Diary of a Blogging Marketer

BYE BYE BLOGGER!

2007-01-15T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've Moved!

Visit my NEW blog at:

http://www.MatthewBredel.com

SEO: One-Way and Reciprocal Links

2007-01-08T06:17:00.000-08:00

A few blogs ago, I wrote about Search Engine Optimization and some of the strategies to help make your website more search engine friend. I also talked about the external ways of improving your SEO by getting other websites to link to you. Remember that there is essentially 2 main types of links:

1) One-Way Links
2) Reciprocal Links

(Yes, I know there are circular links, three-way links, etc, but these can technically be included in the "one-way" links catagories...we will talk about that in a second). First, a reciprocal link is one where you are trading links one-for-one with another person: "If you put my link on your website, I will place your link on my website." This is the foundation of what people refer to as a "link exchange." Mind you, a link exchange can be more than just apples for apples. This can include: "If you put my website link on your website, I will link back to your from another one of my websites." Further, some people trade in circular fashions. This is an extension of the last exchange I talked about. Let's take a step back for a second a review the first two:

Reciprocal Link: Website A <-> Website B
Three-Way Link: Website A -> Website B -> Website C

So the Circular link is as follows:
Circular Link: Website A -> Website B -> Website C -> Website A

Now the big question is: What does it matter? First of all, there is a lot of debate on whether reciprocal links are really worth anything? Do they cancel each other out? Secondly, what is the difference between the Three-Way link and the Circular link and does that matter?

Of course, there is really no answer to any of these questions. What I do know is this:

1) One-Way links are better are Reciprocal Links
2) Three-Way links are better than Circular Links. There is some belief that Google, for example, is smart enough to recognize the full circle of links.
3) Any link that points to your site (reciprocal or not) is a good link.

You will not be penalized for who links to YOU. With that in mind though, who you link TO needs to be given some consideration. Rememder, you are SHARING your page rank with whomever you are linking to. Further, if you are linking to unrelated, non-working, or banned websites, Google may punish you for it.

But at the end of the day, getting links pointing to your site is always a good thing. I will go over some great ways of getting one-way links in upcoming blogs. Until then...

- Matthew Bredel

The Making MORE Money Online Resolution

2007-01-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

There is no time better to start making goals and setting plan than the New Year! Let me help you will developing a money making plan that can work!

After spending two weeks in my Christmas basement drinking Egg Nog and waiting for Santa, I find myself returning to the real world and a new year. And to bring in the near year, it is always a great time to make money...EVEN MORE MONEY! I have spoken in the past about creating a business plan and sticking to it for any online venture. We'll, there is no time better than a fresh, new year. Resolutions! That is nothing more than a fancy way of saying "plan". I've got a resolution...I am planning on making my online business make over THREE times what it does now by June. Am I crazy and reaching too high? HECK NO! That is what making money online is all about and believe it or not, I think this is totally achievable.

Of course for some of you, making three times of nothing is still nothing, so that is not a very challenging feat. But this is a great time to change nothing into SOMETHING. So what is a reasonable goal for someone starting out online? Making a one year plan is too long, first of all. Split up your resolution (PLAN) into Quarters. A reasonable goal for the first quarter is to make a sale! Yes, this seems petty and kind of stupid, but is reasonable (especially for those of you who still have 9-5 jobs). A more aggressive goal for the first quarter is $20/day (That is $600/month). This is also very achievable, but requires a fairly focused effort. After you start getting those sales, you will find a momentum start to build up! Going from $20/day to $100/day is really not too bad. At this point, some of your SEO strategies are starting to help get your site on search engines and your PPC budgets can now grow a bit. So make that your second quarter goal!

After this point, I would leave it open. This may be the point to start a new venture or website. Maybe you want to get more aggressive on getting traffic or maybe the momentum of your website just continues to grow. It is really up to you at that point.

So where to start? The first month should be education. While in my basement over Christmas, I felt inclined to write a quick eBook (Secret2Succeed) to help those figure exactly WHAT to do and how to avoid some of the pitfalls of starting to make money online. You can get a free copy of it at TheWebReviewer.com. During this month of education, you need to study, research and develop a more formal business plan:

What am I going to sell or promote?
Who am I going to sell it to?
What kind of landing page am I going to make? (Blog? Yahoo-Store? Website?)
How am I going to promote it?
Where I am going to get my products?
What tools can I use to be more efficient and make money faster?

All of these questions have simple answers. You need to figure out what works best for you. There is still a lot of great money making opportunities on the world wide web to make money. And there is no better time than the present to make it happen.

Again, Welcome to 2007! And next year, I hope your resolution is as lucrative as mine!

- Matthew Bredel

Sharing Page Rank

2006-12-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

There are so many mysteries about Page Rank. First of all, there is the mathematical definition of page rank:

Page Rank Formula: PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

Huh? This makes sense to about 8 people in the world. So let's not focus on this formula since it will just confuse you. Let's think more about a layman's definition of what Page Rank is. Page Rank is all about linking! It is a measure of how many people are linking to you and how many people you are linking to. For example, if you have millions of websites linking to you and you were only linking to say 10 websites (like Google.com), you will have a very HIGH Page Rank (9 or 10 out of 10). That is the holy grail of Page Rank and only a handful of websites have this. If your website is brand new and no one is linking to you, you probably have a 0 page rank. Page Rank (at least Google's Page Rank) can be found if you have the Google Toolbar installed in your browser or if you can enter it manually on a website like PageRank.net.

But don't be fooled what Page Rank is shown! The page rank that is being reported is probably out of date. Updates to page rank sometimes takes MONTHS. So, even though a website of mine might show a PR of 0, Google may know in the background that it is a 2 or a 3. I think Google delays this information to protect its own interests.

The other point that I want to make is that you may be Penalized for having too many out-going links. Page Rank is a bit like a disease. Your website page that has the most incoming links usually has the highest page rank. This Page Rank bleeds into the next tier of sites on your website. This makes sense, right? If I have a PR7 as my homepage, all pages linked to this PR7 will have a moderately high powered page rank linking to it, resulting in a higher page rank for that page. Probably not a PR7, but maybe a PR4. Again, anything that this page links to this page benefits from a PR4, so maybe it is a PR2. And remember, every out-going link penalizes you (or bleeds) some of your PR7 ranking.

So the point that I am trying to make is to pay attention to who you are linking to and on what page! Homepage links should be pointing to either your own pages (that you want to build page rank for) or relevant pages external to your site which you do not mind sharing your Page Rank with. But what do you do with the links on your page that you need, but do not want to share Page Rank with?

Just recently, Google (as well as the other major search engines) began to recognize the HTML call:

rel="nofollow"

This code is included into the {A} tag of a hyperlink. For example:
{a rel="nofollow" href=http://www.thewebreviewer.com }TheWebReviewer{/a}

(I use {} instead of <> because of it triggers the HTML CODE!)

By doing this, you tell the search engines (and Page Rank authorities) NOT to follow this link when it is spidering your website. Therefore, you preserve your Page Rank links for pages that matter to you and ignore all others. Such instances of pages you would like to ignore include:

Privacy Statement
Contact Us Pages
Affiliate Links!
Certification Seals
etc.

Are you shooting yourself in the foot by no including the "nofollow" tag? Probably not, but any little thing will help and it is good SEO practice (and super easy to do!).

- Matthew Bredel

Taking a Vacation from Affiliate Marketing...

2006-12-13T19:23:00.000-08:00

Three weeks in Australia! It was a nice three week pre-cursor for the holidays that are fast approaching...and frankly, it was a well needed BREAK! Back (many months ago), I wrote a blog about being obsessed with affiliate marketing (Click Here). Over the last few months, I kind of forgot my own advice and this trip away really shed some light on my situation.

For the first few days of my trip, I found myself on an island in the middle of the Whitsunday Islands. Beautiful place! Great Weather! No internet! YIKES! I honestly have to admit that I was truly freaking out. How was my home business going to function without me? What if someone emails me and I don't respond promptly? Will people stop reading my blog if I do not keep writing in it? I must have spent three full days worrying about this stuff. Finally, on the fourth day, we left the island and to much of the displeasure of my wife, I raced for the closest internet cafe that I could find. At the end, my sales were still there. I did get a few emails, but my autoresponder seemed to take care of that (and some even wrote a second letter telling me that there was no rush and enjoy the holiday). Sure, my blog was not updated, but really, did that really matter?

I realized a few things:

1) Choosing a business like affiliate marketing makes it fairly easy to leave without it affecting too much.

2) We (you) my readers are just people, and very understanding people.

3) I need to get over myself a little bit. My blog is fine but people are certainly not waiting by their computer to read it.

4) Again, YOU NEED TO TAKE BREAKS ONCE IN AWHILE!

I cannot tell you how long of a task list I have of things to do for my online ventures. On top of this, I still have my day job and family to take care of. Super-Dad? Super-Affiliate-Marketer? Super-Employee?...

Super-Stupid is what I was becoming. I have said it before and I will say it again...Online Marketing is very fun, but there is always something that can be done to improve your money making ventures. Whether it is write another review, SEO, PPC optimization, write an article, respond to an email, read a new forum, etc. etc. etc. And I was trying to do this all.

The great thing about online marketing is that everything does NOT need to be done today. Further, everything does not need to be done by you. At the beginning when resources (aka, money) is limited, then yes, you need to do a lot yourself. But as the business grows, you need to be willing to give up some of your handle to other people. (We'll talk about this in another blog).

So I did end up enjoying the rest of my vacation without worrying and have made a bit of an oath to myself to chill out, take a couple of nights off from my money making campaigns and veg in front of the TV for an episode of LOS, and put down the laptop during a Chargers game (L.T. is awesome, by the way!).

- Matthew Bredel

Off-Page SEO - Does it Exist?

2006-11-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

People spend countless hours trying to make their website SEO-friendly, but it is not all about what's on-page. Off-page SEO is just as important...if not more!

For those of you who are skeptical that off-page SEO really matters, let us conduct an experiment. Go to Google and type "Click Here" in the search box. Yes, it is kind of a funny thing to search for (and no one will probably ever want to do it for any good reason), but it does prove a major point! So what is the first organic result:

Acrobat Reader

Huh? That is funny. Google thinks that the most relevant response to the keyword search for "Click Here" is Acrobat Reader. So let's go onto this page. In my last article, I wrote about important on-key factors that you should focus on to get high rank in Google.

Does "Click Here" appear in the title? NO.
Does "Click Here" appear within an H1 tag? NO.
Does "Click Here" appear in the meta keyword tag? NO.
Does the word "Click Here" appear ANYWHERE on this page? NO!!!

Now that is really strange. How can Acrobat get the number one position for a keyword that does not even appear on the page? The answer is simple!

How many times do you go to select a document that is in PDF format. Often enough, I bet, to make you realize that you do it. And almost always, right below this PDF, there is a little statement to the effect of:

Need Acrobat Reader? Click Here

Wow! And can you only imagine how many places on the web that this link is pointing to Acrobat Reader and the anchor text "Click Here" appears? Well, conducting a quick look at the Google backlinks tool, it appears that Acrobat Reader has over ONE MILLION LINKS pointing to this page (most of which have the anchor text "Click Here").

Now, of course you will not be getting a million clicks pointing to your website, but what this teaches us is that Google places some importance on both the number of people sending you links as well as what is written in the anchor text of this link.

So the first lesson here is to get people linking to your website. The second lesson is to make sure that the anchor text they are using contains relevant keywords (rather than something useless, like your URL!

- Matthew Bredel

Want to learn more about SEO and Home Based Business? Visit TheWebReviewer today!

****************************************************************
* NOTICE! I will be MIA for about 3 weeks! If I get a chance to post,
* I will...but I am not counting on it! Don't think I've quit, though.
* I'm just on holiday! See ya next month! (or sooner!)
****************************************************************

Sony PS3 Craziness!

2006-11-17T11:36:00.000-08:00

I know that talking about the Sony Playstation 3 does not seem to have a lot to do with making money online, but then again, it has EVERYTHING to do with making money online (uh oh, not another RUDY rant!). Personally, I have little to no interest the the Sony PS3, but I decided to perform a bit of an experiment with tying affiliate marketing in with this Christmas' hottest item (besides TMX Elmo). I created a little website, and through a bunch of affiliate links, created a "Where to buy PS3" website. You can check it out here:

http://PS3.thewebreviewer.com

Now, I think this whole frenzy surrounding the PS3 is rather silly. It currently sells for over $1500 on eBay, people are fighting other people in lines that have lasted longer than 48 hours, and there are reports of even a death due to a mugger trying to steal the money of someone waiting in line. THIS IS NUTS! Sure, there are only 500,000 of these made, but can't people just wait a month or so after Christmas to get it without risking their lives or having to mortgage their house? Last year, a similar thing happened with the Microsoft XBox 360 (which you can now buy almost anywhere). Technology-wise, it is slightly inferior, but most of the superior features of the PS3 will only work with top-of-the-line TVs, receivers and games. Instead of spending $1500 on the PS3, why don't people buy an Xbox 360, TEN games and then wait until January or February to buy a PS3 for $500 (Notice: we have just spent the SAME amount of money and have 10 times as much)?

Sorry about the rant, but this is crazy to me. And doing a little bit of promotion on the side is making me realize how crazy this is! Yes, this website does bring in some money (mind you, though, that I have already developed a lot of traffic avenues through other ventures for it). But I am also learning a few other things:

1) No matter what your intentions are, people are going to get mad at you! I have received about a half-dozen angry people telling me that I am a slime-ball for creating this site. Why? Beats the heck out of me! If they don't like, then leave!

2) Secondly, I have received about a half-dozen angry emails telling me their technical opinions on this product and that I should not promote it. OK!?

If you want to see more angry-ness, go to http://www.hotproductsforum.com. Some people have been ripped off and have a right to complain. Others just want to direct their bitterness (over what, a toy?) at others.

3) I have received about 50 emails thanking me for at least giving them some additional ideas of ways to find this hard product online.

...And at the end of the day, that is what I focus on! No matter what your intension are when it comes to becoming an online marketer, be prepared for the good, the bad and the ugly. I pride myself in trying to be honest and provide good content in my blog, my websites, my email and my articles, but at the end of the day, some people just won't understand. Making money online can be fun, exciting and lucrative at times, but at the end of the day, it is still a business.

- Matthew Bredel

Want to learn more about making money online into a business? Visit TheWebReviewer today!

Online Marketing & the Movie "Rudy"

2006-11-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, on my way home on a flight from an online marketing conference from the east coast, I was sitting in my chair, like a zombie from lack of sleep debating on whether or not to watch the in-flight movie. It was Rudy. Uh? Isn't that movie about 20 years old by now? I expect something relatively new on flights these days, so I was rather annoyed. Still I thought, "I haven't seen it in years, and since I've already seen it, I won't really need to follow it that much."

I think a higher power or something was trying to tell me something coming home from this conference. Man that movie ROCKS! But the heck does this have to do with making money online? I was glued to this movie for the entire 2 hours and let me tell you, it has EVERYTHING to do with anyone who is just starting out or at the beginning of their online money making advertures. What's the movie about? It's the true story of a kid (nicknamed "Rudy") who goes from being uneducated with very little future to a man to fights his way to the top no matter what gets in his way. His dream is to play for the Norte Dame football team. Quoted from the movie:

"You're 5 foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you got hardly a speck of athletic ability. And you hung in there with the best college football team in the land for 2 years. And you're also gonna walk outta here with a degree from the University of Notre Dame. In this life, you don't have to prove nothin' to nobody except yourself."

I actually had a tear in my eye during this scene. Why? Because it is so true...and it is what you will have to do to be successful in the world of online marketing! Maybe not to this extent, but the message is the same. You WILL have an uphill battle to climb. You WILL have set-backs that may want you to quit. And you WILL need to do this for only one person and that is YOURSELF! And just like Rudy, if you are committed and persevere through the tough times, you WILL achieve your goals and not only gain financial rewards at the end, but self-satisfaction as well.

If you are starting off in the online money making business (even if you have seen the movie or not), spend two hours to watch it again and realize that this IS a true story and if Rudy can do what he did, you can achieve your goals, too: Like Making Money Online!

- Matthew Bredel

Want to learn more about Money Making Opportunities Online? Visit TheWebReviewer today!

Data Entry Programs and Marketing is DEAD!

2006-11-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

First it was Clickbank that banned data entry programs from their product line-up. Now Google Adwords is removing this type of product promotion from its PPC program. What is going on?

Being that I review Data Entry and Type at Home programs on my website TheWebReviewer.com, I have been finding it harder and harder to defend myself on the products they sell. About two months ago, Clickbank took a serious leap in removing all of their high-converting data entry and type at home information products from their catalog. Now, I am finding out that Google Adwords is taking a similar approach by disallowing the promotion of these data entry programs on their pay-per-click program. Basically, they are classifying these type of home programs to be in the same class as online gambling and pornography. Wow!

So what is going on?

Let's first see what Google's policy about Data Entry Programs is for its Adwords program:

Can I advertise data entry affiliate programs?
Google policy does not permit advertisements for data entry affiliate programs. This includes ads which direct users to sites that promote the creation or data entry of other ads directing users to the same site. There are no exceptions to this policy, which is intended to protect both advertisers and AdWords users. (from Google Adwords Help Menu)

I think I may understand what might be happening here. In the past few years, one way of very successfully making money online was to promote affiliate products directly through Adwords using affiliate marketing links. For example, instead of having your own website or landing page, a person would advertise for a term and send the buyer directly to the sales website without having to do much more than writing an ad; hence the term "Data Entry". Back in mid-2005, Google took a tighter stance on this and prevented more than one advertising URL per search. That made this "data entry" type of promotion much more competitive and a lot less lucrative. It also provided Google with much more relevant and diverse links in its paid advertising.

