squeeze-U-Lator. We're pretty sure that the owner of MYOS will see the potential and start promoting our product too.

Setting up a Joint Venture (JV) with other marketers is an excellent way of building a list and improving sales. However, getting the marketer to agree to a JV is not easy if they are one of the big guns and you're just starting out. But when two products complement each other as ours do, there's a great chance that the marketer will agree to promote your product if you promote theirs.
There's an additional benefit to doing this - especially with one of the big name marketers. Most of the big names know each other. They have met at seminars, or worked on JVs together. If you can get just one of them on board with your product, he's very likely to tell his friends and acquaintances about it, and they may well join in too.

After all, if your product is a potential good seller and you pay a decent commission, which marketer would turn it down?

Once you are "in" with one or more big marketers, you have a really good chance of becoming one of the big guys yourself, especially if you consistently produce good, sellable products.

So there's a good tip if you're trying to decide what product to create. Look at what other marketers are selling and come up with something that complements it. Ask the marketers whether they would be interested in promoting your product alongside theirs. Any marketer worth his salt will jump at the chance as long as you can demonstrate that your product complements their product, is of merchantable quality and you are willing to pay a decent commission.

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

2011-02-15T14:44:00.000Z

I first got into the idea of making money online several years ago. At that time, I had no idea what to do, what to sell, or how to do it.

One of the schemes that I tried included selling ebooks. I remember signing up at a site that sold ebooks that you could customise with your own name and appearance. I guess it was effectively a single site to which you could apply your own theme, and your own sub-domain simply redirected to that site, passing in theme details.

I didn't make a single cent from that site, because I had no idea how to promote it.

One thing I remember from that site though, was that it also sold Clickbank products, and it was at that time that I first registered with Clickbank. In fact my Clickbank nickname was generated for me by that site, so every time I log in to Clickbank, I am reminded of it.

That site has long since passed into oblivion, but I still have my Clickbank account, and have always been interested in the possibilities of affiliate marketing.

I sold a few Clickbank products, but never actually received any money from Clickbank. This was due to Clickbank's accounting policies which I never managed to satisfy. Frustrated, I lost interest in Clickbank for a year or two, and by the time I came back to it, I discovered that my account was now empty because Clickbank applies charges to "dormant" accounts - that is accounts that show no activity for an extended period.

Since then, I made a few more sales, and finally passed all the criteria of the accounting polices. Last month I received my first payment from them. What a great relief to get past that stage.

My efforts are not concentrated on promoting Clickbank products at the moment, but I do have a few affiliate links running. I'm now getting a few sales per week from ads that I put on my sites ages ago, which looks promising. I don't get a huge amount of traffic to those sites, which makes it even better. The good thing is that just one sale per month is enough to stop the account going dormant, so my accrued earnings are a lot safer than before.

As it happens, the level of sales that I am currently getting (even with no real promotional effort on my part) mean that I will pass the $100 payment threshold every 6 weeks. Sure, it's not much, but I'm not doing anything to promote it. $100 every 6 weeks is equivalent to $866 per year, for doing almost nothing.
Think how much better I could do if I spent 30 minutes or so every day actively promoting my links?

Oh, and by the way, these are results after Google dropped most of my sites from the search engine results following a hack on my host server. They are only now beginning to recover from that.

2011 Is Going To Be My Year!

2011-02-01T15:17:00.000Z

And so another 2 months pass without any posts on this blog. Too busy doing other things, and to be honest, this blog is bottom of the list of things for me to do.
There just aren't enough hours in the day that I can call my own.

Anyway, as it's the beginning of a new month, here's a progress report. I really believe that 2011 is going to be the year that I start to make some real money from the Internet.

My friend Dan and I made a nice amount of money each during November/December last year, selling a software product that I have written. So that we could handle any requested refunds (there weren't any!), we didn't take the money until late December. A nice bonus on the run-up to Christmas.

I spent most of January working on new features for version 2.1 of the software, which has now also undergone a name change.
The new version goes on sale tomorrow (2nd February 2011). We have a lot more Affiliates (or JV Partners) lined up this time, so we're hoping for a lot more sales.

We have also reduced the affiliate commission from 75% to 50%, which should also increase our income. We still think that's a great deal for affiliates, though.

We've also increased the price slightly. It was really under-priced before, but we were just starting out with a new product, so we decided to keep the price low. Now that the product has moved on and provides more automated features, we think we can justify the price increase.

Mistakes Made
When we released our software in November, we made some mistakes. This time, we're being a lot smarter about it.

The release date was just before Thanksgiving, so the response was lower than it might have been. This time, we're releasing it during a flat time when people are looking for ways to make money online.
We didn't recruit enough affiliates. This time we have many more than last time.
A BIG mistake was that we had no up-sell. That's one of those special one-time offers you present after making a sale. By making the offer one-time, it coerces the customer into purchasing while they have the chance for fear of losing out.
An advantage of the up-sell is that you don't have to pay commissions on it. This time, we have a great up-sell, limited to just 50 copies, which will bring in an additional $2,500 each (to Dan and me).
Follow-up was pretty poor on our part. Having built a list of customers, we haven't exploited that list at all. In fact, we haven't really sent out anything except news of bug-fixes and the forthcoming new version of the software.

Income
January was pretty quiet after our initial sales in December.

AdSense income has maintained a good average, but nothing outstanding.

I finally received my first payment from Clickbank! Until now I had not satisfied the CDR (Customer Distribution Requirements), which I have mentioned before on this blog. Finally, I got past that stumbling block and having also passed the payment threshold, I was sent a payment of $142.19.
Again, not huge, but it all adds up.

Receiving that first payment lifts a big psychological barrier. It's frustrating waiting to get past the CDR, but now that it has happened and I see real money in my bank account, I am spurred on to make more. So hopefully I'll be seeing payments on a regular basis. Clickbank pay every 2 weeks as long as you have exceeded the payment threshold, and my aim is to ramp up my Clickbank sales so that I receive a payment every 2 weeks without fail. Getting a cash injection mid-month will be fantastic. (I still have a day-job and will continue to do so until my online activities regularly bring in considerably more than my salary)

Residual Income
On the back of sales of our software product, I managed to make an affiliate sale of Aweber, the autoresponder. They pay 30%, and on a basic account that costs $19 per month, that's a payment to me of $5.70 every month. That may not sound like much, but the commission continues to be paid all the time that the buyer remains a customer of Aweber. Again, it's not going to make me rich, but think of it this way...
If I manage to sign up about 550 customers, the amount I would earn in commissions would be equivalent to the average UK salary. That's not bad for doing nothing except making that initial sale to each of those customers.

Plans
After release of version 2.1 of our software, development doesn't stop. I'm already working on version 3.0, which is going to have loads of great new features that will make it into a complete solution for product creation, marketing and list-building.

I also have several ideas for new software products to follow this one.

A Final Word
It may seem strange that I talk about my software without mentioning it by name or trying to sell it from this site.

Well the whole point of this site is to discuss online marketing - how I am going about it, and what results I am getting. It isn't about the products that I'm selling. It's all new ground for me, so I see it as a learning process. Until I have established a set of procedures for product creation and marketing, and proved that they work, I don't consider myself to be a true online marketer.

Once I feel that I have "made it" in this field, the nature of this blog might change, but the emphasis will still remain on techniques rather than products.

And actually, there is a link to the home page of my product on this page.

Progress Report - Things Are Taking Off

2010-12-04T00:07:00.000Z

November 2010 has probably been the best month ever for me in terms of online marketing activities for a number of reasons.

1) AdSense income, although still comparatively small, was the second best month I've had in the 5 years that I've had an AdSense account. It took me over 4 years to get my first payment from Google, but at the current rate of income, the next payment will arrive in less than a year. Bear in mind that I don't put a huge amount of importance on AdSense ads - it's just an easy way of earning a few extra pounds every month.

2) Residual income is one of the best parts of marketing. Basically, you sell something that requires a regular payment from the customer. As an affiliate marketer, you get a commission payment every month. This month I sold one such item. It was an account at Aweber, the popular autoresponder service. Commission payments are 30%, and a basic account costs $19 per month, making the monthly income from this a respectable $5.70. It might not sound like much, but imagine selling 10 accounts. Or 50. It is actually better to have a lot of small income streams than a few large ones.

3) After my hosting account was hacked and all my domains were dropped by Google, I am happy to report that they have all started to come back again. In fact, I appear to be getting more traffic than I did before the hack occurred.

4) For the last few months, I've been working in conjunction with one of my friends on a new piece of software aimed at online marketers who are finding it difficult to build a list. It may seem a little strange that I'm not mentioning and promoting it here, but the whole point of this blog is to describe the techniques that I am using to try to increase my online income.

As we are both based in the UK, we made the mistake of launching the software the day before Thanksgiving in the USA. We don't have Thanksgiving in the UK, so the date didn't really mean anything to us. Anyway, we think that as many of our potential customers and affiliate marketers are based in the USA, it probably affected the sales somewhat. And Black Friday followed Thanksgiving, closely followed by Cyber Monday.
All the same, sales were not bad, and we made a fairly decent amount of money.

The software was very well received and we're already working on making the next version a lot more powerful and easier to use.

Another important part of selling this software is that we have now built a list of buying customers. Additionally, we gave away a free demo version and have built a list of prospects from that. And as any online market knows; the money is in the list.

My friend and I are very positive about what we have achieved and feel we are ending this year on a high. We know we can't rest on our laurels - we have to maintain the momentum. But after years of trying, it is so good to feel that we are now on our way to some serious income.

By the way, my affiliate link for Aweber was embedded in the software, so the sale that I made was actually off the back of the software sale. This proves that if you get your marketing right, you can get multiple sales from just one item.

Progress Report

2010-11-01T14:36:00.000Z

I can't believe another month has gone by since my last post on this blog. And of course, my last post was a progress report on my attempts to make money online. So what has happened in that last month?

Google Slapped!
Every single one of my websites was Google-slapped, and it was through no fault of my own. My hosting account was hacked and a software robot was then used to seek and edit every file on my hosting account that was named index.html or index.php.
The effect of the changes was to add an IFrame to the page which linked to a site containing malware.
Not surprisingly, when GoogleBot found these links, it dropped my sites like a hot brick. Fortunately, I found the changes within less than 2 days of it happening and restored the original files. Unfortunately, the GoogleBots got there before me.

After the clean-up, I submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they reinstated my sites to their previous positions in the search engine results. The whole episode took about 9 days, which made quite a dent in my hit counts as the majority of my traffic comes from Google.

Overall though, the number of hits my main site gets on a daily basis is increasing slowly. It is up about 300% on the traffic I was getting 6 months ago.

Sales
With more traffic to my main site, I've had more sales. It's obvious - the more people who see your product, the more will buy it. The sales have been of affiliated Clickbank products, but at 75% commission, the actual revenue has been very good.

Product Launch
I have been working on an important new feature for E-Power-Wrap, which is just about to be released as version 2. This new feature is User Registration. Basically, when you create an application with E-Power-Wrap 2, you have the option to force the users to register it the first time they run it.

So what is the benefit of User Registration? It might sound like a fairly trivial development to E-Power-Wrap, but the benefits are pretty huge. You see the Registration system links directly with your Aweber account, which means that anyone who wants to use your application has to add themselves to your list. (And we all know that "the money is in the list", don't we?)

Imagine this situation: You create an application with E-Power-Wrap 2 and then you give it away from your web-site or from any of the hundreds of download sites on the Internet. Each person who downloads it will have to join your list to use it.

Now, how about giving it away with Giveaway rights? Suddenly the whole thing becomes viral and the potential for building your list becomes massive.

E-Power-Wrap 2 will be available very soon, and you can even download a FREE trial.

Training Course
You've probably heard at least one of those "rags to riches" stories about some guy who comes from the poorest-of-the-poor backgrounds, works his way up, and eventually becomes a multi-millionaire. A prime example of this is UK multi-millionaire Sir Alan Sugar, who started off selling beetroot on a market stall and then electrical goods from the back of a van he bought for 100 pounds.

The question is, what makes him different from the other other kids he was at school with? They had similar backgrounds and exactly the same opportunities, but they are not all millionaires. In fact, the chances are that none of them are.

The difference is that even at the age of 16, Alan Sugar thought the same way a millionaire thinks. He saw business opportunities and grasped them. He had the same entrepreneurial spirit that millionaires have.

When you run a business, whether online, offline, or both, you could plod along making a comfortable living, go out of business, or take your business up to such a level that like Alan Sugar, you become a millionaire.

Since I read the Millionaire Stealth Secrets course, and the numerous free gifts that come with it, I feel that my eyes have been opened and I now see a future where my online activities will bring me a lot of money. Already my main site has increased its traffic by 300%, and I have new products on sale. My confidence in my online abilities is much higher, and I have been able to set myself some challenging goals.

My main goal is to earn £100,000 (about $160,000) online before the end of 2011.
A few months ago, that was just a dream, but after reading Millionaire Stealth Secrets, I KNOW it is possible.

The amazing thing about the course is that it boosted my confidence in my online business so much that I had made back the purchase price of £97 by the end of the first week.

Progress Report

2010-10-01T12:57:00.000+01:00

Blogging works as a marketing tool. Or at least I think it does.

Recently I have been putting a little more effort into my marketing and this includes writing more on my blog about Clickbank and other affiliate marketing programs.

As a result, I have seen a marked increase in the number of visitors I get to the site. When I let the site go slightly stagnant, I found that the maximum number of visitors in a day never exceeded 15. The minimum number of visitors in a day was often 0.
By actively posting on the site just once or twice a week, I find that the minimum number of visitors hasn't gone below 15 (my previous maximum) and it now regularly gets as high as 30.

Now this might not sound like very much to any seasoned online marketer, but don't forget that you were a beginner once.

More importantly though, the number of "hops" I get to affiliated Clickbank pages has increased. I used to go for weeks without getting any. In the last 2 weeks, it has averaged just over 9 hops per day and the trend is that it is increasing.

Even more importantly, I am getting a lot more sales of Clickbank products. It's still not many, but as I work harder on posting useful information to the site, it will increase even more.

Best of all, I have finally made a sale of a product with a recurring income. By that I mean a product for which the purchaser makes a regular monthly payment, and for each month that they remain a member, I get a commission. Again, it's not much, but better than nothing.
A few hundred of those and I'll be able to give up the day job!

