internet-makemoneyonline.com » Geoff

$10 to Read This Post

Geoff — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:15:38 +0000

That’s right -you will get $10 if you read this post. No joke. So start reading!

As you probably know by now, Twitter is an amazing social media tool that you should be using to draw more traffic to your sites thus making you more money. You do so because you can broadcast your marketing message to thousands of interested buyers. For instance, with Twitter each and every time you post an update, your message gets broadcast throughout your entire network! Which means that every single person on your list can see every single link you post. And since Twitter allows users to post a website link in the profile, you will gain a high-quality back link in seconds! If you want a simple way to reach out to thousands of potential customers, establish credibility online or grow a targeted list of subscribers, Twitter is the easiest way to do it, hands down.

Take advantage of the recent Twitter explosion in popularity

Everyone from your neighbour to Barack Obama is using Twitter. In fact, President Obama even used Twitter to announce Joe Biden as his Vice President candidate using Twitter! Celebrities are all over this as well – in fact many get paid very well to send messages to their followers. The question really is then – how do I take advantage of the popularity of Twitter to increase my online profits? That’s where Twitter Adder comes in. Your $10 is not far away now – keep reading!

What is Twitter Adder?

Twitter Adder is a software program that allows you to grow your follower list – and does so quickly. This slick software package has won numerous awards and was recently named “Best Twitter Follower Software”. If you’re interested in purchasing the software for yourself, you have a free demo of it available to try before you buy. Some key highlights of Twitter Adder:

6 Laser Targeted, GLOBAL Twitter User Search Tools

Multiple Twitter Account Management

Powerful Automated Tweet Posting and Direct Messaging

Full Twitter Stats and graphical historical viewing

Twitter Current Trends and Historical Trends Research

Url Shortening with Cli.GS to Graphically Track Your link click thru rates to your site

Windows and Mac Os X compatible

7 Day Money Back Guarantee

Free Unlimited Software Upgrades and Support

When I came across Twitter Adder I was so thoroughly impressed with the product I bought it and became an affiliate. The affiliate support system that they have in place is top drawer as well – I don’t think you’ll find one better. I haven’t yet! As part of the affiliate program they give you access to over 30 different video’s that educate you on affiliate marketing – giving you great tips on topics such as increasing your conversion rate, article marketing, Google AdWords, forum marketing, and where to find traffic to name a few. These training videos aren’t specific to Twitter Adder. The increase in knowledge you will gain from these videos will certainly help all of your online money making ventures.

So how do you get the $10?

Easy, sign-up to the Twitter Adder affiliate program and they will give you $10 in your affiliate account. Free $10, an amazing award-winning product to promote, Twitter exploding in popularity, fantastic training tools that would cost you at least $100 to buy – seems like a no brainer to me! Did I mention that this affiliate program is also two-tiered?! I’ve provided a printscreen of my account below with the $10 deposited into my affiliate account when I signed up. Amazing!

If you want the $10, Click Here and sign up for their affiliate program. It’s that easy!
Geoff

How To Twitter

Geoff — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:20:45 +0000

I was going to write a post about how to Twitter but instead I found a great video from YouTube that will get you up to speed if you don’t already ‘tweet’. So don’t be a twit, start tweeting! It’s a great way to increase traffic to your site.

If you want to follow me on twitter – Click Here.

Give The World Something To Click On!

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:48:41 +0000

Affiliate marketers are constantly struggling with what products and offers to support. That is because many of us find it hard to narrow down the hundreds, if not thousands, of markets and niches that are available to affiliate marketers. After working in affiliate marketing promoting different products and systems for numerous markets and niches, I have come up with three simple rules for choosing a market/niche.

Three Rules for Choosing a Market/Niche to Promote In

1. Make sure the offer is already successful. You can find numbers and different metrics through your affiliate network that you deal with or from the program itself if it isn’t involved in working with a network. There is always the draw to try to promote a program or product that is new because you may think that you will have that first to market advantage. This maybe true, but remember that this may cost you a lot of money if you can’t get your traffic to convert. In my opinion, it is much better to go with a program with a proven track record because it gives you a benchmark of what to expect. This is especially important if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing.