Now what we are seeing is a bit of a backlash in the "data entry program" market. Type-at-home program methods no longer work and are frowned upon by Google (it cheapens their search results). From Clickbank's point of view, people were still buying into these programs as simple "enter data from home" income and then returning them because:

1) Direct PPC marketing of affiliate products no longer works
2) It is much more involved than just entering data
3) People felt deceived in the type of product that they were buying

Having high return rates was bad business for Clickbank, so they removed the products entirely.

When it comes down to it, Data Entry programs have a few problems:

1) The traditional "data entry" work of just filling out Google Adwords ads no longer works.
2) They are very misleading in that are really affiliate marketing programs hiding as simple "data entry work"

While some of these type at home programs have evolved with the changing times (by teaching how to create websites, write reviews, and teaching search engine optimization techniques), others stick to their original out-dated philosophies and continue to promote direct affiliate marketing techniques (which, in my opinion, is a waste of money and a scam!). I have found a few data entry programs to actually be better than some of the standard affiliate marketing programs around, but until they change their name and their ad-copy to reflect that there is more to making money online than entering data, they essentially deserve what they get: a snubbing by the world wide web community.

- Matthew Bredel

Data Entry Program Scams? Find out the truth about these and other affiliate marketing types of programs at TheWebReviewer.

Making SEO Work on Your Landing Page

2006-11-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

In part 1 of the SEO Fallacy article, we came to the conclusion that Search Engine Optimization is not only good, but it is essential. But what can you do about it?

Search engine optimization is all about putting your website into a position where the search engine bots will place your page in a top position for a specific keyword search. For example, if I were to search for the term "pet supplies" in Google, I would expect a very relevant website (such as PETCO.com) to appear in the free search results. Now don't get this confused with the paid search results which can be found at the top of the page, highlighted or down the right column of the page (for most search engines). These Pay-Per-Click (or PPC) listings are based on paying for an ad position. For free (or organic) listings, the search engine will determine which result is the most relevant for the queried keyword. Organic listings have a few big benefits:

1) They Are Free!
2) More people click these (especially in the high positions) than they do the paid ads.
3) The people who click the free listings are more likely to buy the product.

Of course, how do we know what Google (or any search engine for that fact) considers "relevant"? We don't! But we can observe and by doing so, we can determine what things are important and what things are not. One thing that we do have control over is the website content itself. Through much analysis and observation, people have determined that the following components of a landing page do (to some extent) have an impact to how a search engine bot will judge a page:

1) The Meta-tag Title: Very Important! Choose your title to have relevant keywords to what you want your customers to find.
2) H1 header tags: Almost as important! For one, USE it (but only once per page!) Make sure it is in a high position on the page.
3) Keyword Meta-tag: Some importance, but do not dwell on this one (or overdue it either!)
4) Description Meta-tag: Little importance for SEO, but could be important for getting clicks.
5) Body Content: Of course, using your targetted keywords in your content is important (but again, do not overdue it!)
6) Using the "alt" tag for images: Using the ALT tag for images gives the search bots more content to index.

A few things that do not seem to make much impact:

1) Other Meta-tags: Especially the Robots tag, which, if done improperly can actually send spiders away.
2) Repetitive Keywords: Repeating the same keyword over and over usually results in being punished.
3) Multiple H1 tags: Spiders will look down upon more than one H1 tag and may even ignore the site because of it.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to very easily make your website much more search engine friendly. Some people put these things in by luck, but any SEO expert will tell you that these tips should be the basis of the entire webpage you are designing. A few extra tags and a little bit of keyword placement in the right areas can take a website that is not indexed into a top 10 organic position.

- Matthew Bredel

Make Money Online - Visit TheWebreviewer.com for today's top online money making reviews, articles, resources, forum and more!

Is SEO just a Fallacy? (Part I)

2006-10-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

As I spend more and more time in money making forums, I see more and more people downplaying the importance of Search Engine Optimization. Does SEO really work or just a waste of your time?

As Google continues to change their organic website position algorithms, more and more people are becoming frustrated with the system and choosing to rely more on paid advertising rather than to optimize their website for high search engine position.

"SEO is a thing of the past."
"SEO has short-term benifits that cannot be maintained."
"There is no such thing as SEO!"

First of all, SEO DOES exist. Secondly, if you are not optimizing your website for search engine bots, you are severely limiting your sales potential as well as spending a lot of money on advertising such as Pay-Per-Click services like Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture. In time, I have experienced moments of first page organic search results and this has resulted in more than FOUR TIMES the sales for me. Not only that, but the traffic is extremely high in quality and it does not cost me a dime!

I think most online marketers would agree with these statements. But why do some of them bad mouth the idea of SEO? Mainly because most of these people do not know HOW to do it or can not maintain a good position. In my opinion, SEO is very real and you can do a lot to help position your own website into a top spot.

Trying to understand the Google algorithms is virtually impossible. Because a lot of people do not know WHAT it is, they assume that there is no way to optimize for it. That is a mistake! Just because people do not know WHAT it is, does not mean that we can not OBSERVE how it works. Of course, we as web developers cannot change the algorithm, but there are two ways that we can take advantage of how the system works.

1) Search Engine Optimization for your website. There are a number of ways that you can optimize your website to be more search engine bot friendly.

2) Develop the incoming links to your website. A large part of SEO is based on not only how many backlinks your website has, but who is linking to you (and HOW they are linking to you).

It is simple for me to throw out these two rather broad ways to optimize your search engine. The details on what exactly to optimize for will be saved for another article. In the meantime, I want to stress that it is a big mistake to ignore the importance of Search Engine Optimization for your online business. SEO can be the difference between a little extra cash and a million dollar business.

- Matthew Bredel

More Online Money Making Tips! - TheWebreviewer provides you with today's hottest and most promising online money making programs, and more!

"Pop-Under" Ads: Nothing More than SPAM!

2006-10-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Getting traffic onto your website can always be a tough feat. The thought of paying for it seems good, but really, is it quality (or ethical?)

Traffic! Traffic! Traffic! I love traffic! Traffic is what makes an online internet campaign really work. If no one comes to your website, then I will guarentee you that you will not be selling a thing. (It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that theory!). Multiplying one million by zero still equals zero! Don't get me wrong: There is a lot more than just traffic that is required to be successful as an internet marketer. But at the end of the day, when all is optimized and you have a great website, traffic is what proportionally drives sales and income.

So to what lengths do you go to get traffic? A little over a month ago, I found that the traffic to my site had "plateaued". I had tried "Free-For-All" websites in the past, but that turned out to be a big waste of time (and I ended up giving out my email address to someone who ending up selling it to SPAMMERS). So I thought I would look into "targeted paid traffic" websites.

At first glance, these "targeted paid traffic" programs look very promising. For about $100, they guarentee that your website is shown to more than 50,000 targeted recipients! That equates to about 0.2 cents per click in PPC terms. What a deal! I continued to read up on it and it explains that the service works as follows:

While people are surfing the internet, the program will detect which topics the person is currently looking for. If the topic is relevant, the program will place a "Pop-Under" ad on their computer. Most of you are aware of "Pop-Up" ads: They are those annoying ads that keep opening up on your screen for no apparent reason. If you are like me, you have a pop-up blocker installed on your browser. Pop-Under ads appear discretely under the current browser that is open. When the person closes the browser, the Pop-under add is present. The "claim" of this being effective is two-fold:

1) It targets the user by creating Pop-Under ads only at relevant times.

2) Most pop-up blockers do not detect these yet.

So, before reading the fine details of this program, I joined anyway. What a mess! Here is a list of all the bad things that happened:

1) The program was telling me that it was creating about 1000 page views per day, but my statistics where showing about 2 visitors per day from targeted traffic service. I spoke with the representative and she explains that the window does appear 1000 times, but that does not mean the person will actually look at it. (HUH?)

2) Of the total of 12 people and 5000 pageviews that appeared, 10 of the visitors had no quality (meaning, they spent less than 5 seconds on my website). That equates to about $1.20 per (poor) quality click. Yikes!

3) This is nothing more than annoying Spyware and SPAMMING at its finest. The software that determines relevancy is user-unknown spyware. These pop-under windows are nothing more than SPAM. I just spent (a very worthwhile!) $40 on BidDefender to remove this garbage from my own computer.

I suppose that the Pop-Under ad did create some attention to someone who viewed it. This person wrote to tell me how upset they were that I created this window on his computer and they he will never buy my products again. So, at the end of the day (before I actually wrote the company and asked for my pro-rated money back), I spent $10 on 12 nothing clicks and one customer who will never visit my website again. I would say this was money very poorly spent!

- Matthew Bredel

To learn more about making money online of ways to develop internet traffic, Visit TheWebReviewer.com today!

Online Business: Location! Location! Location!

2006-10-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

One of the first rules that any businessman knows about being successful is the old phrase “Location, Location, Location!” But how does that relate to the internet?

Just recently, my wife and I decided to take a break from our lives and the kids and decided to head 5000 feet into the clouds to the Southern California resort town of Arrowhead Lake. Our whole goal of the trip was to cleanse our minds from the commitments of life and focus more on relaxation, clean air and each other. I did not even bring up my laptop and went days without checking any affiliate sales or emails. But through all of this, my online marketing mind could not be turned off.

It only took me about 4 hours up in the mountains before I really started to realize this state of online business nirvana. The enlightenment was not very spectacular, but it made a lot of sense to me. It started when I walked into a Christmas themed store in a little village of boutique shops located along the lake. Personally, I really had very little interest in holiday novelties, so I sat in the corner while my wife browsed around. I noticed the store currently had about 12 customers in it. Of those 12, two ended up buying a couple of gifts (valued at about $30 a piece). There was a girl working the counter and another younger guy re-stocking the shelf. The store overlooked this beautiful lake and in my mind, I felt that the business was running very smoothly; I would consider it “successful” during the 15 minutes I sat there. The store had a great location and fit a good niche for people visiting the center.

The following day, we drove up to Bear Valley Lake and again, I found myself in another boutique store, selling Christmas and holiday stuff. This store was not on the lake and in an area when 2 out of every 3 stores seemed to be boarded up. An older woman worked here. We were the only ones in the store. We did not buy anything. Same niche, similar area, poor location. Still, this little hole-in-the-wall probably supports this woman’s lifestyle, but from a business stand-point, probably does not bring in much money.

In either case, I got to thinking about what it took to get these stores to where they are today. The first boutique made much more than the second and seemed to get a steady stream of visitors. Still, I think about all of the work and money that was required to build this moderately successful storefront. The location is probably where most of their profits go. The staffing and the stocking are the next major space and money guzzlers. And at the end of the day, this “prestigious” location probably averaged about 20 visitors per hour.

This is when it hit me! If you add in the leasing, the presentation and the up-keep of this store, your cost per visitor must be enormous! Not only that, your target visitors is geographically constrained to the locals and visitors who just find themselves to be right there at the right place and the right time.

I actually felt guilty about my online ventures (especially since my part-time campaigns probably make a comparable earning at the end of the day)! First, let’s put aside the fact that owning an online business removes the store-front costs, much of the staffing costs and possibly some of the stocking costs. When I got into online business, I knew that and it was extremely appealing in both a business as well as a risk standpoint. My main discovery here is LOCATION, LOCATION, and LOCATION! This store probably pays thousands of dollars per month to lease this relatively high traffic location. And again, unless you happen to find yourself in front of this store during an hour of operation, you will not ever buy anything from them, ever.

Now think about the world wide web. This is the ULTIMATE location! Sure, you do not have the luxury and satisfaction of holding the product and buying it on the spot, but your reach is almost immeasurable. Anyone in the city, state, country or (or even world) can visit your store (at all hours of the day). Instead of 20 visitors per hour, you can have 1000s! It is almost unreal when you think about it (my local Costco probably only has a few hundred customers at any given time). This is why making money online is SO profitable. It is a numbers game without much of the overhead: A win-win situation.

At the end of the day, I am sure there is a lot of pride with owning your own store-front business. But if it is truly just “money” that you are looking for, online selling is an ideal opportunity for anyone with the “be-your-own-boss” mentality. Not only is it a low risk opportunity, it may carry the biggest rewards of them all…and this is because the world wide web is truly what Location, Location, Location is all about!

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Data Entry Scams and Clickbank...

2006-10-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

The data entry world came to a gigantic hault last week when Clickbank decided to pull all of its "data entry" and "type-at-home" eBooks and programs off of its electronic shelf. What happened?

Being a reviewer of online money making programs for TheWebReviewer.com, I was a bit shocked at the discovery that Clickbank had mysteriously removed all of its data entry products without warning. I am sure that to many affiliate marketers, this unannounced removal not only was a shock, but cost this niche a whole lot of money. First understand this: Data Entry and Type at Home programs were some of the highest converting products of the Clickbank line-up. So why would Clickbank pull the plug on these lucrative products?

One theory is the change of management and vision of Clickbank itself. In the last month, Clickbank has redeveloped their website and in doing so, may have chosen to revisit the types of products they sell. But again, why would a company drop such a high money making group of products?

Another more telling tale of the whole type-at-home and data entry program is it is estimated that over 25% of those who purchase the product return the product. Clickbank does offer a 60-day money back guarentee on all of their products. Getting a refund is a fairly simple thing to do. This high return rate not only hurts the revenue of the product, but type-classes the Clickbank product selection as sketchy.

So what is the problem with Data Entry programs and why are they being classified as scams and being returned at such a high rate? Recently, I have spent a lot of time reading up on a few "Data Entry" programs (such as DataEntryBank.com and Type-at-Home.com) and the answer is very simple: The name is very misleading! These data entry programs are nothing more than affiliate marketing programs (just like TheRichJerk, Wealthy Affiliate and Affiliate Cash Vault). These programs themselves are actually pretty good for affiliate marketing programs, but you would not tell that from their ad-copy. It describes "Just fill out a few Google Ads and make money today..." I suppose you are "entering data", but there is a whole lot more to this to be successful. (The eBooks go into the "more", as well, but this is not what the ad-copy told you!).

I think people go into Data Entry programs and Type-At-Home programs with the thinking that they will just need to "type" or "enter data" and presto!, I will make money. When they finally join the program and learn that it is a lot more than that, they become frustrated or disappointed. This leads to high returns and the word "Scam" labelled all over the product.

Data Entry Programs themselves are not scams. The way they are presented is what the scam is all about. These "Type-at-home" programs can profitable, but understand that they are affiliate marketing programs, not simple data entry. If you are truly looking for "data entry" kinds of programs, Paid Surveys are one option (Survey Scout, for example). There are
also "true" data entry programs that fit the criteria of typing data in for a price (the biggest and best site for this is: Freelance Work Exchange.

At the end of the day, it is kind of a shame that these so called "data entry" and "type-at-home" programs have marketed themself into the "Scam" stigma; not because of the quality of their product, but because of the way they represent and sell their product to the public.

- Matthew Bredel

To learn more about "Data Entry" Programs, Affiliate Marketing, and Paid Surveys, visit TheWebReviewer for reviews, articles, resources and more!

Bad Internet Traffic - Does this Exist?

2006-10-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

eCommerce and online business focus generally around one thing: Website Traffic. But is there such a thing as "bad traffic"?

During my last 8 months of being an affiliate marketer, I have learned a lot of about making money online and I have become moderately successful at it, too. One of the most important lessons that I learned is that traffic equals sales! There are many fundamental rules about internet selling and one of those general rules of thumbs is that it is very likely that any respectable website can make 1-2 sales (at least) per 100 visitors. My visitor counts started off small, and I made a little bit of money. My visitor count is now "respectable" and I now make a "respectable" amount of money. But how far does this theory go and when does good traffic go bad?

Annecdote #1: About 3 months ago, I got an email from a very anger person stating that my website was nothing but a fraud due to the fact that they got my link from an adult website (why they were on this site in the first place is left to be seen!). I did some research on why my link was found on a certain website and I found that one of my content ads from Google had the line "Get Off Your Fanny..." I later learned that this rather tame word "fanny" has different meanings in other countries (we are talking about a global economy here!). This triggered an Adsense ad on an adult website. So my first point here is that you do not have control at times where your ad may appear in the world wide web! Secondly, do I care? In this case, I do to some degree. I do not really care that it came from an adult website. Traffic is traffic (even if someone may be upset with this). What I do care about is that I PAID for this click.

This is when good traffic goes bad! I did some careful research on the statistics of those who visited my website from this adult website. Sure enough, I received about 30 clicks at $0.10 a piece (a total of $3). Out of that $3, I received zero sales and additionally, 29 of those people "bounced" (meaning they stayed on my website for less than 5 seconds). This is not a good investment and I made sure that this site would no longer post my ad (and I did change the wording to remove "fanny" from the equation!).

Annecote #2: One common and highly publicized way of attracting traffic to one's website is through free classified ads. The first time I did this, I was kind of shocked what I saw. My visitors to my website jumped to an additional 150 unique visitors per day (after the initial postings.) WOW! I then went and checked my sales: Zero additional sales. I went and researched my classified ad statistics and sure enough, about 145 of those visitors bounced. Does this make classified ads "bad traffic".

It can, but not really! Remember this: these ads are free. And out of the 5 visitors that did stay on my website, I got two of them to sign-up for my opt-in letter. Ultimately, that means I paid zero dollars for each lead. That is definitely worth something. The biggest question here is time. How much is your time worth? To post classified ads requires time and (if you are strapped in time like I am), time is money. Further, this additional traffic hurts my visitors per sales statistics, but who cares! It is ROI (return on investment) that truly matters. The investment in this case is time, not money.

Traffic is currently king on the internet when it come to making sales. In my opinion, though, traffic only goes bad when you pay for it and it does not produce sales. All free traffic is good (no matter where it comes from). But beware, free traffic sometimes come at the cost of time. Is an hour of posting classified ads worth more than a new blog entry or a review of another product? That is a decision that you, the online marketer, must make yourself!