Aim High, But Also Aim Low

2010-09-24T11:51:00.000+01:00

Aim both high and low? What on earth am I talking about?
I'm talking about setting goals for your online marketing efforts.

It has often been said that too many people are scared of making money! It sounds bizarre, but it's true. They have been brought up to believe that if you work hard at school, you will get a good job, and if you work hard in your job, you will earn a good salary. This is so deeply engrained into peoples' minds that if they find a way of making a lot more money with less effort, they don't believe that they deserve it. This creates a feeling of guilt and as a result, they don't put in the required effort and they fail. They go back to their day job, thinking that they have proved that they can't do it and that it's not for them.

I have a different view of all this. I know I can succeed online. My problem is that I do have a day-job, and I have a family. These both put demands on me and I find it difficult to find the time or energy to concentrate on my online businesses.

So that I don't lose faith and interest in what I am doing, I set myself some goals. I have long-term, medium-term and short-term goals. Here are some examples:

Long-term goal: To become financially independent within 3 years.
Medium-term goal: To match the salary I get from my day-job in online earnings within 2 years.
Short-term goal: To earn £10 per day online.

My long-term and medium-term goals sometimes look hard to achieve, but if I aim lower, I'll be depriving myself of my true desires.
My short-term goal is a lot more modest. I could earn £10 (about $15) per day just by selling one item every day, or a higher priced item every 2 days etc. That sounds relatively easy to achieve, so that is what I am working on.

Multiple Goals
You don't have to have just one short-term, one medium-term and one long-term goal. Here are some more of my goals (in no particular order):
Short-term: To buy a better car before the end of the year.
Medium-term: To be driving a new, top-of-the-range Alfa Romeo before the end of next year.
Long-term: To pay off my mortgage.
Medium-term: To cover my mortgage payments entirely by income from Google AdSense. (Don't you just love the idea of Ads by Google paying your mortgage?)

Another View
I live a long way from my place of work, and it costs me about £10 per day in petrol (gasoline) to drive to and from work. So if I can earn £10 per day online, that has paid for my travel expenses. (Ok, if I factor in the tax that must pay on my £10 per day earnings, it's not enough to cover my costs, but in general terms it is a lot easier to think of it as covering it).

Some time ago I sat down and worked out how much I need to earn each day to cover various expenses, such as car insurance, utility bills, local taxes. It's easy. Just take your bills for 1 year, add them up and divide by 365. Then you can think of your online income as covering that bill, or more than one of them.

Reaching a Goal
When checking to see whether a goal has been achieved, you have to be careful. Just because you earned £10 every day for a week, it doesn't mean you've reached the goal. The next week, you might not make any sales. On the other hand, the week after, you might make £30 per day.
Furthermore, sales are NOT going to be that regular. I might sell 3 items on day 1, not sell anything for 5 days, and then sell 4 more items. The point is that you know when you have reached the goal when the amount averages out to your target figure.

Updated Goals
Once you have reached a goal, there's no point in resting on your laurels. Remember you have more ambitious longer-term goals to achieve. You use the short-term goals as way-points or milestones towards achieving those longer-term goals.
So as soon as you are confident that you have reached your short-term goal, aim at a new, higher goal. But don't just change it to "Earn £20 per day online". Now that you have experience and know how to earn that original £10 per day, you should be able to do much better by duplicating what you have done several times over. So make your next goal considerably higher. How about £50 per day? One that I like to use is a factor of 7. Why? Because I like the idea that I can earn the same amount in 1 day that I used to earn in one week.

Setbacks
Everyone gets setbacks in their online marketing efforts, especially beginners. Modify your goals accordingly if you really think they are too ambitious. Go down to £1 per day, but keep the higher goals in the back of your mind.

Basically, what I am saying is that you need to have real goals otherwise you'll end up bumbling along or giving up. Write down your goals and stick them on the wall over your PC screen. Paste photos of things you desire onto the paper. What do you want? An Aston Martin car? Set a goal and stick a picture up to remind you. A vintage 1962 Fender guitar? Set a goal and stick a picture of it up to remind you. That house with the expansive garden you drive past every day? Set a goal and stick a picture of it up to remind you.

Build Up To It
Yes, you want the money and the fancy lifestyle as soon as possible, but in reality, you're not going to achieve most of it this year, next year or the year after. It takes time to become financially independent, and the journey there is actually more important. If you won millions on the lottery, you wouldn't know what to do with it. The majority of big lottery winners end up blowing the lot and after a few years of decadence, they're back where they were before they started. Sometimes they end up worse off; their homes and cars are repossesed, they end up in debt, and all their friends have disappeared.

By building up your income gradually, you ease yourself into the higher lifestyle bit-by-bit. You appreciate the value of your efforts and the value of the money that you've made, and you're less likely to squander it.

By setting goals, I now have a vision of where I might be in 1, 2 or 3 years time, and a route map of how to get there. There may be several diversions along the way, but I'll get there eventually.
If you follow this blog, you'll see if I'm achieving those goals as I report on my progress.

For now, my short-term goals are:
- To release 2 sellable products by the end of 2010. (I'll be releasing my first soon)
- To earn at least £10 ($15) per day.

Now, go away, sit down in a quiet place, take stock of your life, decide what you want and what you need to get it, break it down into manageable chunks and set some goals. You'll be glad you did. It makes planning your online marketing strategies a lot easier.

Put Some Effort Into Your Online Marketing

2010-09-21T09:11:00.000+01:00

It's been quite some time since I last posted on here, and I'm going to try to get back into doing so on a more regular basis.

Anyone who has been following this blog since the beginning will know that I started out a few years ago with the intention of making money online. I've tried various things, but never really put a great deal of effort into it, which has had a fairly predictable result - i.e. very little in the way of online income.

This doesn't mean that it's not possible to make a lot of money online, but it does go to show that there is no "magic bullet". No "set-it-and-forget-it" method of making money. The bottom line is, just like any job, if you want to make money online, you have to put some effort into it.

Unfortunately, my day-job and family life have tended to get in the way of my online marketing efforts. I seem to have very little free time nowadays, and when I do, I'm generally so tired, that I really don't want to be working on what is effectively a second job. Consequently, I haven't made any real progress towards my goal of being able to give up the day job.

Ironically, if I was able to give up my day-job, I would have the time and energy to concentrate on my online marketing, but until I'm earning enough from my online activities, I cannot give up the day job. Catch 22. I imagine that there are many other people in the same situation.

Regardless of this, I have now decided to ramp up my efforts as much as possible in order to achieve this. I expect it to be many months, or a year or two before I can get to that point. In the meantime, I hope to be building up a steadily increasing income, and that extra cash will be very welcome.

Update
So, what has happened since my last set of semi-regular posts to this blog? Here's a quick summary. I shall probably post a summary like this every 6 months from now on - or more often if things go really well.

Products
In conjunction with another online marketer, I have developed a software product for which we have seen a few sales. We are currently working on version 2 of the software, which we think will sell much better as it contains a new list-building feature. More on that product in a future post when we release version 2.

Advertising Revenue
I got my first payment from Google AdSense. What a great feeling that was. It had been a long time in the making - I had displayed Google Ads on various sites on and off for about 4.5 years and earned the odd few cents here and there. The majority of the income was earned in the last 6 months after I had started to make some more popular websites.
Now, those sites are earning from AdSense a lot more quickly. At the current rate, they should earn about the same amount of money in under a year, but with a lot more effort on my part, I hope to start receiving payments at least monthly.

Affiliate Marketing
I've been a member of Clickbank for about 5 years, and I have still yet to receive any money from them. This is because I have not met the terms of their CDR (Customer Distribution Requirement). They will not release any money until those terms have been satisfied. Additionally, my account has also fallen foul of their Dormant Account Policy, in which accounts that are not active for extended periods are subject to various charges.
Recently, however, I have started to make a few sales, which keeps my account from becoming dormant while I try to meet the terms of the CDR.
The CDR is frustrating - it requires at least 5 different credit cards and 2 different payment methods. If everyone pays with PayPal rather than credit cards, it's difficult to meet this requirement when sales numbers are relatively low.
If you're in the same position, stick at it - you'll get there eventually.

I have joined various other affiliate programs and promote my links wherever possible, but again, this needs a lot more effort on my part. Some of the programs are for monthly services, so I should receive a monthly income from them. I see that as a key part of setting up an online income - build a nice core of monthly income streams that almost guarantee a minimum monthly income. I would love to get to the point where my mortgage is paid entirely from monthly affiliate income. (Of course, I would prefer to pay off my mortgage entirely, but one step at a time!)

In summary, I can see that had I put in a lot more effort into my online marketing over the last year or two, I would be in a much better financial situation. it's too easy to give up, or put things off because you're too tired.
Having started to see some money coming in, I am more enthusiastic about progressing things further.

Hopefully, my next summary report in 6 months time will show a marked change in my status.

The Importance of a Good Infrastructure

2009-09-11T07:29:00.003+01:00

When you create your first website, the chances are that the only visitors will be you family, friends and colleagues. However, once it finds its way into the search engines, your site will start to receive visits from more people. If you're good at marketing, the amount of traffic your site receives per day could reach the thousands, or even millions. Yes, it's possible! As an example, the popular article marketing site, EzineArticles.com, receives over 1 million hits per day.
I million hits per day works out at an average of 11.6 hits per second, and that assumes that all the hits are spread out evenly throughout the day.

So imagine how many hits sites the most popular sites, Facebook, Microsoft and Google receive per second at their most busy times.

Clearly, these organisations have very powerful servers and connections to the Internet to be able to cope with the demand. The responses to requests for information from their sites are no worse than anybody elses'. Better in many cases.

My own websites are very unlikely to receive anywhere near the amount of traffic that these sites receive, and I am reasonably confident that the shared host server that I use has sufficent power to cope with the demand. If my sites become more popular, I would upgrade them to dedicated servers to cope. In the event of a miracle occurring and I started to receive daily hits in the order of millions, I would be looking at multiple servers with load-balancing.

So why am I writing this short article?
There's a site that I started using several years ago, called LinkedIn. It is a business networking site which helps you keep in touch with colleagues and contacts, and find new ones. It seemed to remain largely undiscovered for some time, growing steadily, but recently it seems to have caught the imagination of online marketers. This is probably due to the number of people using sites such as Facebook and Twitter for networking.

Recently, an ex-colleague of mine sent a request to add me to his LinkedIn network.
I followed the link in his email and was taken to the LinkedIn website, where I was presented with the signup page. As I already have a LinkedIn account I clicked the Login link. It took several attempts to finally get the Login page displayed, with most attempts timing out after several minutes. I'd say it took me about an hour to get to the login page. After entering my account details, is took me at least another hour to get logged in.

Finally, I was able to see my Inbox including my colleague's request. I clicked the link to read his request. Again, several attempts later I still couldn't see the request. Finally at 11.00pm I clicked the link and went to bed. At 7.15 the next morning, my browser told me that it was still waiting for the server. I clicked again and still no response.

I tried again from time to time. It is now 3 days after the request was sent and I still haven't managed to respond to it.

This is not the first time that I have had this trouble with LinkedIn, so it's definitely not a one-off problem.

I have also tried it with different browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) and that made no difference. I can view and log in to other popular sites like Google and Facebook with no problems, so it's not my Internet connection or my PC.

So come on LinkedIn! Get your act together! If you're going to provide a networking site serving millions of people, sort out your infrastructure.

Why Silver Membership at Article Content King Gives you the Edge

2009-04-21T13:42:00.006+01:00

When you use Article marketing, what do you do? That seems like a stupid question, doesn't it? You write an article related to the products or services you are selling or promoting, of course.

If you're in a very narrow niche or specialised market, occasionally you might find it difficult to come up with something new to write about your product or service. There is only a limited number of ways you write the same information about something without becoming repetitive or boring.

So what if there was a way that you could promote your product or service on article sites, without wracking your brains for new ideas? Wouldn't that make life so much easier?

Believe it or not, there is one article site that lets you promote your product or service without actually having to write about it! In fact, you can write about any subject you want, even if it is totally unrelated to your product, and your product will still be promoted.

How can this be possible? The whole concept of article marketing is such that people looking for information on a particular subject will find your article and then follow the link in your resource box.

Well that's where Silver membership at Article Content King stands out from the crowd.

AdSpace Credits
When you publish an article on Article Content King, you're not just publishing an article; you're opening up a whole new stream of advertising. You see, every time somebody reads your article, you earn an AdSpace credit. Additionally, when somebody reads an article published by somebody you introduced to Article Content King, you earn 0.1 credits, on a downline of 10 levels. You also earn 2 additional AdSpace credits whenever you moderate other peoples' articles. (Don't worry - it's easy! Simply read an article and rate it on a scale of 1..10)

AdSpace
When you have accrued 1000 credits, your AdSpace is enabled, and you can enter your own advertisement codes. Free members of Article Content King are limited to Google AdSense, but if you choose to upgrade your membership to Silver, then you can enter your own advertising codes (within the terms and conditions of the site).
There are 4 advertising spots on each page, and your advertisements will be displayed alongside articles in your chosen category.

Here's an example of how it works.
Let's say you sell real estate from your website. Traditional article marketing means that you would publish articles about real estate in your region and link back to your website. Now if you have accrued 1000 AdSpace credits and you are a Silver member (or higher), you can enter advertisements which will be displayed alongside any articles relating to real estate. They will even appear alongside your competitors' articles! Each time an advertisement is displayed, one AdSpace credit will be spent.

To ensure that your advertisements are displayed, you will need to keep accruing AdSpace credits. As mentioned before, this will happen when people read your articles and when you moderate other peoples' articles.

So to accrue more credits, you need people to read your articles, and this is where you can find that you have run out of ideas for new articles.

Now let's assume your hobby is fishing. You know that you could write hundreds of different articles about fishing, but you don't sell anything fishing-related, so there's no point in writing them.

Well, in Article Content King, you receive AdSpace credits for EVERY article that is read by somebody else, regardless of its subject or category. So you CAN publish those articles about your hobbies and other interests. If you write a lot of articles about a popular subject, you will keep on racking up those AdSpace credits, which will keep your advertisements showing. If you design some attractive advertisements for your primary business, which link back to your website, you could actually get more traffic that way than via your resource box. The fact that you earned the credits from articles in a different category is irrelevant. Your AdSpace advertisements will be shown alongside the appropriate articles.