2. Look at EPC. Earnings per click or EPC is the gold standard for comparing offers to promote. EPC is simply calculated as total revenue ($) divided by total (#) of clicks. Example: if a campaign for an article submission software program paid a total of $500 and there were 1000 clicks your EPC would equal $0.50. If you belong to an affiliate network the EPC results are visible for comparison to other offers.

3. Look for markets that you are personally attracted to. Leading affiliate networks report that there most successful affiliates promote offers that they are interested in. It makes sense doesn’t it? If the topic that you are trying to promote is something close to your heart and you are passionate about it, that passion is going to come through in your promotion and also keep you going when you need a little kick in the pants.

Those are my three rules for choosing a niche market to promote to. If you incorporate those three rules the next time you are struggling to choose a market to promote in you will easily narrow down your choices. Ultimately, this will lead to more success making money online.

Google Adwords Mistake

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:14:37 +0000

I tried to run an adwords campaign for an affiliate program that I’m promoting. I wanted to have the person viewing the ad click on it and take them directly to the landing page of the product I was promoting. That’s where the trouble began!

For those of you who don’t know, Google AdWords has two URL fields that you need to fill out when creating an adwords ad – the Display URL and the Destination URL. I built an example of an ad below:

What I wanted to happen is to have my website address in the Display URL and my affiliate link as the Destination URL. This created a problem as every ad I created was rejected by Google. Bastards. I thought that this was what CPC marketing was all about! LOL. I checked their policy and it states:

Display URL

“This is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users. This URL displayed is limited to 35 characters; it need not be the same as the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site”.

Ok, that made sense to me? So what Google is saying is that the Display URL can be different than the URL your ad links to. But I still got rejected. I searched (using Bing) for some guidance on this. I found that it was all over the map – some people had the same problem while others could have their affiliate link in the Destination URL.

Totally confused I did some more digging around the Google AdWords site and found this:

So as not to mislead users, the display URL should give users a clear idea of the website or landing page to which they will be taken when they click on an ad. Display URLs must:

Indicate who owns the destination URL, but does not need to match the actual destination URL of the landing page exactly.

Appear to be a viable website address. It must include the appropriate extension such as ‘.com,’ ‘.net,’ and ‘co.uk,’ but ‘www’ and ‘http://’ are not required.

Represent a website. The display URL also cannot be an email address. For example, ‘flowers@flowers.com’ would not be allowed.

Comply with editorial policy, which will be discussed in later topics.

Here is an example of a correct and an incorrect display URL:

Correct:
Destination URL: bigbookstore.com/new/a-c.htm
Display URL: bigbookstore.com

Clicking on the ad takes users to a page within the bigbookstore.com website. Even though the display URL is different from the destination URL, it accurately represents where the user will be taken when he or she clicks on the ad.

Incorrect:
Destination URL: http://www.amazon.com/home.html/104-7002842-259
Display URL: bigbookstore.com

The display URL bigbookstore.com does not accurately represent the site to which the user will be taken, which is a page within the amazon.com domain. This is improper use of the display URL. An ad with this display URL would not be approved.

Nice! In one place, Google is telling us we can use different URLs and in the other they say that it isn’t allowed. In the end, I created a landing page on my site in order to use Google AdWords. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Until next time…Bing!

Geoff

Promoting Unique Article Wizard

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:06:47 +0000

So what did I end up doing with all that traffic from my article directory disaster?

I decided to forward my traffic to a landing page of an article directory submission software company. Through ClickBank I found a program called Unique Article Wizard. The software is amazing – it takes an article that you have wrote and then submits it automatically to a large number of article directories, blogs, etc. The cool thing about Article Wizard is that it also automatically re-writes your article before submitting it to each directory, blog, etc. The program eliminates duplicate content issues.

Basically, I forwarded the domain name to my affiliate link so that if someone clicked on the domain name (and all configurations of it – I believe they call that wildcatting your domain) to the product promotion page of Article Wizard. I thought this was a good idea – same traffic looking to submit their articles manually to my site.

Results

Well, once again, not good! The lesson learned from this: you must presell your traffic before sending them on to the landing page of the product you are promoting.

If you want to check out the Unique Article Wizard site (the software is really good and will save you hours and hours of work) Click Here.

For other Click Bank opportunities Click Here .

On to the next disaster,

Geoff

Building an Article Site – Big Mistake

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:52:20 +0000

This one was a big cluster f#$@*. I spent hours building and maintaining an article site and I only made $5 from adsense. I can laugh now, but trust me this was not a fun experience. It put me off trying to make money online for about a year – not joking.