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

The Backlash Against Online Marketing eBooks

2006-09-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

Making money online programs and the eBooks that teach these methods have been going strong for the past couple of years. Just recently, though, a backlash of the product is making people think of it as a scam, not a money making venture.

For some strange reason, over the last 3 weeks, I have read and seen about a half of a dozen articles, blogs, emails, etc. focusing on the topic of how online marketing eBooks are nothing but a scam. Sure, there are always going to be critics, but is this sudden rise in awareness justified, or is it just a coincidence?

I have a interesting intrepretation of this situation from two stand-points:

1) I got into the online money making business using one of these eBooks.

2) I run a review site (http://www.thewebreviewer.com) that focuses on reviewing these exact programs.

In the early part of this year, I did what most of you have done: I needed extra money so I typed something like "Make Money Online", "Extra Cash", or "Get Rich Quick" into a search engine like Google or Yahoo. At that time, I knew nothing about affiliate marketing, paid surveys, wholesaling, data entry programs, etc. I spent a few nights researching it and finally found a program that I wanted to try out.

This eBook has changed my life. I spent the first 3 months making no money, spending a tons on advertising and getting little traffic to my products. I was learning. The last six months, I have created a number of websites and campaigns and earn steady income as a supplement to my 9-5 job. (This was exactly what I wanted to do). The point is that I would have never made it to this point without the guidance of an online marketing eBook. It taught me the fundamentals:

1) What it is.
2) Where to find products.
3) Where to sell products.
4) How to promote products.
5) How to maximize my earning potential.

Understanding the fundamentals is KEY before you can actually start making money. Again, the first three months were spent learning the system, the last six months have been reaping the rewards. At the end of the day, it was ME that made this system work (through hard-work, education and trial & error), but I needed this eBook to get the ball rolling in the first place. (How do you ask a question, if you don't know which questions to ask!?)

Secondly, I have an insight that not many have on these online money making eBooks: I review them! I post on my website about a half-dozen different programs, but I have read about twice that over the past year. I have learned a few things from this:

1) About 75% of all Online Money Making eBooks are the same: They have the same chapter headings and the same content. Some go over the "what" a little bit more; others go over the "how".

2) The last 25% is usually some "innovative" or "unique" marketing or product idea that this specific get rich program specializes in. In most cases, these ideas are a bit far-fetched for most, but are always worth a read.

3) It is usually the "bonuses" that distinguish these programs from one another. Some may offer personal counselling. Others may offer a free website or a paid surveys list. Some do not offer much of anything.

At the end of the day, the content is there to get you an idea of what you need to do to make money online.

So, does this really work? Of course, my answer has to be yes. The reason? I would not be here today writing this article if this did not work for me. So why the backlink against these Affiliate Marketing or Money Making eBooks? I am guessing it could be a few reasons:

1) Speaking out against such eBooks can be controversial (which can be an effective marketing tool to promote your own product...or "anti-product" for that matter!)

2) A lot of people try these programs and a lot of people fail. Not everyone will be successful doing this and those who are not are surely going to consider this a scam.

3) More competion means more work and less sales. Some may bad-mouth the programs just to prevent more people from trying. (The internet is a very big place, though, and there is plenty of ways to still make money!)

At the end of the day, I find these articles that bad-mouth online marketing eBooks a bit silly. Sure, some of them are pretty bad (and pretty short!). But some will provide you with tools to begin making money online in no time.

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Website Sales: Promotion is Only Half the Battle

2006-09-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

In the world of affiliate marketing, promotion is critical. But marketing either your own product or another person’s product is only half the battle…you still need to generate a sale!

I recently received an email from a visitor of TheWebReviewer.com who was in the dropshipping business. He created a fairly nice website with tons of products on it and followed the next rule of online business: Get Traffic! Logically, if you have no traffic to your website or no one is aware that it is there, you are not going to be selling anything. If you have the greatest website in the history of the internet, what good is it? This person then took the concept of Search Engine Optimization and truly embraced it. Within 3 months, he had a Page Rank of 5, over 5000 backlinks, 1000s of pages of articles and an Alexa ranking of less than 100,000. Very impressive!

And this work definitely paid off! The traffic started to consistently flow. But the question was: “I have the traffic, the page rank, the backlinks, etc, but I do not have a profitable website!” What happened? I’ve read a lot of eBooks about this and most of them stress: “If you bring them, they will buy!”

This is not entirely true. Half of the journey is getting people to your website and the other half is to convince them to buy. This person had a very nice looking website, but it did not give me any real reason to buy from them. One of the good (and sometimes) bad aspects of affiliate marketing is that the ad-copy (the website sales pitch) is already done for you. Products that are successful are usually that way because of their ad-copy. When choosing affiliate marketing products, be sure to view their sales statistics. Again, they may have a great product, but if they do not sell it well on their website, they won’t make many sales and you won’t get many commissions. Of course, this is one of the major downsides of affiliate marketing: you have no control over how the seller will present and sell their product. Then again, many of these websites have experience above and beyond most of us in the realm of marketing that can ultimately benefit you, the affiliate marketer, in the long run.

As an affiliate marketer, I spend a lot of time not only choosing the products that I plan to promote, but I look very closely at their conversion statistics as well as study their ad-copy. You should always ask yourself a few questions:

1) Would I buy from this website?

2) What does this website or product offer me above and beyond everyone else?

3) Does the website look professional and secure to make purchases on?

4) Do they provide contact details or offer refunds on the products?

And these questions not only apply to me, the affiliate marketer, but the seller who is creating their own ad-copy, too. Traffic is a very important and essential aspect of making money online, but just because you have a lot of visitors does not mean that people are going to buy from you at the end of the day. A good ad-copy campaign can easily be the difference between monthly losses and huge earnings!

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

In Defense of Doba...

2006-09-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of weeks, I have gotten a few "disgruntled" emails accusing me of promoting the dropshipping program "DOBA" and that it is nothing but a scam that I supposed mislead them about. Further, there are a few reviews out their (such as on eBay: http://search.reviews.ebay.com/Doba) where people are really bagging the program...and here I am praising it making it one of my "5-Star" choices.

First of all, the main complaint by my emails and the comments on eBay are the fact that they were paying a membership fee but were not making money. Now don't be mislead by this...first of all, I have signed up for the 7-day trial and cancelled, no problem. I read their conditions about it (the cancellation must be done during the business week) and did it. The customer service rep was very nice and asked no further questions. It seems like a lot of people are just really P-O'ed because they did not cancel in time and got dinged with a membership charge.

The other main thing about Doba is that it does not provide the true bargains that a general wholesaler might offer. Again, I spell this out in my review. And this is true. My suggestion to all is to go into the trial of Doba knowing which products you plan to sell and see if it is going to be profitable for you. If it is not, you will know pretty fast and you can cancel. If it works (even for a little bit extra money), the service and simplicity that Doba offers is unparalleled to any program I have seen to date.

This is why I rate it so high:

1) You can join it and see what it is all about for 7-days for free.

2) If they have what you are looking for, they are a superb program to join. It doesn't get much easier and it is more organized than any other program.

3) If they don't have what you are looking for or the price is to high, give them a call and cancel...it is very easy.

4) Great customer service, instructionals and personal phone assistance for your money making venture.

I do not work for Doba, but I do feel an obligation to provide my visitors of TheWebReviewer with my honest opinion about this and other programs (as well as address those who are upset!). Take it as you will, but at the end of the day, those who poo-poo this site in most cases do so because they joined, did not like the program, forgot to cancel, and got a $40 ding on their credit card. Yes, that sucks, but if you are not careful, it will happen.

To read my full Doba Review, visit TheWebReviewer.com.

Paid Surveys and SPAM

2006-09-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

I wanted to address really quickly the topic of Paid Surveys and spam. To re-iterate some of my blogs and reviews of the past, I am not the biggest fan of paid survey programs for one reason: they really don't pay enough money, in my opinion. If you are looking for an extra $50-$100 per week, then yes, this is a pretty simple way of doing it. I did this in the past, and I was not satisfied with this amount. That is what lead me into other programs like affiliate marketing and wholesaling. Both of these require a much larger initial commitment and a bit of persistance to be successful, but if you can get to the top of the mountain, the stroll down the hill is rather nice and profitable.

But this is not about affiliate marketing or wholesaling. Paid surveys do work! If you want to spend the time to fill out surveys or mystery shop or read emails, you will get paid for it. But be prepared! The way paid surveys works is that you must sign up on a lot of sites to get the 5-10 surveys per week. Signing up on a lot of websites means one thing: You are exposing yourself to a lot of sites, some of which don't have great intentions! If you plan on doing this, protect yourself! Here are a few suggestions:

1) Use a new email address (like a hotmail or gmail account) to conduct all of your paid survey business on. Some of these sites WILL sell your email address or use it to try to sell you stuff (as spam). Mixing this with your personal email is a mistake!

2) You should still use your real name and address, since they may be sending checks or confirming a PayPal account.

3) You should not need to supply your social security number. You will not be making enough money. If they require it, look into the site a bit more and make sure it is legitimate (if it is something like "Yahoo", it is probably pretty safe...if it is something like "PaidSurveyBonanza", I would be a be skeptical!)

4) Only give your phone number if you are planning on taking part in phone surveys or focus panels.

5) Create usernames and passwords that will be specific to this paid survey venture.

Unfortunately with systems like paid surveys, you are required to expose yourself a bit. Be conscious of what information your are giving them. If you protect yourself with the data you give out, the worst that can happen is a bit of annoying spam organized in a way that will not interfere with your normal life.

If you want to learn more about Paid Surveys and Top Paid Survey Sites, visit TheWebReviewer.com

Is This Affiliate Marketer Getting Lazy?

2006-09-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know! It seems that I have been slacking at my blog in that past week or so. But I do have an excuse. Most of you now realize that this blog is currently tied to my website TheWebReviewer.com. What you don't know is that I am currently in the process of giving it a whole new renovation! Everyone's continued support of the site has encouraged me to rebuild it a bit and add a bunch more stuff. Version 2 is about a week or so away, but here are a few of the new things I am currently working on:

1) New, more professional look!
2) User Forum! (read more below on this!)
3) FREE members area which will include eBooks, Web Design Resources and much more!
4) More about me and my successes with affiliate marketing

and Coming Soon (after the next release):

MORE REVIEWS on money making programs such as Data Entry, HYIPs, and the mysterious Forex programs.

I am really excited about all of the new things going on. If you have not joined TheWebReviewer newsletter, do it today and receive updates to the website when it becomes released.

Now, as for the forum, this is very new to me, but I think it is up and running! Since this is the first time that I have announced it, I don't have any posts yet! I guess you can call this my "beta" release. But before I formally release it, I would love to receive some posts and replies from you, my loyal followers! First, check it out at:

http://www.thewebreviewer.com/forum

And please, if you are having any problems with the forum, let me know!

So, again, I am really excited about the new and improved website and I am sorry for neglecting my blog during this time, but sacrafices must be made! I'll keep you posted to the final release date (and again POST YOUR QUESTIONS!, no matter how silly they may seem to be!). This forum was made for you!

- Matthew Bredel

Making Money Online: I Don't Want To Do Anything!

2006-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here is a common question that people have been asking a lot of late:

"I really want to make money online but I don't want to do web design...or spend any additional money...or write articles or blogs...or learn PPCs...or spend any time doing it...etc...etc...etc..."

Now, I am not going to laugh or make fun of these people or this question. Common sense kind of tells us that this job doesn't really exist (unless you are Paris Hilton). But the question is kind of legitimate considering some of the ad-copy that I see for some money making programs online. In fact, some of the affiliate programs that I even promote sell the product this way. I wouldn't go as far as saying it is dishonest...more like misleading. Believe it or not, there are a very (VERY) small select few who have gotten into affiliate marketing and hit it big without doing much. This is more luck than anything, though.

No matter what program you enter into (and this includes wholesaling and dropshipping as well), there are a few things you are going to have to do to make it work!

1) You need to know how to use a computer. The more you know, the better...it's that simple! People can be very successful, however, without knowing any HTML coding or hosting a website. You can pay for web design services or even use free blogs which are very easy to learn and understand.

2) You will need to invest in some things such as advertising. Dropshipping and Wholesaling make this much easier with the presense of eBay and Amazon Stores, but still, you need to put money up front or pay for their services or dropshipping fees.

3) Everything good in the world usually takes time. Don't expect to be making $100s/day in the first month. It may take a few months to get up to $20 or $50 per day. A little patience and hard-work go a long way. Wholesaling and dropshipping does not have the initial legwork, but it does require sustained work and attention.

4) The best and cheapest way of promotion is through writing articles and blogs. CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! is the king of making money online. If you are afraid to do a bit of writing, you may want to stick with the eBay selling methods of making money. And you do not need to be a literary genius, either. I got a 380 in verbal on my SAT and was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age...and I am now an "Expert Author" on a few article websites. Kind of ironic!

Despite what you read on the ad-copy of many affiliate marketing websites, making money online does require a bit of commitment on your part. Some sites offer "free websites" to make you money immediately, but really, these are not going to bring you any sustainable income. Once you discover the tricks of the system and begin to develop your website and products more, you will find that affiliate marketing IS as easy as they say it is.

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

The Power of the Opt-In Newsletter (Article)

2006-08-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

I do not care if you are an affiliate marketer, a wholesaler, a dropshipper, or even selling a product, if you do not have an opt-in sign-up on your website, I think you are missing out on a whole lot of sales! In most cases, this is an expense. But in the world that we live in, it sometimes takes money to make money. The $15 per month is very trivial in the whole scheme of things. If you are satisfied with $10-$20 per day in sales, then may not want to spend the money and that is fine. I assume, though, that if you are doing any of the above money making programs, you intentions are probably to make more than this. Believe it or not, $15 per month is probably a cheaper and more effective than spending $15 on PPC’s, classified ads, etc.

Why are opt-in’s so important? The average number of times a person will look into a product to purchase it online is roughly 6 times. Let’s assume that you were interested on making money online and entered “make money online” into a search engine (something most of us have done at one point or another). You see an ad on the right that says “Make $500/day Easy”. You click it and there are 3 reviews of different affiliate marketing programs. If you were me, you probably did not buy the first thing you saw. You decide at this point to look up: “what is affiliate marketing”, “is affiliate marketing a scam”, “Rick Jerk Review”, etc. etc. etc. So if you were the first, second, third… site this person visited, they probably just passed right over the affiliate link for your sale. Now you may be that 6th site and just happen to be the prompting force to cause the sale, but you just missed 5 other opportunities with others. The opt-in, in this case, keeps the customer interested in your site. And usually, people don’t buy products on the first day. It may be a week or month later. The opt-in provides an invited reminder to the customer that you exist and that they should go through your website to make the purchase.

And this is not SPAM, either! The point of the opt-in is that the customer chooses (“opt’s in”) to receive your emails. When I first starting affiliate marketing, someone recommended spamming to me so I tried it and what a disaster! I become very hated and I spent months rebuilding my image. Remember, spamming is un-invited solicitation. Opt-ins are invited solicitations.

How do you make an opt-in successful?

1) First, you need to convince people that by joining your newsletter or opt-in, they will receive something in return. Offering free eCourses, free eBooks, free software or free exclusive accesses are just few ideas to do this. If you do plan on offering free services, be sure to follow through on your promise.
2) I mention above that the point of an opt-in is for solicitation. In reality, this is true, but you should hide this fact as much as possible. Offer your subscribers good content, but subtly blend in your products or websites. If you email looks like a big advertisement or spam, they will immediately opt-out of your newsletter.
3) Allow your subscribers to opt-out of your newsletters very easily. Also, do not sell your lists to anyone (and be sure to place a note on your opt-in sign that states will not sell them either). The opt-in letter is more than sales, it is developing trust.
4) Don’t overwhelm your subscribers with emails. I once joined a newsletter that sent me an email twice a day for two months. At first, I was annoyed, but I was curious to see how long it would go on for. Further, this person started repeating the same letters once every two weeks. A few letters in the first few days in fine with a weekly or monthly follow-up. But again, your content should be related to what they signed of for. Once you start advertising un-related products, the newsletter starts approaching spam.

Adding an opt-in to your website these days is very trivial. There are programs called autoresponders (both browser based as well as server based) that makes running an opt-in letter virtually no work. They provide the code to create the web form. Then all you do is create the content and newsletters and when each subscriber will receive them. The emails are automatically sent out for you. Once the initial set-up is complete, the program essential runs on auto-pilot. You may get hundreds of subscribers per day that are self-managed.

Because opt-in letters are critical to sales, affordable and so easy to use, there are no excuses for anyone who is even moderately serious about making money online not to use one today.

- Matthew Bredel
Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Google Adsense Everywhere!

2006-08-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

For those of you who do not use Google Adsense, I must first ask: why? Most of my articles focus around affiliate marketing, wholesaling and paid surveys. I don't touch upon Adsense very often, though...and I should!

I am sure most of you know this already, but Google Adsense is a compliment to Google Adwords. In Google Adwords, you bid of keywords to display your ads at a per-click price. But Adwords has two dimensions:

1) Search Ads - These are the ads that appear either at the top or right column of a Google Search (or MSN search or Altavista search...etc.). '

2) Content Ads - These are the ads that can appear on relevant websites.

Which brings me back to Adsense. How do these ads appear on other people's websites? These people are a part of the Adsense network. Basically, you sign up for an Adsense account (free) and then you add a piece of html code to your website (written by Google). Google will then place ads (at their discretion) on your website based on the content it contains. You choose the size and the type of ad (whether it be text, a banner, a video, etc.) and they choose the content. Now, whenever anyone clicks onto your ad, you will receive a portion of the "click-price". It is that simple.