If you're not a member of Article Content King, join now. If you are a member, consider upgrading your membership to unlock a powerful advertising opportunity.

Start To Make Money With ClickBank

2009-03-12T13:32:00.010Z

Last year I highlighted the problems with ClickBank Dormant Accounts. Basically if there is no activity on your account for more than 90 days, they start to charge you to mainitain the account.

Many people, including myself, have lost money because of this. In fact, the majority of ClickBank Accounts are dormant. Of something like 1.6 million accounts, only about 100,000 are active. That's makes a whopping 93.75% of ClickBank accounts dormant.

Perhaps you are one of the many disillusioned people who made a little money on ClickBank, but never actually received any of it because it was swallowed up by ClickBank's dormant account policy. Or maybe you haven't received your first payment because the rules state that you need to meet the buyer criteria which requires 5 different credit cards and 2 different PayPal accounts to be used when making purchases via your link.

I struggled for ages to get my ClickBank account moving and finally receiving paments. Then I discovered Harvey Segal's excellent guide which shows you how to overcome these stumbling blocks, keeping your ClickBank account active and passing the payment threshold so that you finally get the money that is rightly yours.
Not only that, it shows you how you can start to build up a list, which makes it so much easier to make more money.

The best part about Harvey's book is that it is totally FREE, and you don't even have to sign up to a mailing list to receive it.

So if you've been struggling with ClickBank, check out ClickBank For Newbies (opens in a new window).

Get a Huge Number of Twitter Followers

2009-02-16T00:31:00.003Z

It took me a while to "get" Twitter. I signed up for an account, but found it to be pretty pointless. I tweeted occasionally, but not very often. I even closed my account at one point, but decided to reopen it ... just in case ...

And I'm glad I did. Because this week I had an "epiphany". I suddenly "got" Twitter and all the other Social Networking sites. At least from the point of view of an online marketer I did.

On Twitter, I follow a very popular person, who at the last count had an amazing 179,000 followers! He put a new product up for sale and Tweeted about it. Within minutes the website that handles the sales of that product had exceeded its user limit and to anyone else who wasn't quick enough to get in, the site had effectively crashed.

As an online marketer, I would love the chance to tell 179,000 people about a new product. Imagine it - if I was selling a product for $47, and just 2% of the 179,000 people who read my tweet actually bought it, I'd make a cool $168,260.

So having realised what it's all about, I wondered how to get a large number of followers on Twitter.

Well it just so happens that there is an excellent way of building your follower list. It works on the same principles as viral marketing, is absolutely free to join, and takes about 30 seconds to do.

If you're not on Twitter yet, head over to Twitter and sign up. Again, it's totally free.
Once you've signed up, get on over to TweeterGetter and follow the incredibly simple instructions.

I had doubled my number of followers within 24 hours and it's still increasing.

Give it a try. You have nothing to lose.

Stop Press: In just 2 days, the number of Twitter followers I have has increased 10-fold.

Another New Social networking Site

2008-08-26T21:48:00.002+01:00

If you run any kind of online business and you're looking for contacts, traffic etc., you could do worse than join any of the seemingly hundreds of Social Networking sites that are springing up.

There's a new one around that is a little like Facebook, but has a definite slant towards online business - there's even a page where you can post about online opportunities.

It's called ZenZuu. (Who knows how these people think these names up!)

It's definitely in its infancy at the moment, so it's not as active as Facebook. However, ZenZuu share their advertising revenue with its members, so it's worth getting in at the beginning.

You can sign up here.

Fast Content producer - A Review

2008-08-22T16:21:00.002+01:00

The sales page for Fast Content Producer announces itself with this headline "Discover How to Build Hundreds of Content Rich, Dynamically Changing, Keyword Covered Web Pages in Mere Minutes ..."

The sales page doesn't give any screen-shots or links to examples of generated pages, so I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical about its claims.

I got myself a copy, and after playing with it for a while, here's what I found.

First of all, I noticed that there was neither any online help nor manual, so I assumed it must be so easy to use that it doesn't need any.

The sales page says that there are 4 simple steps to producing content, and I guess these relate to the 4 tabs on the program's main form.

The first thing to do in step 1 is giving your project a name, which was easy enough. The next was to select a content file (or files). It appears to recognise plain text, Word and RTF formats, so that should be simple enough. But what should it contain? If it's going to generate hundreds of content-rich pages, I'd like to know how it's going to use the content, and how much content I need to provide.

Next, select a template. You can View the available templates and samples of their use in your browser. Not exactly earth-shattering design to the templates, but I'm sure it's possible to make new ones. If only there was a manual to tell you how.
Oh wait! There's a button labelled "Purchase Templates". I guess their other templates are so good, they couldn't give them away. Let's see...
Well that's a disappointment. It opens up Google in my browser.

Ok. Onwards...
Having selected the output location of the generated files, I now enter how many words or characters to include in each page. So I'm assuming my content file has to be so big that it can fill "hundreds of pages" and I'm now telling it the cutoff point for each page.

That's Step 1 completed.

Step 2 is about RSS feeds. You add them to the list, and it rotates them around the pages. Oh, so maybe this is where the real, dynamic content comes from.

Then enter an affiliate ad code (such as Google AdSense). This will be inserted in the ad spot within the template.

Step 3 lets you add a sign-up form and links and navigation menus. At the moment, I can't see how you can add a navigation menu to pages that the program hasn't generated yet. Maybe it means to external pages.
There's a form builder. Not obvious what to enter in each field if you're a bit of a novice - and let's face it - most people who use this type of software are probably not experts.
The HTML editor is not bad though - it does a preview as you type.
Finally, you can add keywords which it will replace with anchor text and affiliate links.

Step 4 - Build you pages.
Enter a headline and sub-heading and specify the page naming convention. All the generated pages are in HTML. Pity. I'm a great fan of PHP - especially when it comes to dynamic content creation.

Build the pages...
The Progress Bar (or is it a list?) doesn't do anything.
Ok it built me 6 pages from my short article. Let's view the results...

Well I guess you have to be more familiar with the structure of the templates to get nice looking pages.
The text from my content file has been split between the pages, cutting off at the number of words I specified, and there are Prev/Next lilnks to follow it through.

The signup form I designed appears on every page. That's a bit of overkill I think.
The top half of each page has my single column of advertisements in it. I guess that's just a bad choice of template.

Thankfully, you can just go back and choose a different template and regenerate the pages.

Summary
Personally, I wouldn't pay the $37 I've seen this program being offered for. It doesn't produce good enough pages without a lot of effort, and there's no way to control what appears on each page - it's simply a continual stream of text that is split over the pages.
I doubt whether a visitor to the site would stay long unless you had some really interesting content. On the other hand, some people just want a program that churns out pages of text, complete with adverts, to get themselves into the search engines and maybe earn them a bit of cash from the AdSense ads.
However you use it - don't just fill them with random text - those search engines are getting smart.

A Final Note
I acquired this software with the source code. As a programmer, I could improve it beyond recognition, including the provision of help and much better previews.
Don't hold your breath - I have too many projects on the go already. But you never know...

It's Not All About Ebooks and Courses

2008-07-23T09:37:00.003+01:00

Many people who are new to online marketing get into it because they want to make some money. They don't know what to sell, so they fall into the easy option of selling ebooks and reports; either directly or as an affiliate through ClickBank etc.

While this is not a bad idea - it can bring in a very nice income if done well - but it's not an ideal situation.

Most successful businesses are run by people who are passionate about the product they are selling. Unless you're a good writer, or an experienced marketer, the chances are that your ebook business isn't going to produce a life-changing income.

So think about your interests and hobbies. Even if it is something you dabble with now and again. Could you earn an income from that?

Take photography as an example. It is something which I really enjoy. I'm not a professional by any means, but I believe that I have an eye for composition, and I have taken some good pictures in the past.

So how do I make money from this hobby? If I take a picture that I'm particularly proud of, I post it at RedBubble. This is a site for photographers and artists. You set up an account, upload your images and set a price for them. Anyone visiting RedBubble can buy prints of your work in various formats ranging from cards to framed prints. RedBubble handle all the order fulfillment. All you have to do is provide the images. It also helps if you publicise your "bubble", but you can use any online and offline marketing techniques for that.

RedBubble have base prices for each product, and the artist/photographer simply specifies a markup on those prices, which is typically 20%, but you can set whatever markup you see fit.

RedBubble will protect your images on the website by applying a watermark. This of course does not appear in the printed products.

I like the service that RedBubble provides so much that I now carry a camera with me wherever I go, just in case I see something worth capturing.

So if you're into photography, why not consider selling your pictures at RedBubble.

Article Marketing Works - If You Do It Right

2008-07-07T09:03:00.002+01:00

Do you use Article Marketing to promote your business?

It's a very popular way of getting traffic to your site, as well as building up backlinks.

Backlinks are links to your site that get indexed by the search engines. The more relevant links you have to your site, the higher you appear in the search engines results pages.

So what other benefits are there to using articles to market your site? Well, if somebody is starting to get interested in the kind of thing you are selling, they often go to the Internet search engines to find more information about it.

If the search engine takes them to your article, they can read all about the products that you sell, how to use them, what factors to consider when choosing one, etc. If you write well-reasoned articles about your products, without giving them the hard sell, the readers are more likely to consider you an authority on the subject. This is even more likely to happen if you submit a number of related articles on your subject.

So when you include a link to your site in the resource box at the end of the article, the readers are more likely to go to your site.

There are a number of article sites around, but my current favourite is Article Content King. The reason why I like it so much is that for a small fee, you can get your articles syndicated to a blog which very often gets your articles into Google within an hour. But the piece de resistance of the site is that you get to control the ads that are displayed on the pages containing your article - and keep 100% of the profits from displaying those ads.

This means that I can stop my competitors' ads from appearing on the same page as my articles, Display whatever ads I choose (including ads for my own products), or even sell the ad space to other people. Whatever I do with the ads, I stand to make extra money from them.

If you use articles for marketing, or want to start now, you could do a lot worse than go to Article Content King.

Dead Easy Way To Get Started Marketing Online

2008-07-03T15:07:00.004+01:00

Ok, it is time to get real here.

Thousands of people just like you are trying to make money with their Internet business.

However, most of them are COMPLETELY missing the point!

You have probably learned about list building, traffic generation, web design, and just about 1000 different ways you can become an "Internet millionaire" in just a few weeks, and yet you have not made your first dollar.

Well, that is about to change.

I found this fantastic opportunity from Matthew Glanfield that gets a new online business started at no cost. Now I have arranged with Matthew to get you into his high-selling affiliate marketing membership FREE of charge!

He is going to show you every step you need to make to do EXACTLY what he has done to
make over $10,000 per month from his one list.

Here is the link:

Affiliate Marketing Formula.

Go and get that membership NOW - trust me, you are going to love it.

Online Profits Fast!

2008-06-17T23:37:00.005+01:00

You have dreamed of setting up an online business, but did not know where to start. You have no idea how to make and run a website.
You've heard that "The money is in the list", but you don't have a list, and you don't know how to get one.
You don't have a product to sell.

Help is at hand. Our Free Ebook Of The Month describes a system that is so easy to set up that you'll be amazed. This ebook is valued at $47, but you can get it for absolutely nothing.

Online Profits Fast! tells you exactly how to start selling quality products online without any technical knowledge required, and no money up front. To run this system, you don't actually even need a website!

The inventors of the system handle everything for you. They supply the products, branded with your own IDs, provide the Squeeze Page, provide the Sales Page for a One-Time-Offer (OTO). They even go as far as providing the items to be sold in the OTO. Best of all, all the customers you have are added to your own personal mailing list.

All you need to do is promote your own link. It couldn't be any simpler.

Don't forget! Online Profits Fast is totally free to download.

How fast can you build your list?

XSitePro v2.0 Released

2008-06-17T20:48:00.003+01:00

On this blog, back in March 2008, I recommended XSitePro as an excellent tool for building slick, professional websites without requiring any knowledge of HTML.

Well XSitePro 2.0 has just beed released and it's got even better.

With 43 major new features and 45 updated ones, you can produce even better websites than before. And it's designed to suit all skill levels from beginner to professional.

With hundreds of new website templates, and 30 styles of slick, graphical menus and buttons, your websites will rival the world's top sites for looks and ease of use.

Other new features include some excellent content proofing tools including thesaurus and Readability Analysis. Along with the in-built SEO analysis, these make for very powerful websites.

And one of the best features as far as I'm concerned is the integration of forms with the most popular AutoResponders. That's something that I've always had difficulty with. Now XSitePro does it all for you.

There's loads of other new stuff - too much to mention here. Why not look at the features list on the XSitePro 2.0 website.

Article Site that Gives You Credit

2008-06-09T21:46:00.002+01:00

I've never really been a fan of Social networking sites, but there are one or two which do turn out to be quite useful from an online marketing point of view.

Here's another that I discovered recently.
It's called Qassia.

Qassia is about publishing information, or what they call "Intelligence". The more you publish, and the more popular it becomes, the more credit you earn.
Credit is counted in "Qassia Dollars".
The more Qassia Dollars you have the higher your pages will rank in the search pages.
And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add - only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your website.

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you've got nothing to lose - It's FREE. See you around!

Sign up here

What a Twit(ter)

2008-05-07T13:18:00.002+01:00

I have just had my arm twisted to join Twitter.

It looks totally pointless to me, but I am reliably informed that it's a great way of driving traffic to your websites.

I'm not convinced, but I'll give it a try.

I imagine that it's one of those things that I sign up to and then gradually neglect and forget about completely. Like most SN sites (Squidoo excepted), I can't see it having that much long-term appeal.

If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to, follow Phil_Rogers at Twitter.

Social Networking as a marketing Tool

2008-05-02T00:08:00.002+01:00

There has been a veritable explosion in the number of Social Networking (SN), or Web 2.0 sites.

People love them or loathe them.

Personally, I don't find them a particularly attractive proposition in terms of being sociable.
However, I do recognise them as providers of a huge audience for marketing.

People search and browse the SN sites for all manner of subjects, and with millions of users, there are bound to be people who are interested in what you have to offer.

So even if you're not really interested in SN sites, it's well worth having some kind of presence in them.

I just created a Squidoo Lens about Article Marketing. It will provide exposure to one of my online projects and bring in links to my various sites.

Top lenses on Squidoo have Google PR of 5/10, so they are very valuable as incoming links.

My Squidoo lens is not a work of art in terms of marketing - it's just a first attempt. But its worth a visit just to see what you can do in just 10 minutes.

Go there, have a look around, read some lenses and then make your own. It's quick, it's easy, and well worth doing.

What To Do With Unused Domains

2008-04-23T10:37:00.002+01:00

If buying domains was an Olympic sport, I'd have won a medal over the last few years.
I'd come up with an idea, buy the domain for it, throw a site together and kind of move on to my next crazy idea before it was finished. Basically I lacked focus.

Now, I'm a reformed domain junkie and I've let a few of them expire.

However, I do have a couple of unused ones still lying around because they got automatically renewed. I also have one that I bought recently to use as a sales site for an upcoming product that I have under development.
My product is not ready yet, but I wanted to reserve the domain.

I figured that while the product is still under development, I should put the domain to work, gathering trafic, getting a good Alexa rank, appearing in the search engines etc.

So this is what I have done while the product is still in pre-launch.

I have used some software to create an "Adsense" site. Basically it's an article site based on a selected theme or niche, and amongst the articles, there are Adsense advertisement blocks.
Not just Adsense, actually - I have also created ads using other advertising programs.

In fact, the product under development is a script that generates ads from the ClickBank marketplace. So I have used the script on my site.

So, the article site is themed on the ClickBank niche, and hopefully it will start to draw traffic from the search engines when people start looking for information about Clickbank and related services.
Additionally, it might bring me some income from AdSense and the other advertising programs.

And I have written about it in this Blogger blog because it's one of the fastest ways to get Google to notice a website or domain.

And when my product is ready to launch, I'll add the sales page, but also rework the rest of the site into a more credible article site. At the moment it is simply there to start drawing traffic. As it was generated by software, it's not that organised. It's not bad, but it could be better with a bit of manual rearrangement.

Check it out here.

So if you have an unused domain, get it working for you. Create an Adsense site based on a niche that you'll be using the site for in future.
You have nothing to lose, and you might just earn a bit of money from it.

Revenue-Sharing Article Site Goes Live

2008-04-22T21:51:00.002+01:00

Many people use Article Marketing to promote their online business. It's often touted as an excellent technique, giving the following benefits:
1) Giving exposure to a problem and its solution,
2) Providing links to the author's site to enable people to find it.
3) Providing links to the author's site for SEO purposes.

However, some people have a lot more success than others when it comes to article marketing.

So, have you been disillusioned with the lacklustre results you
get from your articles? I know I was. I read numerous reports and ebooks recommending this technique, but never saw the success that I was promised.

Then I realised that I was looking at only the tip of the iceberg,

There's now a new kind of article marketing that produces the kind of results that I like; money!

Revenue-Sharing Article Marketing enables you to get a LOT more value from your article writing efforts.

A group of us, who were frustrated about what we got from posting an article compared with what the article site owner got from the deal, decided to do something about it.

We like to call it Article Marketing on Steroids!

Take a look at what we came up with. If you are serious about your article marketing, and you want more, I think you will be pleased with what you see.
Heck, you will be excited.

Very excited!

Take a look now

Just go here....
Article Content King

Online Opportunities

2008-04-10T14:29:00.002+01:00

As I've already mentioned, this blog is a record of various things that I am trying in an attempt to make some money online.

It has always been my belief that anyone who starts a career of making money on the Internet shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket. Instead, they should concentrate on setting up, automating and refining an income stream. Then when that is up and running, start work on a second. And then a third and so on.

You shouldn't try and set up a lot of different things at the same time. You'll end up with a whole bunch of unfinished projects, or badly set up sites etc.

I know it's tempting to try every idea that you come across, but believe me, if you put in the effort to set up an income stream properly, it is more likely to pay off and help to fund the next one you set up.

Along with a group of marketers who have become good friends, I shall soon be launching my Revenue-Sharing article site. We've worked hard on setting everything up and think we've got it to a pretty good state. Sure, there will be teething troubles, but we doubt whether there will be anything we can't fix quickly and easily.

Once our launch is under way, I'll be reporting on it here. But the good thing about this idea is that there are opportunities for everyone - not just myself and the others involved in our Joint Venture.

So, I shall be posting details of how you can make money using our system on a new Online Opportunities site, Unmarked Bills.

That site title is just a little joke. There's no criminal activity involved - but we do expect there to be money involved.

I'll be using that site to provide information about other money-making opportunities that I come up with in future, ranging from Viral Products, Software, Affiliate Sales, etc.
It's just being set up at the moment, but do bookmark it and return often.

Free Ebook of the Month - Make Money With PLR

2008-03-31T22:27:00.004+01:00

One of the best ways to make money online is by creating and selling your own product. Similarly, ebooks are the easiest products to sell because they can be delivered digitally.

The April 2008 Free Ebook of the Month, Make Money With PLR explains how you can create your own ebook without having to actually write it.

The book describes Private Label Rights products and how you can modify
them, change their title and even claim ownership of them.

So if you're struggling to get started making money online, download your free copy of Make Money With PLR now.

Latest venture - a mobile phone content site

2008-03-30T21:14:00.004+01:00

I was in two minds whether to post about this one or not. It just seemed too much like a blatant plug, or an excuse to get a backlink.

However, when I first started this blog I said that I would write down everything that I tried to make money on the Internet.

So, my latest venture is SonoLuminus - a ringtone, wallpaper and Java games site for mobile phones.

It's just another possible income stream. It really is a set it and forget it type of website because it uses a mobile content specialist to deliver the goods. I'm just like an affiliate really.

The script that I'm using automatically updates the content from the provider's database, so it doesn't really need much work doing to it. All I need to do is promote it and get it a good position in Google. Probably not a very easy thing to do due to the huge number of mobile content providers out there.
Still, it's worth a try. It costs nothing to set up the account with the service provider, and the script cost me nothing, too.

So if I only make $10 per year, I've covered my costs.

Free Website Builder

2008-03-28T22:18:00.004Z

Hot on the heels of XSitePro, I've discovered another website builder.

This one is completely free. Just go to the website and download it.

No technical knowledge required - Just get on with the business of writing your website content.

Completely NO HTML Required..."What You See Is What You Get" Interface!

Easy To Use Software With Step-By-Step User Guide & Video Tutorials Included!

Comes With Over 100+ Professional Website Templates Included FREE!

Equipped With Convenient Built-in FTP Software For Instant One-Click Publishing!

Professional Full-Version Website Builder Software...No Upgrade Required!

Certified 100% Clean With Absolutely Zero Spyware, Adware Or Malware

Amazing Built-In "Free Cash" Opportunity Where YOU Make Cash Like Crazy!

And Much More!

Get your FREE copy of My Free Website Builder now.

XSitePro Makes Website Building a Breeze

2008-03-27T12:01:00.002Z

Years ago I discovered a little program called Claris Homepage. It was great for putting together websites without having to learn HTML. But times change and the Internet has evolved. Software for creating really effective websites is now a lot more complex.

To cater for that complexity, there is DreamWeaver. Fantastic software. Very powerful, but also very expensive. If you create a lot of websites - maybe for a living - you probably can't do without it.

For us mere mortals though, DreamWeaver is way out of our price range (for now), so what other alternatives?

I recently discovered XSitePro. It lets you build websites quickly and easily, just as Claris Homepage did for me years ago.

The thing that impressed me most about XSitePro was that the sites it generated all seemed to follow the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rules. This means that your site, once up and running should actually stand a chance of appearing in the Google results pages if you promote it properly.

It handles links between pages, and even generates a sitemap page for you. And if you change the site, everything is updated. So it's not just a web designer - it's web site manager.

There are numerous templates to choose from, including those from a growing third-party business. You can change the look and feel of your entire site in seconds, just by choosing a different template.

At less than $200, XSitePro is affordable to most online marketers.

I'm currently rebuilding one of my sites using XSitePro. When it's done I'll write a full review of XSitePro, and illustrate it with my new site.

Beware ClickBank's Dormant Account Policy

2008-03-27T08:34:00.003Z

If you're getting into affiliate marketing, one of the most popular places to start is ClickBank. It's easy to use, and well-tried.

But if you're a beginner and not yet very good at marketing, you could lose the money that you have earned so far.

One of my colleagues had earned about $23 in his ClickBank account, but as he wasn't really promoting his links very well, he just didn't get any more sales for quite some time. When finally he went to check his balance, he saw that it had fallen to $16, and there were a number of small ($1 and $5) transactions on the account. He couldn't understand what they were, so I investigated for him.

It turned out that those charges were for a «Dormant account». In ClickBank's world, this means an account that has a positive balance, but no transactions for an extended period of time.
I investigated further and found that the following scale of charges are applied:
$1 if the account is dormant for 90 days
$5 if the account is dormant for 180 days
$15 if the account is dormant for 365 days

ClickBank pays out at 2-weekly intervals, and it is at those times that the charges are levied.

The charges are applied at every payment time.
So if you account has been dormant for 180 days, you will be charged $5. If your account has still been dormant for 180 or more days 2 weeks later, you will be charged $5 again. And again, and again until your account becomes active again, or your balance reaches $0.

My colleague never received any money from ClickBank. His balance didn't reach the payment threshold, so he didn't get sent any money, and his account stayed dormant long enough for his $23 to be completely consumed in charges.

How many other people have suffered this fate?

Perhaps you now understand why I think Click2Sell is a much better alternative.

Ebay Changes The Rules About Digital Products

2008-03-26T21:48:00.004Z

From 31st March, eBay will no longer allow you to sell digital products in auctions.

This means that the only way you will be able to sell digital products using ebay will be as Classified Advertisements.

So what is the impact of this change?

Firstly, Classified Ads are not included in the Feedback system because the sale is actually made outside the eBay environment.
This prevents people from artificially inflating their Feedback score by buying 100 ebooks that cost just a few cents, which is the main reason why eBay have done this.

On the other hand, people who make their living by selling ebooks will no longer accrue points on their Feedback score.

So what are the alternatives?

The obvious solution is to deliver those digital products on a physical CD or DVD.
However, that signals the end to the automated business as the vendor has to duplicate, package and post discs.

The buyer will have to wait for delivery of the product instead of getting an immediate download.
However, is there anything wrong with the vendor sending the buyer a download link to allow them access to it while they are awaiting the physical medium?

One benefit that I can see is that eBay will be cleared of all those trashy 2-cent ebooks that clutter up the listings.

If you're a buyer trying to artifically inflate your Feedback score, there are plenty of tangible goods on offer in eBay for just a few cents. They may not be as quick and as cheap as the ebooks, but you can still build up a decent Feedback score for relatively little outlay.

If you sell ebooks on eBay; the marketplace is changing. Adapt and survive.

Good news from Click2Sell

2008-03-25T17:23:00.003Z

I've been in discussion with Click2Sell and they're quite excited about having a script created to produce AdSense-style ads for Click2Sell products.

So, they are working on creating and publishing their marketplace data so that my script can use it.

So hot on the heels of CBIntuition will be C2SIntuition.
Or maybe even a combined script that uses both databases.

Sign up for Click2Sell.

Click2Sell script coming soon (I hope!)

2008-03-19T10:45:00.002Z

Having created a script (CBIntuition) that generates AdSense-style ad blocks using the ClickBank marketplace, there is no real reason why it couldn't be done for Click2Sell as well.

The only stumbling block is with the Click2Sell data. ClickBank provide a useful XML file that contains all the details of the products in the ClickBank marketplace.
This allows the CBIntuition script to get access to all the required details of the product and generate the necessary affiliate links.

At present, Click2Sell don't seem to provide a similar file. But as soon as one becomes available, I'll be ready to create a script to use it.

PHP Wizard has some excellent scripts

2008-03-18T20:43:00.002Z

If you're ever on the lookout for PHP scripts that are written by a professional programmer, for online marketers, that don't cost the earth, you could do a lot worse than to visit www.robertplank.com.

Robert is an absolute wizard at writing PHP scripts that do the job simply without any complicated installation procedures or setup.

He also knows a thing or two about online marketing. He's very modest about it, but he could put a lot of "professional" internet marketers to shame.

Robert's scripts are very often sold on a "nickel sale" principle; They start off at an extremely low price (very often just $0.05) and the price goes up by 5 cents after each sale. So it pays to be on his mailing lists so that you hear about his new releases as soon as possible.

His website also has some free scripts to offer, so it's worth checking out anyway.
www.robertplank.com

Great new alternative to ClickBank

2008-03-18T15:04:00.003Z

To the affiliate marketer, ClickBank is a real boon. Just sign up to get a free account and you can start selling any one of the 6000 or so (and rising) products currently being sold through the ClickBank marketplace.

One of my major gripes with ClickBank though, is that they pay out the money using cheques (checks). This costs ClickBank money, and it costs me money. It's also a very slow process.

A great new alternative for vendors and affiliate marketers alike is Click2Sell.

They do everything that ClickBank does, and then some.
The greatest part for me is that they will pay revenue directly into my PayPal account.
A very useful difference is that they are not limited to digital products as ClickBank are. Anyone selling anything, whether it's a digital product, a service or a physical product can do it via Click2Sell.

At Click2Sell, affiliate marketing network it costs you nothing:

to join;

to add an unlimited number of products to sell or promote;

to place a product on the Marketplace;

to get help, consultations and support;

to use advanced tracking tools;

There's also a great feature about Click2Sell that means you can make money without selling anything!

There are nearly 500 products to choose from (at time of writing), and the number is growing every day.

Revenue Sharing

2008-03-18T07:55:00.002Z

One of the upcoming stars in the online marketing world is Revenue Sharing, and I am getting involved with it right from the beginning.

How does it work?
Well, you've seen all those Ads by Google and various other advertising blocks on websites. They all earn money for the site owner.
But what if the site is an article site? Much of the content is contributed by other people. They get links back to their own site on every article they submit, so it's a fair exchange. This becomes even more important as the article site gains ground and earns itself a high Google PageRank.

The problem is that there are so many article sites out there, which one do you choose? Some colleagues and I have come up with a solution to that dilemma.
We share the revenue earned from ads placed on our site with the authors.