When I first heard about Google Adsense and set it up, I thought: "This is lame...I made $0.60 today on 5 clicks". But it is not always like that. Some clicks pay in the dollars. Also, what happens if your visitor count goes from 10 visitors per day to 1000 visitors per day? That is what happened to me. I now make over $10 per day on one of my websites due to Google Adsense. It virtually pays for my daily Adwords expenditures. And when it really gets down to it...MONEY IS MONEY!

Let's extend this beyond my money-making campaigns for a bit. Last year, I decided to run a fantasy football league with some friends. I was a commissioner and every week I wrote a group email describing the happening of the week. This year, I have my "affiliate marketing cap" on and the first thing I think of is: "How can I make something I already do profitable?" The answer is simple! Adsense! So, this year, instead of a weekly email, I have created a new blog on Blogger devoted to my fantasy football league and splatter it with not only ads, but links to my current websites. By doing this, I create the following:

1) A website that can generate money through Adsense clicks
2) A public forum for my group (and anyone else) to read.
3) Weekly Content to keep the search bots happy.
4) Good Content + Consistant Updates = Page Rank!
5) One-way backlinks to my current websites = Page Rank!

Yes, I know, I won't be making much money on Adsense and my Page Rank will only be a 2, maybe a 3 in a month or so, but who cares! I was going to have to do this anyway. The amount of time to set up my blog is virtually 30 minutes. And even though it is a little, any free publicity and money should never be turned down.

The moral of this story is to change the way you think about doing things in life. If you run a children's playgroup, why not make it into a blog or website? If you want to start a list of all of the MP3s you have, why not post it on MySpace? If you are going to have to do it anyways, why not get something out of it! This is what making money online is all about!

Check out my Fantasy Football Blog at: http://bredel-football.blogspot.com/

Also, to learn more about Adsense, click the logo on the right column of this page!

Affiliate Marketing MADNESS!

2006-08-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

I find it ironic how just last week I wrote article about avoiding disaster with affiliate marketing and here I am pulling out my hair like a madman. It's been a tough few weeks. Some of it my fault, some of it not. I finally got my computer de-virused and de-spywared after about two weeks of constant fighting it (on a good note, I avoided having to re-format my hard-drive, which I was very close to doing!). I did find some damn good anti-virus and anti-spyware, which I will write up in an upcoming blog. In this whole process of fixing my computer, I am now about two weeks behind on a campaign that I started developing back in July. And to add insult to injury, my main campaign's website has fallen off not only the top 10 positions in Google, but the top 1000! That has dropped my traffic in half, and with it, my sales in half. Very frustrating to say the least! Keep in mind, too, that I do have a 40 hour per week job and my time is fairly limited on these tasks.

So what to do? Of course, I want to do EVERYTHING and NOW! But that won't get much accomplished. This is the point where you need to step back from the problems and outline a plan:

1) Fix my computer and protect it better (DONE!). Viruses are now gone and I have some bitchin' protection installed.

2) Finish up my new website and campaign. Yes, this will cost me money on my "big" website, but the solution to that problem may just be time. I have been reading a lot about this phenomenon. Some call it the "Google Sandbox Effect". Others refer back to last year and the "Google Jagger Update". But a lot of these theories still seem out of date. I will find out, though, and pass on what I discover...but not until I finish my current campaign!

3) Figure out what the heck happened with my rankings! I'll spend a few weeks working on SEO research to strengthen not only my new website, but my old website as well.

4) Re-vamp my big website and start promoting it at a higher level.

One point I am trying to make here is that time is definitely a factor when it comes to promotion. PPC's allow us to get out their immediately, but SEO, good page rank and position does not happen over night. The Google problem I am having may only require time to fix it (that I what many are telling me). So instead of freaking out and trying to "quick fix" the problem, my time will be better spent on things that I have more control over. Like I said last week...this is just a bump in the road, not a cliff!

Coping with Affiliate Marketing Disaster (Article)

2006-08-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

Affiliate marketing is a great and easy way to make money online, but things do not always run smoothly. Learning how to cope during times of frustration is critical to succeed.

I have yet to find the affiliate marketer who initially started their first campaign in a matter of minutes, made gobs of money immediately, and sustained that through the end of time. Some affiliate marketing eBooks and programs actually promote that their system is this easy. I admit that affiliate marketing was a bit easier in its infancy, but right now, the demand is great and the rules are a lot tougher. Anyone who says that affiliate marketing is a smooth sailing ship at all times is lying to you.

So far in my adventures of making money online, I have come across two major bumps in the road.

The first major disaster that most of us face is making our first sale. It took me three months and I spent more than $300 until I got my first $7 commission. Then I went another 2 weeks before getting a second $7 commission. I then got 2 sales in a week. Then I got 5 in a week. I finally stabilized at about 3-5 sales per day, averaging about $30 per sale. What is the lesson here? Perseverance! At the beginning, two major things happen for success:

1) You become a smarter and more educated at affiliate marketing. I can look back at the first three months and know exactly what I did wrong.
2) Patience. At the beginning, you are so anxious to make a buck that you do silly things to “make it happen”. For example, I overbid tremendously on Adwords to get more people to my site. Also, it takes time to build successful Adwords campaigns as well as building your SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) to get high positions in search engine general inquires. In time, you will target the right people and the traffic will increase naturally, all resulting in sales!

The second major disaster recently occurred to me. I had build a very stable, income producing website that was making about $100/day and attracting about 300 unique visitors per day. Then it stopped. My uniques dropped to about 100 and my sales virtually went to zero. I then did some research and found that my top 5 position on Google free listings dropped off the face of the earth. How devastating! Months of SEO and work down the tube. I panicked! I went racing for answers. Then I got a nasty virus on my computer which sent me off the rails. Three weeks I spent doing nothing but trying to “fix” my website (and my computer) and nothing seemed to improve. I was ready to second-think affiliate marketing once again…when my sales returned. I did not do anything, either.

This is just a part of the affiliate marketing world. Many people stress “multiple streams of income”, and they are absolutely right! Focusing all of your eggs in one basket is a bit risky. I now run a few campaigns and as one slumps, the others seem to pick up the slack. (Keep in mind, though, that you must get one campaign up and producing income prior to building a second one. This is one of the many mistakes I made at the beginning.)

The moral of this whole story is to stay focused! At the beginning, set yourself a goal and a plan of attack and stick with it. Do not let lack of sales and expenses get in the way of your plan and commitment. And when things do build into something profitable, be prepared for the off-week. Stay with your game-plan and do not let it distract your from you current job at hand. Affiliate marketing gives you a lot of good highs once you get to the top of the mountain, but do not let the subtle lows bring you down to the ground. As the old saying goes, you may need to take one step back to move two steps forward.

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

I Hate Spyware!

2006-08-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

What a waste of a frickin' weekend! I was all excited about a new campaign that I was getting close to finishing up and then it happened! First it was one IE window, then 2, then I couldn't close them fast enough. My lower toolbar disappeared and the Task Manager was no longer responding. Firefox started adding new tabs. You could only imagine the explitives that shot out of my mouth!

What happened? Basically, I got lazy over time. I had a version of Norton circa 2004 sort of running in the background. I have not bothered in upgrading it either. I was too good for this. "I'd never download anything malicious". I'm smart! I control what happens with my computer. What an idiot am I...and it is costing me a bundle right now.

Two lessons here:

1) I don't care who you are and how good you are with computers, there is no excuse for not protecting your machine...especially when it comes to a machine that you conduct business on (wasn't that one of my rules about affiliate marketing: treat it like a business?)

2) As awful as an experience this is, I am going to make the most out of it! Just trying to figure out what is going on with my computer, I am learning a lot about anti-virus and spyware software. Do you see where I am going with this? So instead of just upgrading to a new version of Norton, I am spending time learning all about viruses, spyware and the best software out there to protect yourself. I am still trying out a lot of programs, but I am learning that the "popular" programs are not necessarily the best ones. Sure, they may have a lot of features, but when it really gets down to it, I need something that protects me, period! As soon as I find the best programs, I will be sure to pass on the info here.

Now this still does not make me less angry and the a-holes who write this stuff should be in prison. It is also a slap in the face to real affiliate marketers out there. Things like spam and adware just make us look bad.

You know, I can go on for days about how annoyed I am, but I won't dignify the scum of the earth that do this with any more time than they have already wasted of mine.

Wholesaling Versus Dropshipping: Does it matter? (Article)

2006-08-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

Wholesaling Versus Dropshipping: Does it matter?

The internet has given us, the common person, the ability to be our own distributor. But where do you start? Wholesaling? Dropshipping? And does it matter?

Back in the stone ages (oh, about 10 years ago before the internet), going into business for yourself was never an easy task. I personally have always been interested in the distribution business. Why? First, I don’t have to make or produce the products. That requires a lot of time, money, and risk. Secondly, I really have never been very keen with dealing with the public. I once worked in a retail store and the hundreds of customers I would deal with on a daily basis drove me nuts. So I looked for an in-between: distribution. My goals were to be the middle man. Unfortunately, ten years ago becoming a distributor was not easy at all. It required finding the products and negotiating the wholesale terms as well as finding the sellers and those who were going to buy your products. I gave up and became an engineer instead.

Recently, my desires to go into business for myself have been resurrected. Why? Because it is a whole lot simpler now because of the internet! My two biggest problems are now ten-times easier to solve:

1) Finding the Products – You can still do it the old fashion way and spend hours on the phones calling and trying to find the products you wish to distribute. The internet, though, speeds up this process considerably. Search engines allow us to find things fast all over the world. Even better, there are internet companies who do not only the finding of these companies, but test them out as well. The risk is very low, your time to market is much faster and your rewards are just as great.

2) Selling the Products – Now that we have products, we need to find sellers. We can still set up a shop or distribute your products to other stores for resale. But why? The internet is currently the biggest and broadest shop in the world. It requires no storefront. It requires no employees or direct customer relations either. Promotion does come at a cost, but only a small fraction. With the emergence of companies like eBay and Amazon, setting up a store with a lot of visible is simpler than ever.

Understand that there is work involved. This is where you have further options in how you would like to manage your business: Wholesaling or Dropshipping:

Wholesaling: This is pretty straight forward. You find a product you like and you initially buy a lot of the product at a reduced, wholesale price. When you make a sale, you ship the products to the end customer yourself. For a true wholesaling business, you need to purchase a large quantity up front to obtain the lowest wholesale price.

Light Bulk Wholesaling: This is the same as wholesaling, but the minimum buys are much less. This may be more suitable for the everyday eBay or Amazon powerseller. The wholesale prices are a bit higher, but your stock and money up front is much less.

Dropshipping: This is wholesaling at its simplest. In dropshipping, you purchase no product upfront. When a person makes a purchase, you then place the order with your dropshipper (at a wholesale price) and they will ship it directly to the customer. This is by far the easiest and least risky, but the wholesale prices are the highest and there is usually a dropshipping fee as well (usually a few bucks).

Like all business, there are trade-offs. The more product you buy up front, the higher the potential rewards. As you get more conservative, the amount of financial and time commitments become less, but so do your profits. But at the end of the day, no matter which program you choose, there is money to made.

- Matthew Bredel

To learn more about dropshipping, wholesaling and reviews of the top wholesale websites online, visit http://Dropshipping.TheWebReviewer.com

Visit

Tracking Affiliate Marketing Keywords to Sales: An Unresolved Issue

2006-07-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Normally, my posts are based on useful information for making money online. Today, though, I pose my current problem and I'll looking for comments and feedback on the issue!

One of the most important aspects of succeeding in affiliate marketing is tracking your keywords and sales. If you are using PPC's, it is almost essential that you track the quality of your clicks. For example, let's say that keyword #1 is costing me $0.05 per click and keyword #2 is costing me $0.30 per click. Now lets say that I get 60 #1 clicks and 10 #2 clicks. They both cost me the same. But when I check my statistics, I see that my #1 clicks produce a 99% bounce rate (Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site when they initially visit) where my #2 clicks produce a 50% bounce rate. I'll tell you right now which $3 was better spent! (I'll go over how to use Google Analytics to do this analysis in the future).

Well, great! I now know at least which keywords bring interested customers, but how do I evaluate which keywords bring BUYING customers? This is my dilema. One thing that stinks about affiliate marketing is the lack of control you have once someone leaves your website. You really cannot use google conversion tracking because you do not have a "thank you" page. I have spent some time looking at tracking software, but none of them seems to solve this problem (they require a "thank you" page). So I pose the question to my readers: How do you track affiliate marketing sales with your keywords?

And even if you do not know the answer, at least take a lesson from the moral of this blog: TRACKING YOUR KEYWORDS AND SALES ARE CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS!!

Dropshipping: A Step Beyond Affiliate Marketing (Article)

2006-07-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

Affiliate marketing is a great way for some of us to make money online. Dropshipping may be a better solution for others. It may be a bit more daily work, but the rewards can be just as good!

As I continue to grow as an affiliate marketer, I strive to learn new and more diverse opportunities to make money online. Remember that the one of the most common suggestions of online entrepreneurs is to create multiple streams of incomes from many different campaign and programs. Further, understanding the multiple types of online money making programs helps you find the “niche” that will ultimately make you the most money.

For some, affiliate marketing may seem a bit intimidating: It is driven a lot by reviews, reports, advertising, promotion and sales. In affiliate marketing, you, the online entrepreneur, are just a middle man: You direct people to your site (or landing page) and it is your job to convince them to buy from another website. If you achieve your goals, you will receive a portion of the sales, lead or click that came from your site. There are a few downfalls to this:

1) You have no control over the selling site.

2) You must rely on their ad-copy as much as your ad-copy to ultimately make the sale

3) You lose sales tracking ability the minute the buyer leaves your site. Tracking sales to ad campaigns is very difficult.

4) You are competing against other affiliate marketers.

5) Relatively speaking, compensation can be low and out of your control.

For example, I currently promote a product that the website founder likes to change the price and the commission of the product very regularly. Some weeks I make close to $30 per sale, other weeks, less than $8 per sale (for the SAME product!). As an affiliate marketer, what I am to do? I either must grin and bear it or drop them as an affiliate.

So what other options are there to help reduce these issues? The closest program to affiliate marketing that reduces or eliminates the affiliate marketing issues is dropshipping. With dropshipping, you are actually selling the product; you are no longer the middle man. This is similar to buying wholesale and marking up the price for each product, but with a little twist! With dropshipping, you only purchase the product AFTER someone purchases the product from you. In addition, the product is never in your hands; it is shipped directly to the end customer.

For example, let’s say you want to sell ipods. First, you would find a dropshipper that sells the product (at a below market value to you). Second, you create a website, an eBay auction, Amazon Shop, etc. When someone makes a purchase, you return to the dropshipping site, place the order for them, include their address information and the sale is completed. Your earning is the price difference between the final customer cost and the wholesale cost + shipping cost + dropshipping fee. Let’s say that your wholesale cost of an ipod is $150 and you sell it for $200. The dropshipper charges you $18 for shipping and $2 for the dropship fee. Your profit on the sales is then $30.

What are the advantages over affiliate marketing?

1) Control of the final landing page and how the product is presented.

2) Less competition

3) Ability to set your own price and earnings

4) Ability to track your sales to completion

5) Less time required (in some cases) creating an avenue to sell the products (through eBay and Amazon, for example)

6) Potential higher earnings per sale (relative to affiliate marketing)

What are the disadvantages over affiliate marketing?

1) You are now required the action of purchasing each product after a sale

2) Setting up payment methods (though companies like Paypal make this pretty easy…they just take a percentage of the sales)

3) Direct contact with the customer

4) Finding the right product at the right price with the right dropshipper can take some time and negotiating.

5) Higher risk of fraud and poor dropshipping companies.

As similar as the two programs are, they are quite different in what they have to offer you. Affiliate marketing usually requires a bit more front-end work, but once the commissions start coming, the maintenance is fairly minimal. As for dropshipping, you can get set-up and going relatively quickly. With superstores like eBay and Amazon, dropshipping requires no custom landing pages and minimal promotion. This, however, requires a little more work throughout the existence of the campaign. The per-sale-action ultimately requires more work in the long run. Both work very well, but it is up to you to choose which one works best…maybe it is both!

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

For more details on Dropshipping programs, visit http://Dropshipping.TheWebReviewer.com

The Highs and Lows of Day-Trading and Affiliate Marketing

2006-07-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

My wife always criticizes me for making analogies about everything that I do in life. Unfortunately for you poor readers of my blog, this is not an exception!

Back in the late 90s, I (like many) started to get swept into the whole “day-trading” phenomenon. At this time, making a few bucks in a day was not too difficult. (Simply because everything seemed to go up.) Now I was in no way a day-trading expert and most of my transactions were less than $1000. It was fun, though: Researching a stock, picking its buy price, then picking its sell price and watch it go! I would literally be watching the stock-market on a minute-by-minute basis. The highs and rush of a big gain, the sadness and frustration of a big fall. Of course, at the beginning there were plenty of highs, but when the stock market finally crashed, the lows set in hard…I have not done day trading since 2001.

Just recently, I picked up a Wall Street Journal and checked out some of my old stocks that worked well for me. Mind you, if I stuck with that, I would be very poor now. It did bring back the excitement a bit. The funny thing is that the feeling I was having was a familiar one. When it really gets down to it, affiliate marketing and online money making is very much the same thing. The highs of a big day of sales or high traffic to your website. The lows of getting no sales or having your Adwords position drop out of the first page.

But this is better! The risks are much lower now! On my high days, I earn over $200. On my low days, I spend $10 in advertising. And just like the stock-market, there is an instant gratification to your traffic and sales due to instantaneous internet reporting. Now I may not watch my statistics on a minute-by-minute basis, but I do check it out throughout the day. And just like stocks, once I have exhausted one concept, I move on to the next (while the first one keeps bringing in the dough!). As you develop more campaigns and more knowledge about the industry, you find that your high days become plentiful while your low days fall to virtually nothing.