Every time their article is viewed, the ads displayed alongside it belong to the author; not to the site owner. So if that author writes popular articles, they'll get more views and therefore, more ad exposure.

We will be charging a small fee for each post that the author makes, but that money will be used to promote the website, and bring the articles more traffic.

Furthermore, authors will be offered the ability to automatically generate and send a newsletter based on their own articles to their subscribers. So it doesn't just bring in advertising revenue; it builds a list as well.

We'll be launching very soon.
I'll keep you posted...

A new year - a new start

2008-03-13T13:56:00.003Z

A few days ago I mentioned that my blog is now 1 year old. My original plan was to log everything that I do in an attempt to make money online.
That never happened somehow - I kind of drifted away in various different directions.
Then I got involved with a group of like-minded people and I was a bit reluctant to write about what I was doing.

This year is going to be different. Starting from today, I shall be logging everything that I am doing, and report back on progress.

So, here's what I'm currently working on:
I'm a computer programmer, so I'm concentrating on writing software to sell.
A while back, I acquired the PLR and source code to a program for creating software.
It was a sort of Make Your Own Software (MYOS) clone.
At the time I didn't rate it very highly and didn't recognise its value.

This week, one of my colleagues and friends mentioned that he also had the same PLR and source for the same product. He also said that he had actually made some money from software that he had created with it, and that he would like to get it customised with his own label and start selling it.

This piqued my interest somewhat, so now I am improving and developing that software and we shall be marketing it together. It will be called SimpleSoftwareMaker.

Earnings:
I've rest the counter, so as from today, my total earnings are:
$0.00 (£0.00)

Guru or screw-you?

2008-03-13T13:19:00.002Z

There are a number of high-flying online marketers who just don't seem to fail.
They create a new ebook, script, video, course etc., set a high price on it, and people flock in droves to buy them - usually without ever seeing the product first.

They get caught up in the hype of the "guru". If that guy wrote it, it must be absolute dynamite - must buy it.

Personally I've never been caught in the hype of the high-priced products, and I've never bought them. I couldn't actually afford them in the first place, but more importantly, are they really worth $997 to me?
If I walked into a book store and found a book and/or set of DVDs priced at $997, there's no way that I would buy it. Yet, many people go online, read the sales pages and part with their cash without even being able to browse what's in it.

I can't help thinking that the $997 might be better spent paying a professional to create a new product to sell, or on advertising an existing product.

Given the age-old statistic that more than 95% of would-be online marketers never make any money, how many of the people who buy those $997 products ever recover that money?

I suspect that the "gurus" are exploiting their perceived status and are just trying it on. "Let's see how much we can screw out of the punters this time!"

What amuses me most about many of these high-priced items is that a few months down the line, somebody else writes a $27 ebook or even posts on a blog, with a comprehensive summary of what the hype is all about.

Copycat scripts appear for $7, and you find that you can set yourself up with effectively the same things as the $997 package, for about $50. Ok, it's 6 months later, but it still works.
And sometimes it turns out to be something that marketers have been doing for years, and the "guru" has just discovered it and given it a fancy name.

Cynic? Maybe. Envious of these rich marketers who are making money hand-over-fist? Of course. I'd love to be in a similar position, financially. But I don't think I'd treat my position as a licence to print money.

One Year On

2008-03-10T12:39:00.003Z

This blog is now one year old.

It started out as a log of my attempts to make money on the Internet, although it did change focus from time to time.

Well one year on, where am I in terms of making money? My grand plan was to have earned the equivalent of half the amount I earn from my day job. So how did I do?
Not even close!
I sold an ebook for $30 (£15).
I made $20.25 (£10.12) on Google AdSense.
I earned $20 (£10) on "buy me a beer" donations on a forum.
Total for the year: $70.25 (£35.12)
That doesn't even cover the costs of buying domains and hosting them.

The problem was that I really had no idea where I was going with it. Sure, I'd bought and read all those ebooks about making money online, but they all seem to have one or two things in common.
The first is that they don't tell you the whole story. You get part of the way down the line, and then realise that there's something missing.
The second is that they all assume that you either have a large mailing list, that you can easily create a large mailing list, or that people are just going to come to your site like magic.

Since then, I have met up with some like-minded people and we're working on an excellent project that should get us all earning some money together.
It doesn't come without some hard work, but we know that it's going to be worth it in the end.

In that time I have also written a number of programs and scripts which I plan to sell. I am currently working on a script for which I have several customers waiting in the wings, which is all good news. It confirms that I must be on the right lines with my ideas.

So, although I haven't made much money over the past year, I just know that this coming year is going to be huge. It may have taken me a long time to get there, but it will be sure worth it.

If you're struggling to make money online, all I can say is keep at it. It can be done, and this year, I'm going to prove it. Big time.

Ethical Marketing - Telling the truth

2008-03-08T23:16:00.003Z

A group of online marketers to which I belong are into Ethical Marketing.

Ethical Marketing is basically about being honest and truthful about what you are doing. We despise the buzz and hype that you often get from the so-called "gurus" of Internet Marketing.

We've all been there chasing the dream - we buy the latest ebook or video package in the hope that it is the magic bullet that finally gets us earning money on the Internet. Of course, that magic bullet doesn't exist. The gurus give you a lot of information, but there's always something missing, or you need something that they don't provide, so you can't put their plan into action.

Most of us in the group can see through the hype. We know the tricks that marketers play with words to get people to buy. We also know the clever scripting techniques that can tell the potential buyer how many of that "limited edition" product remain.

And this is where the subject of my post comes from. If you're going to set up a limited edition offer - tell the truth. If the first 100 copies of your product are available at half the regular price, then don't sell 500 copies, or all the copies, at the lower price.

I came across one example of that today. The copy read that "We're only going to allow 50 people to gain access to this information. Once those 50 copies are sold, this page will disappear forever".
Just above the "Buy now" button, the copy read "Copies remaining", and under that, a large, flashing 4.
Just to see how true this was, I bought a copy of that ebook. (There's an 8-week money-back guarantee, so if it's rubbish, I'll get my money back)

I just returned to that sales page, and guess what? You got it! It still said that there were 4 copies remaining.

I suspect that will remain true tomorrow, next week, and even next month when he's sold his thousandth copy.

Be honest with your customers. You'll get found out eventually, and you completely lose their trust and respect for you.

Free Ebook of the Month - Discover Cagora

2008-03-03T15:52:00.003Z

Ric Raftis' brand new guide to Cagora is our new Free Ebook of the Month.

If you want to get yourself a free copy, just click the image shown at the top of the page, or click here.

The book guides you step-by-step through getting started with Cagora, why it can pay to join Cagora, and generally how to make the most of your free membership there.

So what is Cagora?
Cagora is a new Social and Community Networking platform. Cagora has several distinct differences to the other sites you may be familiar with.

First of all, Cagora is divided up into Worlds of Interest such as Rockclimbing, Ultralights and Patchwork Quilting and then Local Worlds such as Houston, Texas or Sydney, Australia. People can join as many or as few of these worlds as they wish but the result is they are forming Communities.

Secondly, unlike the vast majority of Social Networking sites, Cagora shares it's income with ALL of its members.

That's got to be worth signing up to, hasn't it?
Sign up for Cagora.
Get the free guide.

Why the Earn $14,000 per month schemes don't work

2008-02-29T12:39:00.006Z

By far, the easiest way of making sales is to build and maintain a mailing list. Once you have people in your list, they are a captive audience, and if you've built your list (or lists) properly, you know exactly what these people want.

If you search the net for opportunities to make money online, you can find a plethora of ebooks and videos showing you how to make your own products, modify PLR (Private Label Rights) products or find products to sell in affiliate programs etc.

These opportunites promise untold riches - $14000 in one month, $1000 a day etc. They are very attractive to the the newbies.

But when it comes to selling them, the information gets a bit thin on the ground. Suddenly, that online marketing opportunity which is ideal for newbies, isn't so ideal.
The reason the program worked for the author of the ebook (assuming he's being honest about the amount of money he has made), is that the author already had a large mailing list.

He writes an ebook about how he made $12000 in his first month, but he doesn't tell you that he already has a mailing list of 50,000 people, and a veritable army of affiliate resellers each with their own large lists.

It's true that if you follow the advice in the ebook you can make that sort of money, but only if you can get your message across to thousands upon thousands of people.

Without a mailing list, you're foundering on the rocks. You simply can't get the exposure for your product that the high-flying marketers can.

However, having said that, mailing lists are not the only way of marketing, and over the next week or so, I'll be covering alternative methods of marketing which will not only help you sell your product, but will start to build your list at the same time.

Free offer - blogging course

2008-02-28T22:20:00.002Z

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you get it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

By the way, that's a cunning marketing method, isn't it? I'll bet we see a lot more of that kind of thing in future.

Free guide to Cagora, the latest social networking site

2008-02-28T13:25:00.009Z

Cagora is a new social-networking site based around communities. Each community can represent a geographical region, or a special interest.
For example, in Cagora I belong to the Bournemouth, UK community, but I also belong to the an Internet Marketing community.

In total, there are in excess of 20,000 different communities for you to join and meet like-minded people.

It's a great place to start finding contacts or customers for your online business.

With that many communities, when I joined I found I had difficulty finding my way around. But now I've found an excellent, FREE, ebook guide to Cagora, called "Discover Cagora - Social & Community Networking".
You can download it FREE from Here.

Getting Started in an Online Business- Part 1.

2008-02-23T01:09:00.002Z

This is the first post in a series about running your own online business. We aim to cover all aspects of running a successful website.
In this post, I'm going to cover Hosting.

Hosting is basically where you put your website.

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might supply you with some webspace on which you can put a website. This is usually part of the deal for having the account, so you don't pay extra for it.
Sadly, most free webspaces come with a lot of restrictions, which apart from the most simple of sales pages, do not lend themselves to the use of eCommerce.
And if your site becomes very popular, you will soon fall foul of the ISP's bandwidth limits and your site will either become temporarily unavailable, or you'll find a huge addition to your ISP's monthly bill.

For any serious website used for Online Marketing and eCommerce, you'll need an independent host. These are specialist companies that provide hosting services for commercial websites.
They are not very expensive - typically $10 per month - sometimes even less. However, the cheaper ones might not provide such a good service or support.

For most online marketing sites, you will need PHP and CRON services provided by your host. This lets you run scripts that will automate your business. After all, we don't want to work for a living, do we?
Don't worry if you don't know what PHP and CRON are. You don't need to know just yet. Just make sure that you have them.

Personally, I use HostGator for my hosting. Since I've been with them (more than one year now), I've never had a site become unavailable. Their support is very good and they even have online chat style support. Furthermore, for just $7.95 per month I can host unlimited domains (subject to the available disk space).
I also use a couple of other hosts, but they are actually HostGator resellers, which suggests to me that they can't be that bad!

There are many other hosting services. Google will find them for you.

Once you have your host, you will need to set up the Domain Name Servers for your domain.
But I'll cover domains in another post.

Idiot's Guide To Running a Website

2008-02-18T16:25:00.002Z

I'm planning to cover a whole raft of topics on this blog, including HTML, Web Hosting, AutoResponders, PHP etc. Basically anything that you need to get an online business up and running.

I hope to cover them in a logical sequence that the beginner can follow.

With a lot of luck and a following wind, I'll start tomorrow with an overview of what running an online business entails.

Stay tuned...

New blog is online...

2008-02-15T11:55:00.002Z

My Computing and Technology blog software has been installed in its new domain.

It still needs a bit of tweaking, and some content adding, so it's not quite ready to go yet.

I'll be using a number of plug-ins, which all need to be configured, and the raw theme that I'm using is a little dull, so that will be getting a lick of digital paint.

This blog will remain here and will revert back to its original topic of online marketing, from which it has deviated somewhat.
It started out as a log of my efforts to make money online. Most of those attempts have been fairly fruitless so far because I was kind of like the blind being led by no-one.

In the meantime, I've met some great guys along the way and have a much better idea of what to do to get started with a viable, online business.

So, whether you're into technology or making money online, or both, keep coming back here, and/or visit my new blog at Phil's Techno Talk.

Article Site security warning

2008-02-14T13:16:00.001Z

This is very important. Not one of our usual topics, but you really must take heed.

Article-Content-King Beat The Hackers! (Almost)

I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news, I am not a scare monger, this is very real! At the beginning of the year, Article-Content-King was hacked, the hackers got all the way to server Admin, but luckily I was also in there too when they were trying to do damage and we managed to lock them out before they could, but still it took a few more days to completely secure the script files.

I was not so lucky with my other server. I had the same script installed several times on that server, and I wasn't there when they were doing the damage. I lost EVERYTHING ON THE SERVER not just the accounts that were "hackable".

This security hole could be more serious than you think! Please read and act accordingly.

Through the security hole in this script, every account on the server was lost. The hackers got all the way into server admin created themselves a user. They had the ability to do what ever they wanted and they wanted to destroy the server. I have absolutely no clue why I would be attacked in this way. I think it is just because they managed to get in and took it as far as they could.

Your site (every domain you own) could be at risk from this even if you have secured your script with the patch and even if you do not have the script installed at all. If you have any domains on shared hosting they are at risk. If there is a chance that another user of the same server has an unsafe installation of this script set up, your domains are at risk.

Lets look at what this script is and how it has been marketed in the 3 years since it was first made available. (or is it 4). This script is not really sold to people who want an article directory, it is mainly sold to Internet marketers looking for an easy passive income site. I managed to buy it for $1 on e-bay 2 weeks ago when I first looked at making the patch for the untouched files. People are still reselling it now at least 3 years on.

There is no telling how many people have installed this script over the years and completely forgotten about it. I don't know about you, but I tend to install all the scripts I get in PLR packages to test them out. I don't use them all and I don't (or didn't) always delete them if I decide not to use them.

Out of the "500" who originally bought this script as part of sourcecodegold mine, how many have this script installed somewhere and forgotten about it. How many others have done so since? How can you be sure you are safe if someone else on the same server as you hasn't secured their script? If server admin is compromised then every account is at risk, no matter how secure.

As Online Marketers we all tend to see the same hosting offers, this makes the chance of someone having an insecure script set up somewhere on a shared hosting account even greater! But there is no telling how far and wide this script could be installed, nor is there any real way of you finding out if you are sharing a server with a insecure site.

This is the reality in any case, and one of the main reasons why I do not use shared hosting, but when you know it can happen and do not do anything about it, you do everyone a disservice.

I am really not trying to cause a panic here, but the threat is very real!

We need to get word out about the SecureArticleBeach membership site to everyone who may have this script installed and get them to download the free patch. You won't really be safe until everyone has.

Please post this message on your blog and let your subscribers and customers know. Even people who have never even heard of this script could be at risk.

Respectfully

Dan Blackburn

Please post this message on your blog, the fix is simple and available FREE from http://www.SecureArticleBeach.com

Article Source: http://www.article-content-king.com

New blog coming soon

2008-02-14T12:39:00.003Z

I am currently working on setting up a new blog, similar to this one, but with a whole lot more.

I shall be inviting authors in the same field to contribute articles, and as an added incentive, the Google AdSense adverts on the pages that include their articles will use the author's AdSense ID. This means that the authors will not only enjoy links to their sites from their resource boxes, but may also benefit from a boost to their income stream from Google AdSense.

To implement these changes, I'm going to have to move from this free Blogger account to a hosted blog.

The new blog will be in the Computing category, so it will cover much more than this blog. This blog will remain, but its emphasis will be on computing and online marketing.

I'll let you know when the new blog is up and running.

Free ebook of the month

2008-02-13T10:41:00.004Z

There's a new feature on my blog starting today; Free eBook of the Month.

These are simply there for the taking.
If I come up with more freebies, it might change to Free eBook of the Week.
You'll find it at the top of the right-hand column.

This month, it's Google Adwords Made Easy. It contains some simple strategies for improving your success with AdWords. So many people dive into the AdWords pool only to find that they end up spending more money than they earn. This ebook shows you how to avoid the sharks and piranhas once you've dipped your toe in.

It's a ZIPped file to reduce download time. You should know how to handle ZIP files by now.

More on the free cloaking tool

2008-02-12T00:09:00.000Z

I just discovered a third, even quicker way of setting up a cloaked affiliate link, so I'll be adding it to QuickLink shortly.

It's not far from completion now. We're putting the finishing touches to the online help (no expense spared on this project), and testing a new way of branding the software so that you can redistribute it to your own customers, complete with your own dynamic advertising stream built in.

eBay Tips The FeedBack Balance

2008-02-05T15:40:00.000Z

eBay has decided that from May 2008, Sellers will not be able to leave negative or neutral feedback about buyers.

However, the reverse is not true. Buyers will still be able to leave negative or neutral comments about sellers.

This is somewhat unfair. I've been on both sides of eBay transactions, and it's not always the seller who is at fault. There are some complete idiots who go around ebay bidding on things they never plan to buy. When they win, they don't pay and they refuse to contact you.

Others don't read the auction details properly and end up disappointed when the product is not what they expected.

The only recourse is to take the matter directly to eBay for arbitration. They say that they will remove people who do not comply. So negative feedback has turned into eviction from the system. Ok, these people may be idiots, but that's a bit harsh. Whatever happened to rehabilitation of offenders?

eBay say that many buyers would not leave negative comments for fear that sellers would retaliate.

I guess this is true for some sellers, but we shouldn't all be tarred with the same brush.

Viral Marketing Links That Never Expire

2008-02-05T00:04:00.000Z

Have you ever acquired an ebook or a software program that's maybe a couple of years old and found that half of the links in it simply don't work?

Basically what's happened is that the vendor has squeezed every cent out of that product and it's not selling any more. Consequently, the vendor has abandoned whatever the links point to and moved onto something else.

That's ok for the vendor - he's made his money and is now making money from something else.
It's not so good for the poor customer who obtains the product from one of the many downline resellers a couple of years later.

There's a better way

Now what if you could market a product that contains hyperlinks that never expire?

If you move onto something else, the hyperlinks change to point to something else.
The product becomes dynamic - every time it runs or is viewed, the ads could be different. Even if it's 2, 3, 5 or 10 years down the line, the ads could point to fresh new material.

It can be done, and I'm working on two ways that can make it happen. The first is in software products, and the latest is in ebooks.

I'm not going to reveal how it's done here - I believe there's a valuable ebook to be written on the subject. I'll be writing that ebook over the next few weeks, as well as producing some example programs and ebooks.
In fact, the ebook that reveals how it's done is likely to be the very first ebook with dynamic advertisements.

Stay tuned to find out more...

Should Microsoft take over Yahoo?

2008-02-04T14:05:00.000Z

On the BBC News website, they posed the question "Will Yahoo benefit from a takeover by Microsoft?".

Is that really the point?

Surely it should be "Will the users benefit from....".

Of course Yahoo will benefit - or at least the owners will. They'll end up with a big, fat wad of money.
Will Microsoft benefit? Of course. Along with Yahoo, they've been struggling to gain market share of the Search Engine Business - totally peeved by Google's dominance.

Will the users benefit? Maybe. Maybe not. Those who dislike Microsoft will start to migrate - probably to Google. Those who use Microsoft's search engine already will initially benefit from a larger database and get improved results.

Those who Google almost exclusively (myself included) will probably not notice any difference and will continue to Google.
I can't see Google losing any of their share of the market, and there's a distinct possibility that they will gain from it.

Will the bosses of Google have any sleepless nights? Probably, but not too many. They're already objecting to the possible takeover. But anyone in a strong position will protect their territory.
Of course there is always the possibility that they are objecting so that the whole process gets drawn out over a few years and Yahoo or Microsoft pull out of the deal.

Will it affect online marketing? Not very much. It might swing SEO a little towards Yahoo and MSN Search, but otherwise it won't make much difference. After all, the bottom line is that online marketers don't care which search engine you came from as long as you buy something!

Free link-cloaking utility coming soon

2008-02-02T21:09:00.000Z

After one of my online marketing buddies had a few problems creating a cloaked link for an affiliate program he was in, I decided that it might be useful to write a small program to create them automatically.

So within the space of a couple of lunch-breaks at work, I put together QuickCloak.
Basically, you enter your affiliate link, add a few optional details about your web site/domain, and click the Cloak button.

QuickCloak then instantly generates two different cloaked link redirectors.
The first is a PHP one. This is useful to anyone who has PHP available on their website hosting service. But if you don't, there's no need to worry because QuickCloak also creates an HTML version.

Either way, you simply promote a link that looks as if it's part of your website. There's nothing to give it away as being an affiliate link. This gives your customers the confidence that what they are buying is one of your own products, and it also stops theives from stealing your commission by replacing your affiliate link with theirs.

You will be able to obtain a free copy of QuickCloak simply by signing up for my newsletter.

Expected release date: This week. Keep checking back!

Security Warning

2008-01-26T21:36:00.000Z

One of the most popular scripts for running an article site is Article Beach.

If you are an Article Beach site owner, ** YOUR SITE COULD BE HACKED AT ANY MINUTE! **.

And not just hacked! Your entire server could be destroyed!

Your website and entire server are at risk from this extremely DANGEROUS security vulnerability.

It happened to a good friend of mine and he lost 20 clients hosting accounts, all his own websites, and the hackers used his domain to send 2 million spam emails.

There is now a FREE security patch for Article Beach which will plug the security gap.
If you've applied security patches before, don't think for one minute that you're safe. So had my friend and his server still got hacked.

His expert PHP programmer has now fixed the problems and they are pleased to be able to release this FREE upgrade for you, so you can secure your site.

You need to install this patch now to protect your own site and the the sites belonging to anyone else who use the same host.

To get the patch, go to Secure Article Beach.

Review: Page Translator

2008-01-21T15:38:00.001Z

I recently came across a program called Page Translator.
Its purpose is to translate web pages into other languages using Google's translation facilities.

I thought this was going to be a great way of increasing the reach of my websites until I installed it.

I ran the installer and installed it in the default folder.

When I ran the program, it took a few seconds to start and then produced two error messages - the first saying that it couldn't find a file which was clearly there.
(As a programmer I could see from the error message that the program was not looking for the file correctly)
The second error message was completely blank. Very useful.

The main program's user interface was completely blank except for a menu that contained nothing useful (About, Tell a friend, Exit). So I wasn't actually able to do anything with it.

The About box revealed that the program was from 2004, so I went to the originator's website to download the latest version. That turned out to be the same one, so it behaved in exactly the same way.

So Page Translator found itself uninstalled from my system almost as quickly as it had been installed.

Such a pity. The demo in the sales website looked good. This program had the potential to be a real winner if only the programmer had taken a little more care and tested it properly.

The program was originally sold for anywhere between $14.95 and $29.95, but is now free. I'm not surprised.

Rating: 0/10
Verdict: Avoid at all costs.

metaGenius hits the net

2008-01-16T10:32:00.001Z

People who run an online business but have yet to learn HTML are probably losing out in the search engine optimization (SEO) stakes unless they get a third party to do it for them.

There are several SEO tools out there, but many are quite expensive. That's not so good for the novice webmaster who is working to a limited budget.

One of the many optimization methods is the use of Meta tags in the head section of web pages. The average online business owner probably hasn't even heard of Meta tags, and definitely wouldn't know how to add them to his web pages.

Enter metaGenius. MetaGenius is a new, low-cost program that uses a wizard-style interface to prompt for information. It then turns that information into Meta tags and adds them to the selected web page.

No need to learn about Meta tags - no need to learn HTML. metaGenius does it all for you.

Find metaGenius at Dryice Computing.

PHP editor under development

2007-12-18T10:56:00.000Z

While developing the CBIntuition script, I needed a decent PHP editor. Whenever your write code, whether it's a web script or a conventional programming language, life is a lot easier if the display is syntax-highlighted.
What this means is that the script or programming language's keywords are displayed in a different style - bold for example. Numbers and text are displayed in different colours, as are comments. This makes programming a lot easier.
There are a number of highlighting editors available, but I remembered that I once wrote a highlighting editor for the Pascal and C++ programming languages. With a bit of tweaking, this could become a web page editor which recognises and highlights PHP, HTML, Javascript and XML.
So PHPIntuition is born.
Another useful feature of programmers editors is "code snippets". This is an idea I came up with years ago, and evidently many other programmers have thought of too.
Basically it's a set of "library" functions that can be simply pasted in to your code wherever you need them. Similarly, if you write some code that you might use again and again, you can create your own snippets.
PHPIntuition provides you with a set of snippet libraries for PHP, HTML and JavaScript. Additionally, it lets you save your own snippets.

The expected release date of PHPIntuition is during the first quarter of 2008.

We'll keep you posted.

Computing Guide

2007-12-11T11:00:00.000Z

The newly revamped site mentioned in yesterday's post is coming along nicely. At time of writing it contains three of the original articles from the site. I plan to write another article today, which will be completely fresh material, to help the Google rank along.

The site still needs a bit of customisation because I copied the script directly from another one of my sites and it contains links that I don't really want.

I plan to add an index of "10 most recent articles" on the opening page because at the moment, you're simply presented with a large bundle of Google Ads. That's not particularly inviting.

I'll also be adding new ad blocks using my CBIntuition script, which displays ClickBank ads in the same style as Google Ads.
I can create different ad blocks for each article category, using the most relevant keywords for that category. This means the ads will be much better targeted.

Finally, I want to overhaul the look of the site. It's quite dull to say the least.
I'm not sure whether the script uses themes or CSS or not, but I can freely modify the code anyway.

Another site gets a revamp

2007-12-10T15:04:00.000Z

I recently acquired a PHP script for making article sites.

I used it to create my Home & Garden articles site.

It seems to work reasonably well, so I decided to use it for another of my sites, A Practical Guide to Computing.
It was already an article site, but consisted entirely of static pages. That made it very difficult to maintain, and being the lazy type that I am, I stopped maintaining it.

Now I am being a bit cunning about the revamp. The site already contained over 100 articles, but it didn't rank anywhere in Google, and it has fallen down the Alexa rankings to greater than 10,000,000.

So, yesterday I set up the site with just one article, and today I created a new Google Sitemap and submitted it. It's just come back with a status of OK, so I can now put my plan into action.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Google likes sites that update regularly.
So, every day I'll reintroduce one of the old articles and update the sitemap to reflect the new page. In addition, I'll add completely new articles that I write myself from time to time.
Google should then see the site as a very active one, with a decent amount of content. Admittedly, some of that content will be duplicate (the original articles came from other article sites), but my own articles will be all new content.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this "live" site attains a Google PageRank higher than zero.

Of course, it's not just about content - Google likes to see external links to the site, so I'll work on obtaining some of them. I shall not be using link farms or reciprocal links - I want good quality one-way links.

Breakthrough

2007-12-05T08:16:00.000Z

The data file for my new script, CBIntuition, comes from the ClickBank Marketplace in ZIP format. I've been tearing my hair out trying to get a PHP script to unzip it.
Most of the scripts that I've found depend upon the Zlib library being linked in to PHP on the host server. My host's servers don't appear to have the library built in, and as I don't own the host servers, I can't add it.

A new friend of mine, found via an online forum, has just furnished me with a library, DUnzip2 that will do the job. It's not his library, but I have to say thanks to him the Admin of CBIntuition is now one step nearer completion.

PHP Scripts

2007-12-03T23:52:00.000Z

Almost everyone who's got seriously into developing interactive websites would agree that it doesn't get any easier than using PHP and MySQL.

Having now spent the last couple of weeks working on a script using PHP, I'm inclined to agree.

The script, CBIntuition, delivers Adsense-style advertisements for products on the ClickBank marketplace.

And this has spawned another related idea, which I'll be calling MyIntuition until I find a better name.
Basically, it will deliver similar, AdSense-style ads, but the advertisements will be for your own products, or other affiliate links (ie not ClickBank).

The idea is that the user will be able to add their own advertisements to a MySQL database and the script will then deliver ads from that database.

I'll be working on the script just as soon as the CBIntuition script is finished.

Into the unknown - video production

2007-11-26T00:58:00.000Z

Video is everywhere now. The advent of sites such as YouTube has made video publishing the latest thing.

Some of my Internet Marketing friends and I are getting together to produce a bundle of Internet Marketing training videos. This will consist of a varied selection of narrated Powerpoint-style presentations, Screen-captured video demonstrating how to do something, or simple discussions and presentations.