Page Rank, Alexa Ranking, SEO and YOU! (Article)

2006-07-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

Page Rank and Alexa Ranking are two well respected figures of merit currently on the web to assess the success of your website. What do they really mean and how do they affect you?

Since I began my online money making adventures about 6 months, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand how the world wide web actually works. One of the biggest keys to being successful on the internet is how to get people to actually come to your website. Naturally, the more traffic that you get to your site, the higher potential for sales you will have. Of course, there are artificial ways of doing this such as advertising, classifieds and pay-per-click programs. While these are very important and can provide you with a lot of high quality visitors, they can be rather costly and limited in exposure. So how do you attract traffic the natural way? How do I get those top positions in the “free” search engine results? How do I expand my exposure beyond my hometown, state and even country? The trick to achieving these goals is called “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO.

Unfortunately, SEO is not a defined formula or process. It is a bit of a secret. Trial and error is what drives this process, not a straight-forward formula. Even worse, this formula is constantly changing. So what can you do? First, there are a few “figures of merit” for a website. Now understand, these merits do not directly relate to getting top spot on Google, but they are factored in to some degree.

One figure of merit is called Page Rank. Again, Page Rank is another unknown formula which only the search engine gods know about. Page rank generally provides a number (between 0 and 10) on how well linked your website is. If you are a sole entity in the world wide web with no links being directed to you, your exposure to the world and ability to find your website is rather low. Cases like this earn ratings of 0 and 1. If many websites, also with high page ranks, are linked to your site, the probability of people finding your website is much higher and deserves much higher page ranks such as 5 and 6’s. The upper numbers like 8, 9, and 10 are rare and found mostly on the real big sites (such as google.com, yahoo.com, etc.). So page rank provides a figure of merit on how people can get to your site naturally. It is believed that page rank has a lot to do with search position on Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Each one of these search engines have their own page rank system, but the Google one is the most respected.

The other figure of merit that I see praised a lot is the Alexa Ranking. Some people think this number and the Page Rank are similar, but they really are quite different. The Alexa Ranking focuses more on the AMOUNT of traffic that your site receives, not the linkage. Of course, the two are related, but the merits tell different tales. Now, as much as traffic is a good thing for sales, it has a lower effect on search engine rankings and SEO. Alexa Ranking numbers work in reverse, as well. The lower the number, the higher the ranking. Most websites start off in the millions. Websites below 100,000 usually means heavy traffic.

I currently have a friend who runs a fairly respectable website which has an Alexa Ranking of 65,000 (gets close to 500,000 visitors per day) but only has a page rank of 2/10. I have a website that has an Alexa Ranking of 1,000,000 but a page rank of 4/10. What does this mean? Most of his traffic is coming from places other than highly page ranked websites. My site has a lot of high quality links, but little traffic. For me, I need quality visitors, for him, he just needs visitors. At the end of the day, it all evens out and our income is approximately the same at this time.

From all of this, I have drawn a few conclusions:

1) Figures of merit for your website can help you understand your place in the world wide web.
2) Depending on your website goals, your figures of merit should be optimized according.
3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used to improve your free search engine position and is dependant more on your Page Rank and less on your Alexa Ranking.
4) Alexa Rankings are a good indicator of traffic, but does not necessarily reflect the importance of your website on the web (particularly to search engines)
5) One of the best ways to improve your Page Rank is to get your website link on other people’s high Page Ranked websites
6) Finally, no matter what type of website you run, high search engine placement (Page Rank) AND high traffic (Alexa Ranking) is the goal for all financial success.

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

The Affiliate Marketing Inventor?

2006-07-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit it, but I've always been a bit of a geek all of my life. I was reminded by this fact from my mother this past weekend. She said to me: "I haven't heard about any of your 'invention' ideas of late." She made a good point! In my quest to quitting my day job and making millions of dollars while sitting on a beach sipping pina coladas, I have spend countless hours throughout my life thinking about that "invention to make me rich". I've seen the Oprah shows that shows some funny looking person who came up with some silly idea that is making them millions right now. That should be me! And over time, I have come up with some pretty good ideas (at least, I think I did!).

But really, let's get real! Was I really going to make and sell these products? There is a lot of overhead involved in creating your own product:

1) Thinking it up!
2) Researching the marketplace (does it exist?)
3) Protecting your idea (patent? $)
4) Prototyping your product ($)
5) Testing your product ($$)
6) Producing your product ($$$)
7) Marketing and selling your product ($$$$)

Boy, there are a lot of dollar signs above. I have also looked into "invention" companies, but they usually want a decent amount of money up front (if they are reputable) and, if the product ever becomes a hit, they usually take a fair chunk of the profit. What is the old saying: "You've got to spend money to make money!". Creating your own investment is a fairly large financial risk and time commitment, but the pay-offs can be HUGE!

When I discovered online money making opportunities, much of my "invention-thinking" energy was re-directed. I realized a fair way back that my ideas were good, but really, I was not prepared to sacriface my career and the stability of my household to test them out. Affiliate marketing provides me the opportunity to:

1) Make a lot of money! (maybe not as much of inventing your own product, but enough to fulfill my pina-colada drinking dreams)
2) Invest little money and time…I do not sacriface much at this time.
3) Make money without working (once on auto-pilot, can you say pina-colada again?)
4) *VERY IMPORTANT: Allows me to be creative and inventive in a very productive way!

That was the answer to my mother's question! I find myself thinking and pondering different products to promote, how to promote them, to whom to promote them, the design of the website or blog, etc. Affiliate marketing has given me a positive and prosperous outlet for this inventive mind of mine. What I now dream up becomes a reality. And ironically, if I ever DID want to invent products, my knowledge of the internet and its resources (which I have learned through my online ventures) have given me the tools to effectively promote and sell my own inventive product.

I am still not drinking my pina-colada quite yet, but every few days or so, I get a little sip and boy, does it taste good!

To Blog or Not to Blog: Making Money (Article)

2006-07-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

To Blog or Not To Blog: While Making Money Online

Making money online through blogs has been a very popular venture of late. While blogs are free and very appealing, are they just as good as designing your own website?

One of the biggest crazes associated with making money online these days centers around blogs. Only in the last year or so has web-logging or “blogging” (a fancy way of referring to an internet diary which can be make public) really been a major way of communication on the world wide web. Its initial intensions were to provide internet users a place to share their feelings, opinions and ideas. Of course, everything in the world these days that starts out simple with good intensions becomes tarnished by the desire to make money. I hate to admit it, but I am not an exception to this rule, either.

I became an internet marketer about 7 months ago and like most affiliate marketers, my roots began through reading eBooks. Many of the recent “updates” to these money-making programs focuses on using blogs as a means of an inexpensive (free) place to create landing pages (pages which you link your potential customers to in order to promote your product).

There are three main ways to promote products:

1) Promote products by directly linking to the seller’s website. This is fairly competitive these days.
2) Create your own landing page by having your own website.
3) Create your own landing page by having a blog or using a free website.

I have tried direct promotion with little luck in the past. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is irrelevant and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services (like Yahoo Overture and Google Adwords) is very competitive. This is because services like Adwords will only allow one sponsored URL per search. High niche keywords and unique keywords are required to even compete (and be seen) if you plan on having a modest advertising budget. A landing page is much more successful and easy to promote, in my opinion.

Do you create your own website or use a free website, like a blog? Let’s review the pros and cons of creating a blog (versus your own site).

Blog Benefits:

1) Cheap: They are free! Creating your own website requires you to pay for domain names and monthly hosting fees.
2) Little to no web design experience required. Excellent templates and designs already available. Creating your own website requires some technical expertise or additional fees in paying someone to do it for you.
3) Flexibility to create your own unique, content and ad-copy. Same with creating your own website, just broader.
4) Excellent for Search Engine Optimization. Blog sites such as Blogspot are linked with Google, which improves your probability of high, free search results.

Blog Cons:

1) Lack of flexibility of design. You are usually constrained to the templates and designs that are offered by the site.
2) Possible sponsored ads on your site that you do not get paid for. Blogspot allows you to add your own advertising, such as Adwords, but most require that they place their own ads.
3) Some free sites and blogs disallow your own domain name. This creates ugly, non-memorable website URL names. The free sites that allow unique domains names usually delay its activation by months.
4) Not professional looking. This may not be a bad thing, depending on the type of product you are promoting.
5) Lack of vistor track-ability. Being able to trace links, clicks and visitor statistics can be very critical to a successful campaign. Blog and free sites may not provide the accessibility to install tracking code.

The Verdict:

I have done both free blog and creating my own website in the past and I have found much more success with your own website versus a blog or free website. Being able to track my visitors can be extremely useful. I spent the time to learn web design and now, adding new content to my site can take LESS time now than with a blog. Price-wise, a domain and host can cost less than $10 per month. While I was able to make money through my blog, sales almost TRIPLED with my own site.

While I promote making your own website, there are definitely benefits to having a commercial blog. Specifically, the SEO of a blog can be rather powerful! Ideally, my best suggestion is to create your own website that sells your product while creating and maintaining a good-content blog that links two-way links to your site.

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Making Money...While On Vacation!

2006-07-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

Well, it is truly NOT great to be back! I wish life was a vacation all of the time, but that is our goal, right? Leave the 9-to-5 job behind and find that golden ticket to leisure and fun. This vacation was my first true "test" of having my affiliate marketing campaigns put on auto-pilot. I went up to the mountains for 10 days...no internet, 3 TV channels and a LAN telephone. (As much as I miss those things, it was great to go without it for awhile!). But as you can imagine, I was so itching to find out how my affiliate websites and blogs were going. Did my Adwords ads need fixing? Was Overture going to replenish my funds if they went dry? Were people going to come looking for my blogs and find no new posts?

As much as I was tempted to find an internet cafe, I held back. When I got home last night, I was literally scared what I was going to find concerning my affiliate sales, click statistics and livlihood of my websites. I have put a lot of effort over the last few months to create these things to let them go to pots. The moment of truth came...I first checked my Clickbank sales and...

...I couldn't believe it! I had some of the BIGGEST sales days of my online money making career! There were even some over $100 days, which is really good for me at this time! I was so excited not only to have all of the sales, but to find that everything had been working to clock-work! GoogleAds continued to get me my predicted clicks! Overture DID replenish my funds. A few more articles had been approved and released. All was well in my world of blogs and websites...and I wasn't even here!

This is encouraging me to do one thing right now...TAKE MORE VACATIONS!

Affiliate Marketing, My Website and the Firefox Incident!

2006-06-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

So I am just about ready to go on vacation for about 2 weeks (sorry, no computer access for the trip, therefore, no posts for a couple of weeks) and I was at my dad's house wanting to show him my website: TheWebReviewer.com. Being an old geezer that he is (sorry dad!), he has his fonts on Internet Explorer set to large. To my shock (and HORROR!) I saw my website overwriting itself all over the place! This can't be? I have checked it out a hundred times with no problems. Further, my cool fonts were no longer visible. What happened???

We'll, it is simple: I did not do a good job making my website very robust I am afraid. My mistakes:

1) The CSS style sheets that I created where all "absolute" positions. This is fine as long as everyone else is using your settings, but this was not the case.

2) Avoid using non-standard Fonts and even "point" font sizes. Stick with simple, standard fonts (like Ariel and Times New Roman) or even the "default font". Defining 12 and 14 point font sizes seem to confuse some browsers, too. Use simpler font styles such as small, medium, large, etc.

I have now fixed this little mess (at probably the cost of many potentials buyers...If you website is not organized well, and in this case a mess, no one is going to stick around!). When designing your website, be sure to keep it simple, but also test it in multiple environments! Most people have Microsoft Internet Explorer pre-installed on their machines. A lot of people use Firefox as well, and at times, they format out differently. In general, I recommend Firefox over IE anyway.

1) IT'S FREE! To download it, just click the link in the right bar.

2) It seems to be more stable than IE (less crashing)

3) It is supposed to be less vulnerable to viruses and spyware.

4) It is fully integrated with all of the good Google tools (you should also install these on IE as well. Click the link in the right bar).

5) It isn't Microsoft (I know a lot of people who use Firefox just to spite Microsoft!).

My point? Be sure to use robust formatting and font types and sizes on your website and remember that just because it looks good on your browser does not mean that it will look good on everyones! Test it both in different browsers and viewing settings!

See ya in a couple of weeks!

Online Money Making Battle: Paid Surveys Vs. Affiliate Marketing

2006-06-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

Paid Surveys Vs. Affiliate Marketing: Which is for you?

As you start learning about money making programs online, you will usually come across two legitimate ways of making money: Paid Surveys and Affiliate Marketing. I have tried them both and they are quite different!

I have spend a lot of time over the past 6 to 8 months researching and trying out different ways of making money online. Some of them work, but a lot of them are basically scams or pyramid schemes. The two that stand out as both legitimate as well as popular are paid surveys and affiliate marketing. You may see them called a variety of different names such as "focus groups", "paid to read emails", and "mystery shopping" for paid surveys and "data entry", "Clickbank money", even "forex" (even though the real forex deals with foreign exchange of currency) for affiliate marketing. A sub-catagory of affiliate marketing includes "Adsense" money-makers. Whatever you want to call, they are really just two different ways of making money online.

Paid surveys are simple. You sign up on a whole bunch of survey sites and over time, you will receive invitations to take part in filling out a marketing (or other) type of survey. This includes online surveys, phone surveys, focus groups, mystery shopping, etc. Now you will not be receiving dozens per day, by maybe a dozen or so per week. These surveys can range between $5 each to $75. Making $100 per week is definitely achievable!

Affiliate marketing is totally different. Throughout the world of the internet, there is a marketplace based on referrals. Almost anything you buy on the internet has some type of referal or affiliate program. If you can send a buyer to a vendor's website and they buy something, you (as the affiliate marketer) will receive a commission. These commissions can be percentages or straight values for the sales (or for that matter, leads or even clicks!). To promote another person's product, you usually need to create a website or blog and advertise.

Both of these online money making programs work and they do work as they are described above. But, of course, it is easier to explain it in 3 sentences than to actually do it. So what one do you choose? Let's compare the realities of these two work-at-home programs and find out!

1) Potential to Make Money

Paid Surveys: Making $500 per month is very doable, but that is pretty much the maximum in most cases.

Affiliate Marketing: The top affiliate marketers in the world make millions! But realize that only about 5% of those trying to make money through affiliate ventures are actually making money. (read on!) A solid affiliate marketer can bring in about $5000 per month.

2) Time Commitment

Paid Surveys: The initial start-up to sign up for the survey sites may take a few hours, but after that, your time will paid with the surveys or focus groups, etc. are you taking part in. You get paid for the time you put into paid surveys.

Affiliate Marketing: The actual "setting up" of an affiliate marketing campaign really does not take too long. But affiliate marketing requires a real commitment to learn the trade, research the products, advertise, and ultimately, become technically savvy enough to use the internet resources available to you (read #3). Once you develop the proper skills to do this, things become much simplier, your time commitment goes down and your earnings grow substantially!

3) Computer Know-How

Paid Surveys: Your computer skills only need to be average at best. Once you figure out how to create accounts on the survey sites, everything is fairly spoon-fed to you. As long as you have basic email knowledge, paid surveys requires very minimal technical knowledge.

Affiliate Marketing: A lot of the well written eBooks about affiliate marketing do a good job walking you through many of the technical steps. To get started requires very minimal computer knowledge. However, if you really want to make a considerable amount of money, it usually requires you to learn how to do some website design, host management and manipulation of code. You do not need to be a computer coder to be successful, but you should feel confident enough to edit a website.

4) Difficulty to Make Money

Paid Surveys: If you are willing to put in the initial time to sign up for most or all of the sites provided and you are willing to spend the time actually doing the surveys, then making money with paid surveys is easy.

Affiliate Marketing: If making a million dollars was easy, we would all do it, right? Not many people can read an affiliate marketing eBook and start making a solid income immediately. Some people do not make a cent in the first few MONTHS (I was one of them!). A lot of people quit, but if you are determined and willing to learn the trade, the initial up-hill battle will flatten out! It may start off at $10-$20 per day, but once it rains, it seems to pour!

5) Start-up Fees

Paid Surveys: You really need to join a paid survey site program to be successful. Most charge a one-time fee of $30-$40. No other fees occur after this.

Affiliate Marketing: You should really buy an eBook to teach you how affiliate marketing works. This usually costs between $30 and $50. There are usually advertising costs (which can be fairly minimum, but not required). If you have your own website, you will have monthly hosting and domain fees. Websites are not required, though. Blogs are a free way of promotion these days. Of course, it is entirely up you how much you will spend.

What it really gets down to is what you are willing to give. Paid surveys is a conservative, yet honest way of supplementing your monthly income by a few hundred days (and believe me, a few hundrd dollars can go a long way!). Affiliate marketing can be an initial uphill battle, which for some, leads to nothing. But the rewards can be very high and result in more than just a supplement of income, rather a career! Either way, if you try them out and it does not work for you, the other is always available and at the end of the day!

Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Google Analytics - Great Free Tracking

2006-06-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I was curious and clicked on the "Analytics" tab in my Google Adwords account. When I got there, I was a bit disappointed that I need to be "invited" to join the program. I said "what the hay!" and signed up for it anyway. Who cares, right? Well, last week I got my official invitation to join and being curious, I logged on and set up an account.

For anyone looking for a quick and easy way of tracking your website statistics, this is a GREAT and EASY way of doing it! I was quite impressed and now I almost rely on it! It provides me with such a good overview of my site as well as who my visitors are and what they are doing. It isn't perfect, nor does it provide all of the information you need, but it gives me enough to make quick judgments on what is going on. And again, IT'S FREE!

I have tried a handful of counter sites to do the same thing and most want your money in order to provide you with any meaning information (a counter tool at the bottom of your site is clearly not enough). The one counter site that I do like and still frequent is StatCounter. Its free version provides you will all of the good details that you want to see, but only for the last 100 visitors. For me right now, that is enough to get an idea what is going on. It provides a little bit more "raw" information than Analytics, which I like.