Most of us have never done anything like it before, so we're all jumping into the unknown.
Hopefully, the result will be an excellent collection of hints, tips and other useful information which we can put together as a bundle and market as a joint effort.

It could be the start of something big.

ClickBank meets AdSense

2007-11-23T11:45:00.000Z

If you cast your eyes to the left-hand column of this blog, you'll see a section called "Ways to make money".
Under that section, you will see a list of titles and brief descriptions. They are actually advertisments similar to those "Ads by Google" ones you see on most web pages (including this one).

The difference with these adverts are that they are for products being sold via the ClickBank affiliate program.

They are displayed on this site (and some of my other sites) by a script that I wrote myself, which I've called CBIntuition. It selects all the ClickBank products that contain a pre-defined keyword, and then chooses up to 5 of them at random to display on the page.

The advantage of this is that many ClickBank products pay huge commissions on sales - up to 75% for some products.

The script is still under development, so it's not yet available to purchase, but it should be some time in December 2007.
The ad display script works just fine. I'm now working on an admin and configuration script. Installation will be very simple - simply copy it to your host.

The most difficult part of this script is keeping the ClickBank marketplace database up-to-date. This changes almost daily, so it should really be updated at least weekly.
I'm working on another script to do as much of that as is possible.

The script will be available from my software store, Dryice Computing, where you can find out more details.

Caveat emptor (buyer beware)

2007-11-15T07:58:00.000Z

When I set up my ebook site, The Cafetorium, I purchased the eStore script and a bundle of ebooks and software packages.

I set up the eStore, loaded in the product database, which consisted of all the ebooks and software in the bundle. Then I set it to work.

Yesterday I received an email from the owner of an eBook saying that they had never issued that eBook with resale rights of any kind.
Of course I removed the eBook from my inventory immediately and explained that I had received it in a bundle of stock for an eBook site.

So the old phrase, "caveat emptor" or "buyer beware" raises its head again.

If you find yourself in the same position, just remove the item from sale. Don't bother arguing about it. I still have around 200 products in my store so I'm not going to lose out by having my stock list reduced by one.
(Actually I never sold any copies of the product in question, and I doubt whether I would have sold many in the future)

Incoming links

2007-11-14T08:07:00.000Z

There are two main forms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The first is known as on-page SEO. This basically means adjusting your content to make it search-engine friendly. It's all about using keywords in the domain name, the title, description and body text. Get the ratio of keywords to other text too high and you get penalised for "keyword stuffing". Get the ratio too low and you lose out on relevancy.

The second is known as off-page SEO. This is a lot more difficult to achieve because it's basically about other sites having relevant links to your site.
It is preferable if these links are one-way, otherwise you get accused of simply trading links specifically for SEO purposes.
Last night I discovered that one of my sites, Dryice Computing, has 14 incoming links. I knew about one or two of them, but the others were somewhat of a surprise. However, 10 of the links were all from sub-domains of the same site, so it probably only counts as 1 link in Google's eyes.

There are several factors to consider when getting incoming links set up. The first is that the linking site is on a different C-Class IP address. This is to make sure that the site owner is not simply linking in from all his other sites.
The next factor is relevancy. The site that links to yours must have some relevancy in terms of content. If your site sells dog biscuits, it's no use having links in from a company that makes radiators.
Another important factor is Google PageRank. If you can get links in from a high-ranking page, your own PageRank will grow.

The site that links to my site 10 times has a Google PageRank of 5, which means it carries a lot of weight.

It will be interesting to see if my site's PageRank grows from its lowly 0 as a result of these links.

Keeping Google-friendly

2007-11-14T07:55:00.000Z

Whenever I change or update any of my websites, I always go to Google's webmaster tools to keep everything up to date.
It's a site worth visiting anyway because if you use Google sitemaps, you really need to ensure that they are up to date. If they are not, Google reports an error and stops indexing the site. You then need to update the sitemap and re-submit it.
When you do that, it can take a while for Google to go and check the site out again, but you really mustn't forget to go and look at the results. If there are still errors, your site's changes won't be updated in Google's database.

Google likes sites with Google sitemaps, so it's worth investing the time to create one. However, creating one by hand is not a lot of fun and prone to error unless you really like writing XML.
There are plenty of tools out there for generating Google sitemaps.

Another advantage of using Google sitemaps is that submitting your sitemap to Google is a much faster way of getting your site indexed by Google than simply by submitting its URL.

You can visit Google's webmaster pages at http://www.google.com/webmasters.

Bum Marketing

2007-11-10T23:45:00.000Z

One method of marketing that I've read about numerous times is the publishing of articles on article sites.

The main reason for doing this is to create high-ranking links to your sales site, which is good in SEO terms. The same principle is used by posting on forums, adding a link to your website in the signature.
Another advantage of this method is that anyone reading the article or the post could actually click through to the sales page.

So when I heard about Bum Marketing, I thought that it was just somebody churning out the same old stuff with a new name.

In reality, that's true to some extent, but it takes it a little further by explaining how to do it properly.

In a nutshell, you target phrases containing a number of keywords that render a relativly small number of results in a search engine.

Let's say you are selling Albanian sausages, either directly or as an affiliate.
Rather than choosing one or two keywords, you go for complete phrases, such as "how to knit an Albanian sausage warmer".

Basically, you publish a number of articles relating to that subject and at the end, you include a link to your sales site (or your affiliate link).

The article sites all have a high Google PageRank, so the inlinks to your site are quite valuable. The article sites are also indexed quite often by the search engines, so your site can get a good placing in the search results.

The bottom line for this method when used for selling ClickBank products as an affiliate is that an article can earn you in the region of $20 per month.
The idea then is to write a new article every day for 3 months (90 days), so that your 90 articles earn you a revenue of $1800 per month.

That sounds good to me - that's equivalent to my mortgage payments. I'd love to be able to cover that simply by writing an article per day.

I read another ebook which described an accelerated version of the Bum Marketing method. Basically you churn out 5 articles an hour for a month. All very well if you have that sort of free time, but you have to look at it realistically.

I quite enjoy writing, so I think that once I've got into the swing of things, I could knock out a new article during my lunch break every day. A couple more in the evenings would bring my daily total to 3 articles. So I'd get my 90 articles in the space of a month.

So let's give it a try. I'll keep you posted with the results.

A new venture to try out

2007-10-30T13:36:00.000Z

Yesterday I attended an Internet Marketing workshop. The main theme of the workshop was Drop-Shipping, but also included other necessary techniques such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and how to use Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines without going bust.
The information I picked up from the workshop was worth much more than the measly £20 I paid (which included a reasonable lunch).

I'd heard about drop-shipping before. Basically the marketer sets up a website to sell products from a drop-shipping wholesaler. Customers buy from that website, and then the website owner places the order with the drop-shipper at the wholesale price, thus making a profit.
The drop-shipper fulfils the order and ships it to the customer.

So in a nutshell, the only thing that the website owner has to do is market the website and pass on orders to the supplier. In some cases, the ordering could be automated, depending on how the drop-shipper prefers to receive the orders.
If that's the case, the business becomes self-running. All that's required is a little maintenance - changing the items on sale, ensuring that orders are getting through etc.
Everything else is handled by the drop-shipper.

At the workshop, we were shown examples of successful and not so successful drop-ship websites. The least successful one was making about a few hundred dollars a month. Not very good, but not bad for very little effort. And consider this; if a self-running site can earn $300 per month, think what 10 or more of those sites would do.

I'm now looking at drop-ship suppliers in the UK, although they don't have to be UK based of course. Any drop-shipper that will post internationally is a potential supplier.

Widen the scope

2007-10-23T13:10:00.000+01:00

Once people start getting into Internet Marketing (IM), they discover the merits of putting Adsense units on their pages. After all, if they can earn some money just by giving up a small amount of space on their pages, why not?
A recurring, passive income. Add the code once and leave it.

What these people often fail to consider is that Adsense is not the only scheme out there. Yahoo! can supply similar context-sensitive ads in some areas.
There's also Amazon. See the left-hand column for an example of a context-sensitive Amazon ad.

Personally I have made more money from my Amazon Associates links than from Google Adsense.
I have Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk Associate IDs, so I can target a wider market.

Forget Alexa - Concentrate on Google

2007-10-18T08:13:00.000+01:00

After some 2 weeks of no updates in Alexa ranks of the sites that I monitor, I'm now seeing some very strange things happening.

The ranks of many of the sites have plummetted by around 1 million places. One has fallen 3.5 million places, and another has dropped off the face of the earth as far as Alexa is concerned and has gone from a rank of 4.4 million to No Data, which is a fall of at least 5.6 million places.

And as on a few occasions before, one of my sites gets a different rank depending upon which page you visit.

I guess it's possible that these positions are a result of my robot visiting he sites every day, but it's unlikely.

Anyway, after a short discussion about Alexa on a forum, I've decided it's not really worth bothering about, and I shall be uninstalling the Alexa toolbar.

A week or so ago, I saw the August 2007 results for search engine popularity. Google wins hands down. Of 61 billion searches worldwide, 37 billion were handled by Google. That's more than the other search engines put together.

From today, I'm just going to concentrate on getting my sites highly ranked in Google.

Internet Marketing Workshop

2007-10-16T08:13:00.000+01:00

Last night I attended an Internet Marketing seminar. In actual fact, it wasn't so much of a seminar as an introduction to Internet Marketing (IM) and a commercial for a 1-day IM Workshop.
That wasn't so bad - the seminar was free, they fed us, and the workshop is only £20 for two people. The reason it's so cheap is that they make money out of hosting and providing programming and eCommerce solutions, which they try to sell as part of the workshop.

I already have eCommerce solutions in place and I'm a programmer by profession, so I'm just going for the tuition.
It takes place in about 2 weeks time. It's going to be interesting to hear what they say.
They claim that using their techniques, you can get a top spot in Google within 3 days of launching a site.
I suspect that there's a trick involved - it probably only works if you choose their hosting package (maybe your site ends up as a sub-domain of their site, which already has a good Google Page Rank.
We shall see.

During the seminar, they did give me a tip which might help improve my site Google ranking. The answer is "Give something away for free".
If you're competing against others for the same market, give the customers something free. On my eBooks and software sites that's easy. I have several little utility programs that would not command a high price. They would make excellent giveaways.

I think I need to do a bit of redesign on The Cafetorium. It could really use an intro on the front page, with news of special offers etc.
Have to dig deep into that PHP code and see what I can do.

New domains now online

2007-10-15T15:39:00.000+01:00

My new host has managed to fix the problems I was experiencing and my new domains are now online.

The first domain, The Articles pages, is a kind of Article Site Directory.

The next domain will be a Blog which will be related to the Directory site. This is because it is much easier to promote blogs and get them in the search engines than any other type of website.

The third domain, will be an article site. These are becoming well known as a medium for making a fair bit of money. I'm all for that!

PS. It's now 13 days since the Alexa ranks changed on any of my sites.

Alexa is still driving me crazy

2007-10-12T10:04:00.000+01:00

It is now 11 days since there was any change in the Alexa ranks of any of the sites I monitor. (Several of those sites do not belong to me - I monitor them as a sort of control against which to compare my own sites)

I guess as the number of sites in the Alexa database increases, the longer it will take to recalculate the stats, so this could actually get worse. let's hope that Alexa introduce some more processing power to cope with it.

The project I'm currently working on is designed to rise through the Google ranks as quickly as possible. It will be interesting to see whether this is reflected in the Alexa ranks. However, as Alexa is based only on visits by Alexa toolbar users, there might not be any correlation between them.

Yet another false start

2007-10-12T09:53:00.000+01:00

Well I set off with all good intentions to get my latest project off the ground.
I planned how I was going to do it, and was going to work through it methodically.

The first task was to register some domains, which I did with no problems. It's something I've done numerous times before, and it's very straightforward.

The next task was to find a new host for some of these domains. The reason for this is part of SEO (search engine optimisation). I want to link various domains together, but the search engines see this as a blatant attempt to exploit external links if both linked sites have the same C Class IP address. (See the end of this post for a quick description of IP address classes)

So, I found a new host and my account was created. Then I set my new domain's DNS to point to that host's servers and waited for it all to come online.

Still no sign of it. Even before all the DNS are updated, the account Control Panel should work, but it's not letting me log in.

The hosting reseller is aware of the problem and doing everything he can to sort out the problem, but it is a little frustrating.
I can not proceed with the rest of my plan until those domains are online.

If it doesn't happen soon, I may have to cancel this hosting account and move elsewhere.

Getting down to business

2007-10-10T22:50:00.000+01:00

Over the past few months I've had a few false starts to various online business ideas. This has usually been due to pressures of work and family, and the fact that I'm also trying to renovate a house.

I have now decided to knuckle down and get one of my ideas implemented, working through it methodically from beginning to end.

A while back, I noticed a huge increase in article sites. It wasn't until I set one up myself that I realised that they can be big money-spinners with Google AdSense.
However, my site was all static HTML pages, so it was a real chore to maintain. Consequently, my article site has stalled and its popularity has dwindled.

Over the last few weeks I've been getting into PHP which can make website maintenance so much easier. So, I am now going to set up a new article site at The Articles Site, using PHP and a mySQL database.

I'm not going to rush into this - I believe that's another reason why I've had only a little success with my past efforts.
So, visit The Articles Site regularly to see it evolve.

(By the way, for anyone who's been following this blog, you will have spotted the fact that I've deliberately put the URL of the new site in this post in a blatent attempt to get it into Google as fast as possible. This is despite the fact that there is currently no content on the site. Google will simply log the URL at this time, but as the content increases, should begin to love it)

New money-making domain

2007-09-29T01:24:00.000+01:00

At the moment, I have two main web sites. The Cafetorium is the place where I sell eBooks and software. At the moment, most of the products I sell from this site are 3rd-party products. I'll be adding more of my own once I get all my other projects established.
The next site is Dryice Computing. The plan for this site is to sell only my own software products. At the moment, it carries only one of my own products, and one 3rd-party product. I plan to replace the 3-rd party product with an improved version that I'm creating myself.

I'm now setting up a 3rd website. This has two main purposes. The first is that it's an experimental area where I can try out marketing techniques, and sell products that don't fit in with my main sites. It's likely to use hard-sell techniques similar to those used by the Internet Marketing "gurus", pushing hyped-up, high-price items.
The second purpose is totally mercenary - to make money. I figured that if I can successfully push products that sell for $67 (about £34) upwards I might as well really go for it.