In either case, you SHOULD be tracking your visitors quite regularly to learn what is working and what is not. I'll get into more details on this in later blogs. Happy hump day!

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Article 2)

2006-06-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm getting lazy about creating separate blogs about my articles. Here is my new article in its entirety:

Affiliate Marketing: The Risk-free Business

Trying to get into the world of small business can be a very risky, high cost and time consumer venture...until now. Affiliate marketing and other online money making programs can produce the same successes with virtually no risk at all.

We all have dreams about running our own business at some point in our life. It can be for the personal satisfaction, the freedom of bosses or the big financial rewards. But we know at some level that in order to get to this point requires either a lot of time, a lot of money or a even a lot of luck. Being an engineer in everyday life, I find myself between a rock and a hard place: Is it worth it for me to give up a fair paying job with reasonable hours to a high risk job which will require a lot more hours and probably, at least for the first 3-5 years, pay me less money? Working a 9-to-5 job can be fairly mundane and the self-satisfaction and financial rewards are adequate, but, in my opinion not acceptable.

Some Benefits of Owning Your Own Business:

1) Personal satisfaction
2) No bosses
3) Potential for big financial rewards
4) You set your own work hours
5) Potential to financial freedom without much work.

Some Drawbacks of Owning Your Own Business

1) Large up-front financial investment
2) Large up-front time commitment
3) High risk of failure
4) Little direction
5) Employ management (in some cases)

What do you do, then? I have been to the trade shows and the franchise shows and wholesaler shows. I have to admit that I do have quite a bit of excitement about them, but really, I am not prepared to make the sacrifices; at least at this time in my life. I have a wife, a mortgage, a car payment and two very young children.

About six months ago, I stumbled across some money making opportunities on the internet. I first started with Paid Surveys, but this was not meant to solve my small business desires, rather, to earn a little bit of extra cash each month (and it did that!, a couple of hundred dollars is nice, but I am not retiring with this any time soon!). This led me into the world of affiliate marketing.

Making money online through affiliate marketing has been an interesting and great experience. I was a bit skeptical at first, but the more research I did, the more it made sense to me. As an affiliate marketer, you promote products on the internet. If people find your link and/or website which lead them to a sale, you get a certain percentage of the sale. These earnings can be a few dollars, tens of dollars, even hundreds of dollars each! The process to be successful in doing this is not necessarily simple, but it is rather straight-forward. If you approach a venture like this from a small business point of view, you can be very successful in affiliate marketing.

This was the niche that I was looking for. Affiliate marketing has allowed me to receive many of the benefits of being in a small business for myself with little or none of the drawbacks:

* Minimal up-front investment: About a hundred dollars or so.
* Minimal time commitment: I work on it when I have time. There is no time limit on making this succeed.
* Low risk: If you put the effort into it, you can and will be successful. If it does not work for you, you are out very little (unlike buying a business).
*Lots of Direction: There are a vast number of quality eBooks on the subject and the support networks in newsgroups are outstanding.
* No Employees: Unless you really make it big, which this does have the potential of doing!

I have not yet quit my day-job by any means. I work on affiliate marketing about 2 hours per day, 5 days per week. I am not making tens of thousands per month yet, but everyday my affiliate marketing business grows and it does make a steady stream of income. By slowly building my online money making business now, I open the doors for the future to truly leave my 9-5 job behind and achieve the goals of self-employment that I have always desired. All of this was done at little to no risk to my family, life-style or current career path.

- Matthew Bredel

Visit http://www.TheWebReviewer.com for more money making articles, resources and reviews on today’s hottest online money making ventures.

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Part II)

2006-06-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

I always find it a bit laughable about how some "make money online" ad pages try to portray affiliate marketing or ebay powerselling or paid surveys as "just follow these three steps and you'll be making money out of your behind!". Yes, you can make money and good money from these ventures, but it requires a bit more than flipping three switches. The funny thing is that it does not require much more effort than three little steps for any of these programs.

Remember, THIS IS A BUSINESS! For an example, let's look at a affiliate marketing and the "three steps" required to make our fortune:

1) Finding a Product to Promote

The Wrong Way: Going to an affiliate site and picking either a random product, the most popular product or a product you like and going with it.

The Business Way: Researching the products! Which products are popular and selling well and why? Can you market these products? Is the market saturated? How much money will each sale make you? How many visitors per sale do you expect? How much will it cost you per visitor?

2) Creating Your Landing Page

The Wrong Way: Taking the products ad page and regurgiting the content or adding no content at all! Also creating a content landing page that is not targeting true buyers.

The Business Way: Research and understanding your product! Buy the product if you have to. An honest sales pitch has a lot more value than regurgitated ad text. People can see through it! Study the competition's websites or blogs and make yours BETTER! Also, you need to understand who the target buyers are and cater to them. For example, trying to sell diet pill to someone looking to lose 5 pounds is probably not the best idea. In this case, focusing on people looking to lose 50 pounds may make more sense.

3) Promoting Your Site

The Wrong Way: Creating a GoogleAds Adword or Overture account and bidding $0.50 for the top 20 keywords related to your product.

The Business Way: Research out more targeted and obscure keywords that relate to your product. (Don't bid on "free diet pills" if they are not truly free!) You must make budgets for your Pay-Per-Click accounts and stick with them. Budget out how much you make per lead and vary your bid price according this. You should also go beyond PPC's to not only increase your traffic, but to get free traffic as well.

When I first started affiliate marketing, I did all three steps "The Wrong Way". That made me virtually no money. Actually, it cost me a small amount! Now I focus on "The Business Way" of affiliate marketing and sure enough, I make a fairly steady stream of income. Affiliate marketing (as well as other online ventures) are actually pretty straight-forward ways of making money and the eBooks that teach this do show you how to successfully do it. It is how you interpret this information and use it which separates the winners from the, well, no so successful!

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Article 1)

2006-06-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

In my series of how affiliate marketing relates to small business, I am planning on writing a series of articles to complement the topic. I've written my first article called:

Transitioning Affiliate Marketing Into the Small Business Mentality

Check it out! I still cannot reiterate more to "newbies" the importance of not only how affiliate marketing works, but how to effectively implement it as well! Enjoy the article!

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Part I)

2006-06-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

Blogspot royally annoyed me last week! For some stupid reason, the website would be down or it would come up with a bunch of broken links or it would just freeze on me! By Thursday, I gave up with posts for the week. I'm back now!...

One big point that everyone seems to miss about making money online is that is really and truly is, by definition, a small business. When I first started doing paid surveys, I approached it as a "hobby". Then I got more adventageous and started making money through affiliate marketing and Adsense. At the beginning, I continued to approach it as a "hobby", like the paid surveys. I was not willing to invest the time or money into building my affiliate marketing campaigns. Not much really came from it, either. I did not know what I was doing nor was I ready to put any money into it. I became frustrated and finally bought my first eBook on how to do it. That cost about $40.

This taught me to focus on Blogging and SEO at first (because they were CHEAP!). Believe it or not, I actually DID get some sales. Not many and nothing reliable at all, but it was something. That prompted me to start spending money all over the place: PPC's, Domain Names, Web Hosting, Autoresponders, Ads, more eBooks, etc. Now here is where my warning to everyone comes into place:

I started throwing money around (a few $100 in this case) and it gained me absolutely NOTHING!

But the problem was not what I was buying, but rather, what I was trying to do. All of the things listed above, in my opinion, ARE NEEDED if you really want to play this game. The problem was that I did not have a good PLAN. And this ties back into the original point of the article:

Affiliate Marketing IS a small business that requires both resources and planning to be successful.

Once I figured this out, things began falling into place and my negative income was slowly becoming positive once again. You do not need a marketing or economics degree to figure this out, either. How much are you willing to pay per Sale? Per Click? Per Lead? And prior to even figuring this out, are you really ready and educated on affiliate marketing and Adsense to play this game? My first recommendation is to buy an eBook to learn the ropes and play with blogging and free traffic until you understand how online marketing works. We'll talk about planning and resources another day!

Affiliate Marketing eBooks: Part II - Which One to Buy?

2006-06-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

So you are ready to give affiliate marketing (or any type of money making program) a shot! So you type in a few good keywords into Google like "Make money from home" or "Get Rich Quick" and you get eBooks and programs being thrown at you at all directions! Again, I have read my share of internet eBooks (especially on this topic) and most are really quite similar. At this point, you need to step back and figure out what YOU need in a program:

1) Are you fairly internet savvy or did you just figure out how to turn on a computer yesterday?

2) Do you just want the details on what to do or do you want to know why you are doing it?

3) Are you looking for all the details up front, or would you prefer them in small doses?

4) Are you dedicated to making this work or are you looking for a quick way to make some money?

Believe it or not, but there is an eBook or program for any of the cases listed above. Some programs really walk you through it providing excellent examples and really defining the basics. Other eBooks throw everything at your up front and let you figure it out yourself. Both have their pluses and minuses, but it is the reader than needs to choose which is best for them. The best way to learn which eBook is right for you is to read reviews on products themselves. You will probably find that a few eBooks really stand out (TheRichJerk or AffiliateCashVault, for example). These are popular because they have been around awhile and have provided good results. This doesn't mean that newer eBooks are not better, just not as easy to find reviews. I still like the LifeEmpowered System a lot (for its ease of use and great support). BecomeHated is a newbie which is great for the technical savvy user looking for tons of information and fast! But whatever you choose, make sure it is right for you...

(Reviews for the above eBooks can be found at: http://www.TheWebReviewer.com)

The Intimidation of Internet Marketing

2006-06-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

I seem to spend a lot of time these days checking out what other people are doing in the form of online marketing and advertisement. At first glance, I was quite overwhelmed and impressed with what I was seeing! Some of these sites were HUGE! They may have hundreds of articles. The have dozens of reviews and commentary over a large wealth of products. Page Ranks around 5 and 6. Hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS, of visitors per day.

And then there is my website...a handful of reviews, a few articles, some nice commentary and quite a few useful tips on making money (http://www.thewebreviewer.com). But nothing in the league of these others. So should I just quit? HELL NO!

First of all, the internet is a VERY BIG PLACE and there are plenty of web surfers to share the wealth. If you look closely at these sites, they were not created yesterday, either. They have been around for years. Content takes time. And what about the few thousand visitors a get per month? That is MORE than enough to make affiliate sales or earn some advertising revenue. Remember that the big players fill a certain void while the little players (like us, at least for right now!) fill another void. I know that when I initially started to research the web for money making opportunities, it was the smaller sites that made more of an impression on me. The big sites rely more on quantity and advertising.

So remember, don't get discouraged if your website or blog is not as fancy, or big, or as popular as the others...it really doesn't matter! You WILL still make money if its content is good and in time, it can easily grow into the power-house that currently intimidates us online!

Affiliate Marketing eBooks: Part I - A Waste of Money?

2006-05-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Yawn! The long weekend has really taken it's toll on me and I am pretty lazy today! Wake up, Matt and let's get back to business!

One thing I have been doing a lot these days has been reading eBooks...particularly eBooks focusing on affiliate marketing. So the question of today is: Are affiliate eBooks just a waste of money? The short answer is definitely not! The long answer is, let the buyer beware! I honestly feel that anyone who is ready and willing to give affiliate marketing a shot should by all means buy a book! A few reasons for this:

1) Trying to figure it out yourself can take a LONG time!

2) Trying to figure it out yourself not only can, but WILL cost you a lot of wasted money!

3) The resources, links and suggestions offered in many eBooks can be invaluable and very insightful.

I don't know about any of you, but I do not have a degree in business, economics, or marketing. Without the proper guidance, trying to compete with those who do can be pretty tough. A least with a little bit of instruction, you can avoid a lot of the disasters that are associated with marketing. A lot of these books hold your hand and give you an adequate description of marketing in order to be effective. And beyond the marketing aspect, there are plenty of little trade secrets that can propel you from being someone who sells nothing to a power-user.

But of course, not all eBooks are created the same. We'll cover that a bit tomorrow. Visit http://www.thewebreviewer.com for more details on some of the reviews I have conducted. (I am currently reviewing Affiliate Cash Vault! Stay Tuned!)

Affiliate Marketing of the Past: Direct Promotion

2006-05-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

When I initially read my first eBook (The Life Empowered System) about affiliate marketing, it spent a lot of time stressing the ease of direct promotion. Let me explain what I mean by direct promotion...You can go to an affiliate site and get a weblink that will direct whomever to a website selling products with your "tag" associated with it. If that person buys the product, you will receive a commission. In direct promotion, you will send the person who clicks your ad directly to the link that your affiliate tag is on. Therefore, no landing page. You bypass the middle man and go straight to the product.

What has happened? Why doesn't this work anymore? One big reason is that a lot of people were doing it (and making a fair some of money!). The only overhead costs and time came with promoting the link. The bigger obstacle came late last summer (2005) when Google announced that sponspered links can have only one link per search. Before, if you typed in "DishNetwork", you may find 10 or more affiliate links directly to the DirectTV website. The normal rules of high CTR and price applied...that was it! Now, we have to fight for that one position. I tried to actually promote DishNetwork this way and my ad was never seen! (I was not prepared to pay higher than the top bidder).

Believe it or not, it is all for the better! This new rule improves the quality of your searches and weens out a lot of the marketers who really are not that committed to the programs. Also, the greatest thing about eBooks is that they usually do update them regularly and once you buy it, you get the updates for free. The new version of the Life Empowered System no longer focuses on this type of marketing. It now focuses on more modern approaches such as blogging. Again, I highly recommend this program!

PPC's and Click Fraud: A Growing Problem

2006-05-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

When I started affiliate marketing many months ago, I bought an eBook and followed its instructions on promoting products using pay-per-click services. We have talked a lot about Google Adwords and, those of you who are trying it, are probably finding that it is not trivial to use (and requires a bit of guidance). That leads us to the "other" PPC services. Like Overture, most PPC's are pretty straight forward and the ad placement goes to the highest bidder. At the beginning of my affiliate marketing, these sites were quite the gold-mine! I got a lot of clicks and relatively cheap rates (usually about 0.05 per click). It seemed too easy and I did get a lot of sales because of it!

But things have changed over the last few months. My high click rates stayed where they are (or even grew!) and my sales diminished. What the heck is going on? After a lot of research and link tracking, I started to realize that these clicks were not of high quality...if fact, they are probably a form of click fraud. Click Fraud is where someone clicks your links purely for profit for themselves. With the introduction of blogs these days, I believe that more and more people are becoming aware of online advertising and taking this knowledge to do bad things.

So what do you do? For now, I have turned most of my PPC campaigns off (except for Adwords and Overture). Think about it this way: If I am paying 0.05/click and I get 100 clicks, but only 10 of these clicks are of any quality, you are actually paying about 0.5/click! That will give you quite a bit of leverage on Adwords and Overture (with much higher quality!).

What about Adwords and Overture? Of course, click fraud happens here, but both of these outfits are much more advanced than the smaller ones and can pin-point click fraud more easily. Also remember that any half-way experienced online money marketer needs Google to be successful and to piss-off the Google Gods usually means banishment from all Google services (both Adsense and Adwords).

I suppose we are back to the basics:

1) Google Adwords
2) Yahoo Overture
3) Search Engine Optimization

Hey, it keeps us honest, right?

Affiliate Marketing Online: Does It Make or Take Your Money?

2006-05-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Instead of an actual entry to today's blog, I decided to write a short article related to Online Affiliate Marketing. Check it out at:

Article: Affiliate Marketing Online: Does It Make or Take Your Money?

Blogger and Moderating Comments Mishaps

2006-05-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

I would like to first apologize for everyone that has been leaving comments to my blogs that I have not even acknowledged. About a month ago, I was getting a lot of stupid splog comments (or spam-blog) that I could not erase. You can still see some of them on under my first few entries. I kind of got pissed off and turned on comment moderation and sort of forgot about it! I came across it last night and activated the legitimate ones. I do appreciate the feedback and questions and I plan to start addressing these questions in my upcoming blogs.

One other final note about splogging...Being an affiliate marketer myself, I understand the importance of put your "brand" (or website links) within your signature on a comment response. I do it and I have no problem if others doing it on my blogs. It is the comments that add no content or relevancy to my current blog that annoys me. A signature alone will provide the backlink you need. We don't need a sales pitch. I will talk about this again more in the future.

Again, I really appreciate all of the great comments and questions (that are not splog!). It gives me the motivation to continue writing this blog! Until tomorrow...

Understanding Adwords - Part VIII: GoogleAd Last Words

2006-05-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

I promise to continue to comment on Adwords in the future, but for now, I feel that I need to move on a little bit! I do want to bring up a few other minor points about Google Adwords:

1) The payment system for Adwords is a little bit different than many of the other types of PPC sites such as Overture and Miva. Overture and Miva charge you prior to activating your ads and keywords. This means that you need to fork up usually about $50 just to begin. It will then debit from this account until it reaches a threshold where it will either automatically replenish this account or deactivate your ads. Google, on the other hand, charges you $5 to sign up and then will charge you for what you owe at the end of each month. Personally, I prefer to pay for my clicks after the fact, not up-front.

2) Join and use the GoogleAds forums (http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-help/) to help answer some specific questions and learn some of the tricks of the trade. It is an excellent resource!

3) Don't be afraid to contact GoogleAds support. There are times where their software robots really can screw you over. Sometimes Google needs a little bit of a kick in the butt. In all, though, they are pretty good program and harassing them a lot will not solve all of your problems.