My plan is to make at least as much money as I make in my day job from this site, and preferably 10% more. I really like the idea of going to work (I really like my day job, by the way) with the secret that I actually earn more money from my websites than I do from my job.
It's what I call financial security. If I was made redundant, or the company went under, I'd just shrug it all off.

To go along with the theme of making lots of money, I've set up the site Unmarked Bills. It's just a blog at the moment, but that's just to get the domain Googled. The blog will be moving over to a sub-domain, while the main promotions take over the domain home.

Protect your software from pirates

2007-09-26T08:53:00.000+01:00

If you write software or you sell software, you'll know how important it is to protect it from copying. The more useful and high-demand the software is, the higher the chances are that it will be pirated.
If you protect it, then the crackers WILL crack that protection. Then you will find unprotected copies, or serial numbers or even serial number generators going around the Internet.
In a way, it's flattering. The crackers consider your software highly enough to warrant the effort of cracking it.

However, if you make your living from software, flattery doesn't pay the bills.
So your protection system must be very strong. There really isn't any protection system that can't be cracked with the right amount of effort. But if the system is strong enough to deter the crackers, you're in with a fighting chance.

Shareware Creator is a strong protection system that can be applied to new and exisiting programs. It forms a secure wrapper around the program that lets you control its usage. You can make the software time-limited, require a registration code, lock it to run on one PC only etc.

Many commercial licencing software products cost a fortune. One very popular one has a starting price of around £1,150 (about $2,300) rising to £7,500 ($15,000).
That may be ok for the big software companies selling expensive software, but if your software package sells for £20, you'll need to sell a lot of copies just to break even.

Shareware Creator has many of the features of the big commercial protection systems, but at a very small fraction of the price.
Powerful software doesn't have to be expensive. Check it out.

New domain, new site

2007-09-25T23:36:00.000+01:00

I've just registered a new domain, www.KidsCanMakeIt.co.uk. My plans for this domain are to provide projects for kids to make stuff. I find it quite sad that kids are spoon-fed so much stuff nowadays that they don't get the satisfaction of having made something for themselves.

The site will contain articles and plans, ideas and suggestions, and will welcome contributions from readers.

This is something that I've wanted to do for a while now, because I think my 3-year old son will benefit from it.
Then today I had a conversation with someone who runs a different type of site for kids. They put Amazon ads on their site and make a lot of commission on the sale of books, CDs, DVDs etc. In fact they've had months that have earned them over $1000.
I like that kind of side-effect of running a website that I'm genuinely interested in running.

I only just registered the domain, so the DNS hasn't been set up, and there's no pages available just yet.
I'll be getting started on it tomorrow.

Alexa Rank system is a joke

2007-09-24T08:30:00.001+01:00

Well after weeks of following the Alexa rank of various websites, I've concluded that it a bit of a joke.

The rank is supposed to be site-based, but I'm now getting different ranks for different pages of the same site. What's more, some of the less popular pages have a higher rank than the others.

Other sites, where I monitor only one page, sometimes return a wildly different rank from two visits within minutes of each other.

I've tried re-installing the Alexa toolbar, which has appeared to fix strange anomalies before, but it made no difference whatsoever.
What makes it worse is that I am now experiencing the same effect when I view the rank from home and at work.

So, although I shall probably continue to monitor the rank (I have a system set up to do it automatically), I shall not be taking it very seriously until they fix this bug.

Web Link Checker

2007-09-21T12:19:00.000+01:00

A new software product has made its way to The Cafetorium eStore. It's a Web Link Checker.
We've all been there. After carefully crafting your website, you upload it to your webspace only to discover that you've mis-typed a link to another of your pages.

Web Link Checker lets you quickly and easily test all your internal links before you upload them.

It's a simple program - just choose an HTML page (usually your home page) and click the Test Links button. Within seconds the program will tell you which links are broken so you can fix them before the site goes live.

It's only £4.99, which is well worth it, especially if your site has a lot of pages.

However, as a software engineer, I've been inspired to write my own version of it.
Web Link Checker doesn't recognise encrypted links as created by EmailLinkMangler and other such programs.
I would also like a version that will test a site that has already been uploaded, and will also check links to external sites, because we don't have any control over the existence of those.
If you buy Web Link Checker now, but would like the improved version when it's available, you'll be able to get it by paying the difference in the price, so you won't lose out in the upgrade process. In fact, I might reward early buyers by giving a discount.

Watch this Blog for news about the new version.

Buyer beware

2007-09-12T09:40:00.000+01:00

A bit of a warning today.
One of my websites sells ebooks and software as digital downloads, making it all totally self-running. This is an excellent way of having an online business.

However, I bought a large bundle of ebooks and software as stock, and this is where you be careful. I decided to review all the products that I sell and improve the descriptions of them on the website.

I decided to start with the software, and chose one product that I actually need to use myself. I installed a copy of it and ran it. I really couldn't believe how many bugs it contains. The software in question is Sitemap Maker. It is supposed to scan your website, finding all the URLs of all the pages, and then generate a Google Sitemap file. You then load this file onto your webspace, tell Google about it and your site will be indexed some time later.

I entered the root URL of one of my sites exactly as specified in the help. The program then appeared to lock up. It finally came back having failed to find any URLs. I then modified the root URL and it went away and listed my site's pages, but included two which didn't even exist!
Then I got the software to generate the sitemap file and there were errors in that, too.

A while back I actually wrote a program that does the same thing. Mine isn't perfect which is why I haven't put it on sale yet, but it does a much better job than Sitemap Maker.
As a programmer, I was able to spot the faults in the generated file immediately, but the average customer buying the software would not.
In fact, Sitemap Maker has an option to upload the file to your web space, so most people wouldn't even bother looking at the content of the generated file.

Needless to say, I have removed the product from my online store. I'll be replacing it with my own version once it's complete.

That was the first product that I decided to review. How many others are of a similar poor standard, I wonder?
I think I'll remove them all from sale and then reintroduce them once I have reviewed them.

My online store is all about making money, but I don't want to be seen as a vendor of inferior goods.

Another experiment

2007-09-11T15:00:00.000+01:00

During the day I work for a small, sonar design consultancy, Wavefront Systems Ltd. The reason why I mention it, and have put a link to their website is purely for the benefit of the search engines.

I overheard two of the directors lamenting the fact that our site doesn't rank highly in the search engines, so I figured that if I include a link in here, and then ping the blog directories, it will stand a chance of being seen by the search engines.

So, let's see what happens...

Another Blog

2007-09-10T08:35:00.001+01:00

Last night I set up another blog. Unlike this one, it uses WordPress, which means that the blog is hosted by my own domain host.
WordPress comes as a bundle of PHP scripts, so if there's something I don't like about it, I can change it.

The content of the blog is related to this one in that it's basically about making money. It's a total experiment, but I'm not going to reveal the basis of that experiment otherwise it is bound to fail.
However, if it works, I'll be logging it here so that anyone who's reading will be able to replicate it and make some money too.

Check it out at Unmarked Bills.

And the above link to the blog is also an experiment. I'm not going to ping the other blog to get it seen by the search engines. Instead, I'll ping this blog and see if the other blog gets noticed.

Aaaaaggggh! Alexa is driving me nuts!

2007-09-10T08:28:00.001+01:00

As I mentioned recently, I discovered that Alexa doesn't just count hits on a site, but hits on separate pages within a site. That's what started my BrowseBot experiment, to see what effect viewing every page of a site had on the Alexa rank.

I check and log the rank every day to view the progress. Now I find that I'm getting a different rank depending on which page I view on the same site.
It's not a unique rank per page, but one of two rank figures comes up depending on the page.

There's no rational explanation for this. The pages are all in my own domain, and there's nothing strange about them.

The only possible reason I can think of is that there are several Alexa servers (very likely), and their databases don't always match. I suspect that with so many sites logged, they probably don't get the chance to synchronise their databases as often as they would like.

Web site resurrected

2007-09-04T21:30:00.000+01:00

A few years ago some friends and I planned to build a battling robot to enter into the UK's Robot Wars TV series. Unfortunately, the series was cancelled before we had the chance to complete it.

Later, when another TV series, TechnoGames, sais they would introduce walking biped robots in the next series, I started to build one of those. Amazingly, that series was also cancelled and the walking biped events never took place.
My project was shelved because I had too many other things to do.

At the time, we set up a website, Robot Assassin, showing our experiments and development of our robots.

I am now going to resurrect the Robot Assassin site as a "Niche Content" or "Article" site, to use Internet Marketing speak.
It's going to be an experiment to see whether niche sites really can earn money from Adsense and other Affiliate programs. It will also serve to demonstrate whether having regularly updated content really does give you a high rank in Google.

Finally, it is also a means of furthering my knowledge of the PHP scripting language.

There's nothing on the site yet - I only just switched the DNS to my new host, so it will take a few hours to get up and running. I also need to design the new style and put together some content before it goes live.

I plan to set up a robotics forum, so if you're interested, why not bookmark the site and come back later.

Getting Googled

2007-09-04T08:17:00.000+01:00

Although I have been concentrating on the Alexa Rank of my sites, I am also very interested and keen on getting my sites ranked by Google.

Except for Google themsleves, nobody seems to know the exact criteria used by Google to rank sites. However, amongst the unknowns, there are a lot of known criteria, so of course everyone concentrates on them.

Google doesn't want to list junk sites because they are no use to anyone, so content is very important to Google, as it should be. To this end, I had previously created static web pages so that all of my content was there in plain HTML for the search engines to see and index.

Since then, I have discovered the wonders of PHP scripts and MySQL databases and dynamic pages. This means I have fewer actual pages on my site, but several of those pages have content added to them dynamically (on request), and that content comes from my database.

Not to worry though. Google does index dynamic pages as long as it knows how to access them.

Dynamic pages usually have a list of one or more details added to the page address, like this (I've highlighted the details):
http://www.cafetorium.co.uk/product.php?products_id=108&osCsid=8eea7

This means "load the page called product.php, and fill it with product data from the database, where the product ID is 108&osCsid=8eea7".
The product could be an article for sale, an article - anything really.
Here's the address again as a real link:
Blogging Secrets

Anyway, as long as you give Google all the possible combinations of product details, the resulting pages will be indexed.
Fortunately, on sales pages, those links exist, and
The Cafetorium has a list of all products, where all those links will appear in one page.

For good measure, I always create and submit Google Sitemaps for all of my sites, which tells Google all the pages that are available.

And finally, if you wonder why I put links to my site in this blog, it's not for the convenience of readers, nor as blatant publicity. It's because Google indexes the Blogging sites (especially Blogger), and it's a good way for Google to find links to pages.

The Alexa experiment continues

2007-09-04T08:13:00.000+01:00

Since I created my robot to view all of the pages of one of my sites while running the Alexa Toolbar, there's only been a slight move in the Alexa Rank (less than 1000), and it's no more than my other sites for which the robot visits only one page.
However, the updating of rank is somewhat erratic - it often goes for over a week without changing - so it still might have some effect.

New eBook Store Opens its eDoors

2007-09-02T01:56:00.000+01:00

The new Cafetorium eBook store is now online and in business.

It took a little longer to configure than expected, but it's all done now.

Currently we have a stock of 206 products; mostly eBooks, but some software as well.
Over the next few weeks I'll be adding a lot more products, some of which will be available exclusively from The Cafetorium.

I have implemented a system by which you need to create an account to be able to purchase from The Cafetorium. The advantage of this is that you will then have full control over your account - you can subscribe or unsubscribe to the newsletter, remove your account, change your email address etc.
We never pass email addresses on to anyone else. We hate spam as much as the next person.
The details that we keep in your account are the minimum required. There is no unnecessary personal information kept. All account details are kept in a secure database.

If you want eBooks - Give us a try.

Phil Rogers' Online Marketing

Different Priorities

Does Google PageRank Mean Anything?

Aghh! The Frustration!

Back on Track!

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and men...

A Month in the Online Life of Phil Rogers - Day 1

Progress, Development and Targets

Learn From What Other People Do

Progress Report - Payment from Clickbank

Going For The Big Guns

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

2011 Is Going To Be My Year!

Progress Report - Things Are Taking Off

Progress Report

Progress Report

Aim High, But Also Aim Low

Put Some Effort Into Your Online Marketing

The Importance of a Good Infrastructure

Why Silver Membership at Article Content King Gives you the Edge

Start To Make Money With ClickBank

Get a Huge Number of Twitter Followers

Another New Social networking Site

Fast Content producer - A Review

It's Not All About Ebooks and Courses

Article Marketing Works - If You Do It Right

Dead Easy Way To Get Started Marketing Online

Online Profits Fast!

XSitePro v2.0 Released

Article Site that Gives You Credit

What a Twit(ter)

Social Networking as a marketing Tool

What To Do With Unused Domains

Revenue-Sharing Article Site Goes Live

Online Opportunities

Free Ebook of the Month - Make Money With PLR

Latest venture - a mobile phone content site

Free Website Builder

XSitePro Makes Website Building a Breeze

Beware ClickBank's Dormant Account Policy

Ebay Changes The Rules About Digital Products

Good news from Click2Sell

Click2Sell script coming soon (I hope!)

PHP Wizard has some excellent scripts

Great new alternative to ClickBank

Revenue Sharing

A new year - a new start

Guru or screw-you?

One Year On

Ethical Marketing - Telling the truth

Free Ebook of the Month - Discover Cagora

Why the Earn $14,000 per month schemes don't work

Free offer - blogging course

Free guide to Cagora, the latest social networking site

Getting Started in an Online Business- Part 1.

Idiot's Guide To Running a Website

New blog is online...

Article Site security warning

Article-Content-King Beat The Hackers! (Almost)

This security hole could be more serious than you think! Please read and act accordingly.

New blog coming soon

Free ebook of the month

More on the free cloaking tool

eBay Tips The FeedBack Balance

Viral Marketing Links That Never Expire

There's a better way

Should Microsoft take over Yahoo?

Free link-cloaking utility coming soon

Security Warning

Review: Page Translator

metaGenius hits the net

PHP editor under development

Computing Guide

Another site gets a revamp

Breakthrough

PHP Scripts

More about videos

Into the unknown - video production

ClickBank meets AdSense

Caveat emptor (buyer beware)