4) The Psychology of Adwords: I want to stress the one the most! Using Adwords can be a very addictive and compulsary venture. Patience can definitely be a virtue when using this program. Prior to any campaign, you should really draw up a game plan and stick with it! You may be tempted to up your maximum bids beyond your planned limits...Don't do it! Sometimes, it takes a few days to get Adwords to drop bid prices for activation. If you are asked to pay beyond your limits, spend a few days trying to optimize your ads...they may require review, be patient!

5) I have wasted hundreds of dollars learning many of the lessons I have written about throughout this blog. Some lessons you need to learn on your own and just like anything worthwhile in this world, understanding Adwords is no exception. I do still highly recommend Perry Marshall's The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords to anyone who is really serious about making affiliate marketing work. Many of my (costly) lessons learned where spelled out right in this book. I was kicking myself quite a bit for not getting this book sooner.

I will continue to add Google lessons learned throughout my upcoming blogs, so stay tuned for more!

Understanding Adwords - Final Notes on Content Searches

2006-05-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

Something that I forgot to mention about content searches...

If you choose to use content searches, please be aware of what they are! For normal google searches, you are guarenteed positions on Google Searches or some of their direct affiliates (like AskJeeves). Again, these are very targetted searches based on the keywords that you are bidding on. Content searches are a bit different. These are the ads that can appear on any website. Specifically, the ads that are generated when using Google Adsense. This blog, for example, has ads on the right column from Adsense that come from content searches. Keep in mind that the ads that are placed are based on the content of my website, not necessarily from a specific searched keyword. Therefore, your ad may appear on a website that is unrelated to your topic audience.

Unlike Google Searches, though, are you not penalized for this! The CTR of your content searches has no bearing on your content search position nor does it affect the CTR of your campaign related to google search position. So if you have a Google Search CTR of 5% and a Content Search CTR of 0.01%, you are not being penalized for the 0.01%. It is what it is!

Getting back to the topic of click fraud, you can probably guess that some idiots on the web take advantage of links they have placed on their website by clicking them. This, of course, makes them money and costs you the price of a click (or many clicks) with no quality at all. Google works fairly hard to prevent this and a lot of their software is smart enough to detect fraudulent clicks. They will banish you from Google Adsense if they suspect you are clicking your own ad links. Don't be stupid, just play the game fairly!

Understanding Adwords - Part VII: Content Searches Beware!

2006-05-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a story about when I first started affiliate marketing. One of the very first campaigns I tried dealt with PSP downloading services. I got my links, went into GoogleAds and started a campaign. This was about the fourth campaign that I had tried and with the three previous, I was not getting any clicks with 0.05 per keyword. With this one, I thought, I would be adventurous and set my bid price to 0.30 per keyword! I was feeling really good about this plan! I even set my maximum daily budget to $15. And away I went!

The first few days, nothing really happened that was too extraordinary. I got about 10 clicks per day through google searches. $3 per day...no sales. Then one afternoon I went to check my account and it showed about 500,000 impressions and 50 clicks (and I had reached my max for the day.) WOW! I must have found a winning strategy! So I checked my daily earning...no sales. Hmmm...well, they say that some products get a sale for 1 in every 100 clicks.

The next day I changed my maximum daily budget to $30! Sure enough, at the end of the day I had over 1,000,000 impressions and 100 clicks! DOUBLE WOW! I'm rich!...no sales. Maybe this was just a fluke day! One more day!

On the third day, again, 1,000,000 impressions and 100 clicks! And STILL NO SALES! At this point, I had over 250 clicks and not one single sale. So I paused the campaign and did some study: I went to a variety of web forums and told my story and everyone told me: SHUT OFF THE CONTENT SEARCHES! Further digging brought me two conclusions:

1) Click Fraud - Yes, it exists and I do honestly believe some of this mess was caused by this.

2) Content Searches provide low quality clicks

So what to do? I have two suggestions:

1) Disable Content Search completely from your campaigns. At least at the beginning until you become more familiar and advanced at GoogleAds.

2) Change the max bid price explicitly for content searches. This one I am still up in the air about. Right now, I set my max bid price on content searches to 0.03 per click. Believe it or not, I do get clicks and impressions from this. I have yet to determine if they clicks have any quality to them at all. Then again, it doesn't come at much cost.

In summary, I spent over $75 just to learn that content searches can really bite you in the rear if you are not careful. This is another instance where Perry Marshall's eBook would have saved me time and money on this stupid campaign (the lesson learned here cost me 150% more than the price of the eBook...again, it is money well spent if you plan on trying to learn Adwords).

Understanding Adwords - Part VI: Being Positive About Negative Keywords

2006-05-11T11:45:00.000-07:00

When I first started learning how to use Google Adwords, I read about negative keywords. What these keywords do is prevent your ad from showing if your negative keyword appears in the search. In google, this is achieved by adding a minus sign (-) in front of the keyword. For example:

zeppelin
-led

In this case, if someone is looking for led zeppelin, your ad will not appear. If you type in zeppelin airships, your keyword would be triggered. At first when I learned about negative keywords, I thought "why would I want to get less clicks and impressions?". After reading Perry Marshall's The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords, and applying some of his negative keyword techniques, I found that my ROI (return on investment) improved substantially. So, for our example above, if I was selling items that revolved around old fashion zeppelin aircrafts, I would not want to pay for clicks that people who are looking for led zeppelin information. This targets my audience much more and provided me with more quality clicks as well as improved my CTR (click-through-rate), which is important for ad position and cost! Perry Marshall has a good free online course focusing on this and his eBook cannot stress it enough. Sign up here!

Understanding Adwords - Part V: The Matching Game

2006-05-10T12:35:00.000-07:00

For some stupid reason, I have had a tough time in the past grasping the concept of the different matching options of google keywords. There are three specific matching types:

1) Broad matches:

For example: golf clubs

If you use these two words as your keyword, a google browser will find it if the words golf and clubs appear in the search despite its order and location.

golf balls and clubs (found)
golf clubs (found)
best golf clubs in town (found)

2) Phrase matches (defined by quotations around the keywords):

For example: "golf clubs"

In this instance, the words golf and clubs must appear just like it is typed within the quotes. There may, however, be other keywords around it:

golf balls and clubs (not found)
golf clubs (found)
best golf clubs in town (found)

3) Exact matches (defined by brackets around the keywords):

For example: [golf clubs]

For exact matches, the searcher must only type in the keywords defined, in that order, with no other keywords present:

golf balls and clubs (not found)
golf clubs (found)
best golf clubs in town (not found)

Now the first question you may ask yourself is "Why would I use a phrase or exact match if the broad match gets me the most results?". Yes, that is true, but a few things to point out:

1) Broad matches are much more competive and may cost you more money to bid on
2) Broad matches may produce clicks you don't want. For example: free golf clubs
3) Exact and Phrase matches gets higher priority than broad matches for page position
4) Exact and phrase matches help to reduce keyword cost and produces higher quality clicks.

One more thing to point out! In Adwords, you must specify plurals explicitly! Many PPC's will include a plural form by default, but not Adwords. So if you are using golf clubs as a keyword, you may also want to include golf club as well!

Understanding Adwords - Part IV: Immediate Ads

2006-05-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

Adwords has one unique advantage over most of the other pay-per-click websites. With Google, you can create a new ad and it will be active, essentially immediately. PPC sites like Overture and MSN, for example, require an editorial review of both the ad and the keywords associated with it. At some level, I don't blame them! But from our (the advertiser's) stand-point, it makes our jobs of developing effective ad campaigns more difficult. Most ads and/or keywords take 1-3 days for editorial review. GoogleAds will activate your ads and keywords immediately. There are a few things to point out, though.

1) Because the ads and keywords are effective immediately, Google still must regulate what the user is trying to do. Even though they are not reviewed my a person (initially), Google's computer brain tries to review it. This can both work for or against you. If the Google computer software does not like your ad, keyword, or even landing page, it will charge you a high price to active the keyword. On the other hand, you may get away with a fairly irrelevant keyword at a low price. No one other than Google knows the algorithm of determining this.

2) Some ads or keywords will produce "flags" in the Google system. There are some topics that google does not like (for example, gambling). If you put anything in your ad that relates to gambling, it may warn you immediately (and request justification) or it will flag it internally, allow you to bid on it, say it is active, but not tell you that your ad requires review prior to publishing. This really stinks at times! I will wait on an ad for days and not get a single impression just to find out that Google has flagged it and requires manual review. Usually a call to Google can solve this problem, but it usually takes a few days to even figure it out.

3) The benefit! Assuming that your ad does not require manual review, the ability to activate ads and test them immediately gives you lots of flexibility to test your ads and fine tune them for maximum click through rates (CTR). Perry Marshall's eBook focuses on this topic extensively and has really helped me to improve my CTR as well as my ROI (return on investment). Again, I highly recommend this book for anyone using Adwords. You'll earn back the money you spent on it in no time! Click here to learn more!

Understanding Adwords - Part III: Max Bid Headaches

2006-05-08T07:46:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has used Adwords knows this scenerio:

I just thought of this great campaign and I have this great list of keywords that people are going to want to click! You set up your website or blog, you do a bunch of research on keywords and its various derivatives, you go to GoogleAds, create your ad, put in your keywords, choose a max bid that you can afford (like $0.10) and ta-da...

"YOU HAVE 456 INACTIVE KEYWORDS"

This is the point where I usually curse at the computer. So Google (kindly?) gives me two options:

1) Increase my keyword price

2) Increase the quality and relevancy of my ad

At this point, you can browse through your keywords and see the ridiculous prices google thinks your keyword is worth. Some of these keywords are $5, maybe even $10. I doubt you will be paying this.

The only other option you have is to optimize your ad. I have read tons on this topic and even have spoken with Google about it before, but I still am not quite sure how this works. If I change my ad, nothing really happens (at that time). If I add more ads, nothing really happens (at that time either). I think (this is purely speculation...if you have more insight, please let me know!) Google will initially give you its electronic estimate of what it will define its max bid value at based on your keywords and first ad written. From that point on, it will stay that way until the ad is officially reviewed by an editor. This can sometimes work to your advantage. A few things you can do in the meantime:

1) Write multiple ads. It is always a good itea to write multiple ads, but it also gives an editor more options to lower your bids.

2) Put keywords into the ad itself.

3) Be specific and use exact-match [] keywords pr phase-match "" keywords. For example, if you are selling golf clubs, instead of using the keyword:

golf clubs

Use:

[websites to find golf clubs]

4) Use negative keywords

5) Add more content to you landing page (Google does check your landing page for relevancy as well!)

6) Be patient! Time fixes these problems at times.

Perry Marshall goes over a lot of these issues in detail (and adds a few more advanced methods as well!). Click here to learn more.

Understanding Adwords - Part II: Ad Position

2006-05-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

For most PPC sites, determining the ad position for a particular keyword is pretty straight forward. Like any auction, highest bidder wins! In Overture, for example, you can use the keyword selector tool to show you what position your ad will appear in for a given maximum bid. Keep in mind, though, that you maximum bid is just that: a MAXIMUM bid. You do not necessarily pay this price per click. Rather, you pay one cent higher than the next lower bidder. This sounds like a good deal, until you look and see what the max bids are for some keywords. Are you willing to pay $5 per click for the first position? Some people are! More advanced users and well-established campaigns can afford this hit. Beginners (like most of us), cannot compete in the market. Overture requires a minimum bid of $0.10. Right now, that is about as much as I want to spend. Unfortunately, that puts me in one of the lowest ad positions. I will still get clicks (in most case), but not many.

Google puts a little twist to this deal. Maximum bid price is one deciding factor. The other is Click Through Rate (CTR). CTR is a percentage which is calculated:

CTR = Click Throughs / Impressions

For example, if your ad has 10,000 impressions and it is clicked 100 times, your CTR would be 1%. (1%-10% CTR is considered rather respectable!) Google will then use this number and your bid price to determine your rank:

Ad Position = Maximum Bid Price x CTR

(Of course, it is not a simple equation like this, there are unknown weights and normalizing involved, which we, as the users, do not know!).

So what is the significance of this? It says that the top positions do not necessarily go to the highest bidder. Rather, it goes to best and most established ads. A person with a really high CTR may only have to pay pennies for the top position while a low (or no) CTR ad may pay dollars for the same spot. To some degree, this gives us little people a chance!

Of course, to have a high CTR, you need clicks and to get clicks, you need impressions and a respectable ad position. You have two options here:

1) Patience - Over time, you will get impressions and clicks

2) You can pay for it up front - Raise your bid from the beginning and hope not to get burned.

Either case, you need to have GOOD AD COPY! If people don't notice your ad, they won't click it. Google punishes you for this! As your CTR drops, more money is required to maintain that position. So, for everything good in the world, there always seems to be something bad!

Again, Perry Marshall spends a few chapters on improving ad copy and optimizing your CTR. Check it out!

Understanding Adwords - Part I

2006-05-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

Understanding Adwords: That is a tough task. Since there are many different components of Google Adwords, I will be splitting up this blog over the next few days or so. Let's begin with the essentials...

Google Adwords works similiar to many of the other PPC programs. You bid on keywords and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. You may have a million impressions and no clicks, and it won't cost you a cent. So what is different about Google? Let's go through some of the main differences:

1) Ad position is a function of not only the minimum bid price, but also the history and the effectiveness of this ad to generate clicks.

2) GoogleAds rewards (or punishes) people for bidding on keywords that are relevant to the ad and landing page. Relevant keywords offer lower maximum bids than non-relevant keywords.

3) GoogleAds, generally, does not review ads immediately. (This can be a crucial advantange!)

4) GoogleAds allows for broad match, phase match, exact match keywords. Also plurals. Further, negative keywords can be defined.

5) Google allows for both search engine and content search advertising (discussed briefly in my blog about Adsense: Adsense, Does it Really Make Sense?

6) You are billed after the clicks are made, not before.

I am sure I can think of a few other differences which I will bring up as I think of them. Before I go for today, I really want to emphasize that getting GoogleAds to work effectively takes a bit of time and understanding. You can find yourself spending a LOT of money trying to learn the system through trial and error. I have read a few books and eBooks about GoogleAds and Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google Adwords is one of the best (Click here to learn more...). The forty-some dollars it costs will save you hundreds in the future. Also, the quicker you understand the true details of GoogleAds, the faster you will be making sales. Much of my success occurred after buying this book!

See ya tomorrow!

Pay-Per-Clicks I - Overture Overview

2006-05-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the biggest, most unique and effective PPC sites is Google's Adwords. But, of course, for everything good in the world, comes some headache. Adwords is definitely no exception to this rule! So let's focus on the simplier ones first.

Most PPC sites are fairly straight-forward in how they work: It is simple...you write an ad, you choose some keywords and then you bid on this keywords. Position of your ad is based on how much you pay. Best position goes to the highest bidder. This can be good and bad.

The good is that you know exactly where you stand, how your bid effects position, and you can size up your competition quite easily. Yahoo's Overture (http://www.overture.com) is probably the largest PPC site that does this on the web. For any keyword, you can view the current bids by using the keyword selector tools (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). This tool will also be useful when using GoogleAds later on.

The bad things about this system is that position is purely based on money, not relevance (more or less...editors can remove your keyword if it is too obscure). This is a disadvantage for a few reasons:

1) Writing good ad copy is not rewarded
2) Poor ad copy degrades the entire quality of the search results
3) Trying to compete in established keywords can be difficult and expensive as a beginner

Adwords works quite differently than this. We'll discuss this more in detail next time.

Targeted Marketing: Pay-Per-Click Introduction

2006-04-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

I spoke about it briefly yesterday, but one of the most important mechanisms of the internet for successful affiliate marketing is based around targeted marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) programs. Let me explain how this works...

I am sure you have all used a search engine before and have noticed "sponsored" links listed somewhere on the page. Google, for example, has sponsors on the right column and sometimes, has 1,2 or 3 sponsors above the search results (which are highlighted). These sponsored links appear on mostly all search engines: Yahoo, Hotbot, MSN, etc. Similarly, you will find sponsors located on individual webpages. This blog, for example, has a list of sponsored links at the bottom of the right column. These specific type of ads are called "content ads". We will discuss this another day. They work in the same manner, though.

First of all, anyone can create an ad for any website at any time. To set up an account usually costs less than $5 and there are no commitments or monthly fees to join (if you are, you are doing something wrong!). The special thing about all of these ads are that you ONLY pay what people click on! My ad can be seen by 1,000,000 people (these are called "impressions"), and receive zero clicks, and this will cost me nothing. Most ads cost anywhere between 5 cents per click to $5 per click to hundreds of dollars per click (I have never seen this type, but have read about them). So, let's say that 1000 people see my ad today and 100 of them click my ad at $0.1/click. My costs for the day would be $10. Luckily, most PPC programs allow you to limit your daily budget, just in case your clicks exceed your expectations.

The other main thing to point about about pay-per-click programs is that you are bidding on keywords: these are the words that people are searching for. For example, if I am selling golf clubs, I may bid on keywords such as "golf", "golf clubs", "how to play golf", "pebble beach", etc. You would probably not be bidding on keywords such as "britney spears", "baby showers" and "asian monkeys". The significance of this is that we are now targeting our product and website to those who are actually looking for it. Target marketing is a huge component to making affiliate marketing campaigns work!

Unfortunately, running pay-per-click campaigns are not trivial. PPC are strongly based on:

1) Competition,

2) Writing good ads,

3) Relevance

and, of course,

4) MONEY!!

More to come on Sunday! And remember, you CAN make money doing this! Be sure to check out the eBooks that have worked for me at my review site to get your campaign started today!:

http://MakeMoney.TheWebReviewer.com

Staying Focused on Your Affiliate Marketing Plan

2006-04-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry for missing a few blogs...Jury Duty, enough said!

While sitting on Jury Duty, I had plenty of time to think about life, and included in that is affiliate marketing. I came to a bit of a revelation about my current campaign...I was losing my focus! I have done this before, and I am glad that with experience that I am a bit more wise to pick-up on this mistake early on (though, I feel that I have already wasted a lot of time and money on this mistake). So what happened?

I originally developed a "plan" for this campaign. I did not set up dates, but rather, a sequence of events I wanted to follow. The first few steps of my plan were as follows:

1) Find, Research, and Pick a Product to Promote (DONE!)

2) Develop my promotion blog (DONE!)

3) Get my blog seen through search engine submissions, RSS feeds, and signatures to forum and blog responses. (75% DONE)

4) Pay-Per-Click Campaigns for targeted promotion (CRASHING!)

Wait a minute! PPC campaign? I haven't mentioned PPC campaign yet? What happened? Well, I got excited and over-anxious! In the process of step three, I was curious and checked out my Clickbank account and found that I was actually getting a few sales. In affiliate marketing, getting your first few sales on your product is almost as good as sex! The adrenaline was high, and I was eager to make this campaign work faster for me! That is when I started a few campaigns on several different PPC sites in haste. My impressions went up considerable, but my sales actually dropped and my PPC costs were going through the roof! Any money that I made prior to this is now history.

Two main lessons have come from this:

1) Haste Makes Waste! - especially when it comes to pay-per-click campaigns. To develop a proper campaign in PPC's require time, research and patience. Throwing out a few popular keywords without any thought is just asking for trouble (and a hole in your pocket-book!)

2) Stick to the Game Plan! - Don't let your emotions (and sales) get the better of you. For that matter, if things go south (and sales are not what you expect), still stick to your game plan. Again, you may feel desperate and start doing things that will only make things worse.

So for now, I am going to finish my "free promotion" plan and begin to research keywords and develop my PPC campaigns in a smart manner, not an excited or desperate manner! Stay tuned!

Free For All Sites: Do You Get What You Pay For?

2006-04-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

We've all seen them: "Get 1,000,000 clicks for free!". Wow! What a bargain! Just think, one million people looking at this blog! I'll become famous! Come on! Let's get real here! Unless I am Yahoo, I don't think that 1,000,000 people are going to be visiting my site anytime soon...

But then again, I was still a bit intrigued! What is this all about and how does it work? So I looked around and I found FreeViral.com! Here is how it works: It is basically a (legal) pyramid scheme revolving around links rather than money. Visit this site, which has 6 links on it. Go to each one of these links and collect its secret code to paste into the original site. Once you go to all six links, you can now add your link to the six below (while link #6 drops off!). It took about 5 minutes, no big deal, and I signed up using an email that I usually send all of my spam to. So now you need to promote and get people to your FreeViral site to sign up. Hmmm...that seems like a lot work from this point on.

So what am I (and FreeViral) getting out of this? Well, I think I am getting virtually nothing. For one thing, I need to promote this site to get the links out there. Not worth my time! Secondly, and more importantly, what is the quality of these clicks? Are people going to my site because they are interested in my product? Probably not! They just need my secret code. I will monitor this, though, and see if anything comes out of it. It is gets me one sale in the next year (which I doubt), it would have been worth my 5 minutes.

From FreeViral's point-of-view, they get something key: YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS! This is what is called an "Opt-In". Now that they have my email, they can target me more directly to sell their own products. FreeViral probably doesn't bring in any money, but can build quite a big email list. Maybe I'll try setting up my own Free For All in the future!

The Obsession of Affiliate Marketing

2006-04-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

When I started my affiliate marketing venture a few months ago, I was quite determined to make it work. A few things I have discovered over the my tenure:

1) There are a LOT of affiliate products, a LOT of forums, a LOT of pay-per-click (PPC) sites, a lot of eBooks, etc. on the internet.

2) A strong understanding of all the items listed in #1 are crucial for success.

3) Any type of SEO or PPC campaign require continuous fine-tuning, tweaking and improving.

4) Page Clicks, Impressions and Sales can occur at time, any day.

Add all four of these together and you can find yourself becoming OBSESSED with Affiliate Marketing! I kind of feel that if you are determined enough to make online marketing work, you will ultimate find yourself becoming addicted to it. I have to admit, I do work a normal 40 hour work week, but I do find myself (about 4 times per day) checking my Adsense account, my Adwords account, my Counter account, and my Clickbank account. One of the most fun aspects of this business is the real-time interaction with the internet. Getting a sale builds adrenaline! Getting low click-through-rates (CTR) drives you to develop better ads. Broken links on your website make you literally want to cry. And every success promotes further drive and desire to do more!

So here is were I (the San Diegan Marketer) says: "Chill out, dude!" I found myself spending every day on this stupid computer for about 2 months. This kind of pissed off my wife and kids a fair bit. Just like any job, you must learn to manage both your work and family appropriately. Therefore, about a month ago, I vowed that on Saturdays I would not even turn the computer on at all. Let me tell you, if is tough and I look at the computer about 3 times a day and think about checking it really quickly, but I do restrain myself. I also no longer jump on the computer first thing when I get home from work...I wait until the kids go to bed.

I always stress perseverance to succeed in internet marketing, but you need to be smart about it. One great thing about affiliate marketing is that you really are not under a time crunch. You control you own destiny and life; Don't let some like a silly money making venture take control of you!

Adsense Really Does Make Sense!

2006-04-21T20:11:00.000-07:00

OK, I am over my bitterness from the past two days of being locked out of my account. Let's get back to business!

I wanted to talk a little bit about Google Adsense. For those of you who don't know what this is, they are the ads (provided by Google) that appear all over the place (including this blog!). For example, I have two sets of ads on this blog: One appears on the right hand margin below my links and the second one appears under the blog summary on the top of the page. The one on the right is called an "ad unit" which are made up of content sponsorship from Google's Adwords program (that will be discussed in a later blog!). The one on the top is called an "ad link" which provides a topic you can click that will bring you to a new page of sponsored links.

When I first started affiliate marketing, I kind of ignored Google Adsense because I felt a few "cents" a day, if I was lucky, was not worth it. That was a stupid mistake. True, some clicks only pay a few cents, while MOST pay between $0.30 and $2! I couldn't really believe it! Even though I don't get many Adsense clicks, I do make about $2-$3 per day for doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! It is so easy to set up and once you add the javascript code to your blog or website, there is no more maintenance required! Just remember, $3 per day is $90 per month! That money also helps offset promotion costs. And realize this, right now, I only receive about 100 impressions per day and about 2-4 clicks...as I continue to promote the blog and get more people to visit, the higher the clicks become and the more money Adsense brings in!

For ANYBODY with a website that draws ANY traffic, you should always have an ad or two somewhere on the page. It is too easy to ignore. (But, don't be silly about it!...websites that are wallpapered in ads usually just piss me off!) Good luck and sign up today:

https://www.google.com/adsense

Splogging BS and Blogspot

2006-04-19T20:10:00.001-07:00

YEA I'M BACK!

It is a bit ironic that my original intention to today's (now yesterday's) blog was going to be devoted to splogging and spam. If you have not noticed, this blog is a bit late. Why, you may ask? Because this blog is currently being flagged as spam. I don't know really what I think about this either. On one side, I understand how blogspot needs to take a bit more responsibility in controlling spam on their website. On the other side, I find it very annoying and even pissed off that I am now locked out from writing my daily blog because my account is on hold. Whatever this "spam-preventation" robot is, it is really not doing its job correctly. With all of the real Spam and Splog (which, last night I learned was a Spam-Blog), why would they suspend me prior to actually reviewing my content? Again, nice try by blogspot, but really, they need to get smarter about this. Also, I am kind of interested in knowing whether or not someone has "flagged" my blog as spam (as you can do!). If you have, please nut up and write me a comment about it!

So it is 8pm, Wednesday, PST. Let's see how long this takes before I can submit again (and get back to the real issues at hand!).

My account was reactived at 3:30pm today...At least it was less than the 24 hours they promised! BACK TO BUSINESS!

More Work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2006-04-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

I keep slowly but surely add RSS feeds to various directories as well as add a few comments here and there to a few of the popular forums related to my product. I also spent a little time last night re-reading a chapter in BecomeHated called "How to Drive the Most Traffic to Your Site". This eBook has quite a bit of information related to SEO and is probably my most informative resource on the topic. One of the many points that it makes is that Page Rank is not only a function of how many websites link to you, but also what their Page Rank is as well. For example, having a primary link on one high ranked page (say 7 or 8) will probably help your own ranking much more than having a link on 5 different 1 or 2 ranked pages (truly understanding Page Rank is still a mystery, though). Keep this in mind when you are finding places to get your links posted. A bit more discussion on this topic can be found at:

http://www.seogeeks.com/articles/pagerank-chart.php.

For more details and ideas concerning SEO, I highly recommend getting a copy of BecomeHated.

Trying to Understand Page Rank

2006-04-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

In the past, I never really paid much attention to Page Rank and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The more I read about blogging (and affiliate marketing in general), the more I hear about SEO. One thing to understand is "Page Rank". Google, for example, has a Page Rank tool (that is incorporated within its toolbar add-ons...I highly recommend that you install this into your browser! You can get it at: http://toolbar.google.com/?promo=mor-tb-en). It appears at the top of the browser and provides a "Page Rank" for every website you visit. This provides you with a "gauge" to see how search engines rank the website in importance. A 10 of of 10 means that it is extremely important and search engines will more than likely put this site above all others. A 0 out of 10 usually means that it won't even be found.

So, naturally, getting a higher Page Rank is an important asset to get FREE traffic to your website. Also understand that Page Rank is a function of the number of high ranking websites that actually link to your website. Getting back to yesterday's blog, by adding your URL to search engines and RSS feeds AND by just simply posting on forums and commenting on other blogs (with signature links), you are already on your first steps to getting your link out there. As I discover (and you suggest) other ways of improving Page Rank and SEO, I'll be sure to post it!

Becoming Known - My First Steps at Being Found

2006-04-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Let's quickly come back to the present and focus on my current task of the week: Becoming known! My last affiliate effort focused entirely on GoogleAds. I do plan to promote this the same way, but first, I want to draw some people to my blog the natural, FREE ways.

After some reading and forum study, submitting my blog to some free RSS submission sites seem like a good first start. I was referred to the following submission list site:

www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

I went through and checked out most of the links and about 20 or so seem promising. This is my first step to getting my blog "out there". This will be in addition to the URL submissions I will make to the main search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, etc.) Further, I plan to start reviewing other blogs and forums and leave my "fingerprint" wherever I feel relevant. I will do this for a few days and see if I can build a larger hit count. Stay tuned! (and Happy Easter!)

Choosing my Affiliate Product

2006-04-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

For my second post, I wanted to take a few steps back and discuss the product I chose and why. Over my last few months of affiliate marketing, I have promoted over 2 dozen different products. Of those two dozen, I only had two that ever produced a single sale. Mind you, at the beginning, I was promoting about 3-5 products at a time and really did not focus on a single campaign. My first lesson that I have learned:

* As a beginner, focus on only ONE campaign!

I understand the "draw" to do as many as you can...You come up with a "great idea" or product to promote and play with it for a few days before you think of another "great" one, so you kind of shelve the first one and start the new one. You still follow the older ones, but your focus is really on the latest and greatest. Additionally, you get caught up in the whole notion of "if one sells x, them 10 will sell 10x!" This may be true...in the long run, but not at the beginning.

* A campaign takes TIME and DEDICATION to ever get off the ground.

Before ever starting a second campaign, I would recommend getting the first campaign to start making you money.

The next thing I have learned in the past few months is:

* Know, use and respect the product you plan on promoting.

This may not be the case all the time, but in the initial phases of internet marketing, it is a really good idea! One of the toughest things concerning internet marketing is trying to sell your product through ads and promotion. Writing ads that stand out is not as easy as it seems! If you KNOW your product and LIKE it, it will come out in your ad copy! People will believe you more because your ads appear more believeable (the ads are genuine, not artificial). This is a huge advantage over a lot of the competition! Remember, to get sales, your promotion needs to stand out and be above and beyond everyone else!

Finally,

* Choose a product that pays (initially)

For your first few campaigns, you will probably be focusing on a single product or two. One of my first campaigns focused on Amazon.com products. I was actually getting a few sales here and there, but at a whopping 5% commission, my $50-$100 products were paying me a mere $2.50-$5 per sale. I spent more on promotion than that! I recommend to start with "higher" commission programs (Clickbank is a good place to start). Some eBooks and software products pay up to 75% commissions. This way, you can prosper with fewer sales (rather than relying on a lot of sales).

In conclusion, for my second real venture in affiliate marketing, I chose what I was beginning to know best: Online Money Making products and the eBooks that compliment this genre. I have become quite familiar with many of the eBooks over the past few months and I am quite passionnate about the two that are working for me (Life Empowered and Become Hated). So let's see if I can make these work!

Welcome to my Blogging Marketing Diary

2006-04-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first blog of many that hopes to share my experiences of internet marketing blogs to all. First, let me introduce myself: My name is Matthew Bredel and I am currently a 31 year old engineer living in San Diego, California. Over the last six months, I have found myself becoming very frustrated with the lack of income I have needed to solely support my family of 4. For this reason, I, like many of you reading this, resorted to the internet to find a "quick and easy" way of making money online. I was not, nor am I going to, quit my day job and I was never looking to make six-figures doing this (at least at this time in my life). Just $1000/month would go a long way! Paid surveys and Affiliate Marketing really stood out to me and I was fairly convinced they were not "scams" after reading a lot of forums and logically, they both made sense.

I first tried Paid Surveys and signed up for every survey under the sun. To be honest, it was not a bad deal! I would get about 1-2 surveys per day and was making on average about $100/week. This was not bad (and it really was not difficult), but it really was not enough. The paid survey program I had joined also had some literature concerning affiliate marketing (not much, but enough to convince me to sign up for a "real" program). After lots of research, I felt most comfortable with John Westbrook's Life Empowered System.

That was about 5 months ago. With the program and a bit of coaching from John himself, I was able to get some business going, primarily through GoogleAd promotion. I still was spending a lot of money on promotion, websites and time. Lately, I have been reading more affiliate marketing program eBooks (and this includes the updated version of the Life Empowered) and all of them (the legitimate ones, at least) seem to focus on one thing: BLOGS!

So this is my goal and my mission right now: To get Blogs to sell! As you may guess, I have chosen to promote two products that I am now fairly familiar with and that I am truly do believe in: Affiliate Marketing eBooks and Paid Survey Sites. During the course of this blog, I want to focus on three things:

1) The Past: How and Why I chose these parts
2) The Present: What is currently going on with this campaign
3) The Future: What is my next step to make money

During the course of my blog, I welcome all comments and suggestions! I really do want this to work and I am willing to bring all of you along for the ride as well! See you in my next blog!

Cheers...matt

Diary of a Blogging Marketer

BYE BYE BLOGGER!

SEO: One-Way and Reciprocal Links

The Making *MORE* Money Online Resolution

Sharing Page Rank

Taking a Vacation from Affiliate Marketing...

Off-Page SEO - Does it Exist?

Sony PS3 Craziness!

Online Marketing & the Movie "Rudy"

Data Entry Programs and Marketing is DEAD!

Making SEO Work on Your Landing Page

Is SEO just a Fallacy? (Part I)

"Pop-Under" Ads: Nothing More than SPAM!

Online Business: Location! Location! Location!

Data Entry Scams and Clickbank...

Bad Internet Traffic - Does this Exist?

The Backlash Against Online Marketing eBooks

Website Sales: Promotion is Only Half the Battle

In Defense of Doba...

Paid Surveys and SPAM

Is This Affiliate Marketer Getting Lazy?

Making Money Online: I Don't Want To Do Anything!

The Power of the Opt-In Newsletter (Article)

Google Adsense Everywhere!

Affiliate Marketing MADNESS!

Coping with Affiliate Marketing Disaster (Article)

I Hate Spyware!

Wholesaling Versus Dropshipping: Does it matter? (Article)

Tracking Affiliate Marketing Keywords to Sales: An Unresolved Issue

Dropshipping: A Step Beyond Affiliate Marketing (Article)

The Highs and Lows of Day-Trading and Affiliate Marketing

Page Rank, Alexa Ranking, SEO and YOU! (Article)

The Affiliate Marketing Inventor?

To Blog or Not to Blog: Making Money (Article)

Making Money...While On Vacation!

Affiliate Marketing, My Website and the Firefox Incident!

Online Money Making Battle: Paid Surveys Vs. Affiliate Marketing

Google Analytics - Great Free Tracking

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Article 2)

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Part II)

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Article 1)

Make Money Online: The Small Business Side (Part I)

Affiliate Marketing eBooks: Part II - Which One to Buy?

The Intimidation of Internet Marketing

Affiliate Marketing eBooks: Part I - A Waste of Money?

Affiliate Marketing of the Past: Direct Promotion

PPC's and Click Fraud: A Growing Problem

Affiliate Marketing Online: Does It Make or Take Your Money?

Blogger and Moderating Comments Mishaps

Understanding Adwords - Part VIII: GoogleAd Last Words

Understanding Adwords - Final Notes on Content Searches

Understanding Adwords - Part VII: Content Searches Beware!

Understanding Adwords - Part VI: Being Positive About Negative Keywords

Understanding Adwords - Part V: The Matching Game

Understanding Adwords - Part IV: Immediate Ads

Understanding Adwords - Part III: Max Bid Headaches

Understanding Adwords - Part II: Ad Position

Understanding Adwords - Part I

Pay-Per-Clicks I - Overture Overview

Targeted Marketing: Pay-Per-Click Introduction

Staying Focused on Your Affiliate Marketing Plan

Free For All Sites: Do You Get What You Pay For?

The Obsession of Affiliate Marketing

Adsense Really Does Make Sense!

Splogging BS and Blogspot

More Work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Trying to Understand Page Rank

Becoming Known - My First Steps at Being Found

Choosing my Affiliate Product

Welcome to my Blogging Marketing Diary

The Making MORE Money Online Resolution