I bought into the whole adsense hype. I bought into the dream of creating a keyword rich article site that millions of online eyeballs would flock to and click on every ad that was put infront of their opportunistic eyeballs. Wow was I wrong! My site even got up to a PR3 in Google yet still no revenue!

The biggest mistake I made was not focusing on building a customer email list. That way I would have a list of web-savvy entrepreneurs that I could market to. Instead I was totally focused on trying to build adword revenue. Damn you Google! I also had banner advertising as well that brought in about half as much as the adwords revenue! I think I’m getting tears in my eyes again…

The one thing I did do that was positive was that I had the foresight to buy an expired domain of an article site (now I know why the previous owner left it to expire! LOL). That gave me instant traffic – traffic that didn’t earn me a friggin dollar mind you! I’m not bitter, really. Incredibly I still get about 1000 uniques a month to the site – all from backlinks that are still out there even though the site is no longer up.

What They Don’t Tell You

So if you’re going to build an article site beware! What they don’t tell you is that you will be spending hours upon hours manually approving articles for inclusion into your directory. They tell you it will be automatic – and some of it is from article submission software, but you’ll have to still manually approve articles. If you don’t and leave it as automatic approval (for manual submissions), you’ll end up with articles about cures for erectile difficulties in the poetry category. All for $5 in adsense revenue. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Geoff

Build Your Twitter Network via Customer Lists

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:28:33 +0000

Here’s a great idea I had about building your Twitter network.

Twitter has a feature where you can send an email to your friends asking them to join your Twitter Network. Let’s take it one step further – If you have built a customer list ( opt-in of course LOL ) , why not add send them an email to get them to sign-up and follow you on Twitter?

How to add People to Your Twitter Account

1. Log into your Twitter account

2. Click on ‘Find People’

3. Click on ‘Invite by Email’

4. Input your customer list into the blank box seperated by commas.

5. Hit ‘Invite’

Here’s the screen shot from Twitter where you would add your customer email list:

Easy!

To sign up for Twitter Click Here.

To sign up to follow me on Twitter Click Here.

Geoff

Twitter Traffic? Who Knew!

Geoff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:10:42 +0000

It all started when I saw a comment from someone about my post Top Ten Reasons To Use Wordpress. It had a weird site address and mentioned something about Twitter. I didn’t think anything about it other than I was happy that that post ranked high enough in Google for someone to actually find it!

Then I looked at my traffic numbers the next day. Guess what – I saw a huge spike! When I dug deeper into it I found that all of it was coming from the person who found my site and ‘tweeted’ it to his followers. Followers makes him sound like some sort of religious zealot, but in Twitter speak it means those who choose to receive your messages (or ‘tweets’).

Intrigued, I went to Twitter and signed my self up under the name “RapidFireCash” – cool sounding eh?! LOL. Anyway, the next thing I know I have like 15 people signing up to be my ‘followers’. I’m thinking this is a good start considering this is my first day at it!

Increasing Traffic With Twitter

My plan is simple – give people the best information that I can on this site and then alert them (’tweet’ them) my blog content via Twitter. I also have used the TweetMeme Retweet Button plugin for my blog to add a feature beside every blog post so that anyone with a Twitter account can click on the post and send it to their followers.

Bottom Line

What I learned was that there are many different ways to drive traffic to your site. I never really put to much thought into the power of social networks but I’ve changed my tune on that one. Everyone should make it easy for those with networks to share your information that they think will benefit their followers. Do yourself a favour and add this plugin to your site to help with that: Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button, as well as the other plugin mentioned earlier in this post.

To sign up for Twitter Click Here.

To sign up to follow me on Twitter Click Here.

Geoff

Affiliate Programs: A Review of Affiliate Marketing

Geoff — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:55:57 +0000

Affiliate Programs: A Review of Affiliate Marketing

If you are going to be serious about affiliate marketing you have to learn the basics of what is it and how it can really help you make money online.

First some basic vocabulary: a person who signs up to find products to sell from their marketplace is called an Affiliate. A person who has developed a product and needs to find websites/people to sell it is called a Vendor. Some vendors sell their products through affiliate networks such as ClickBank or they have their own programs which they administer themselves. Some affiliate programs use ‘advertiser’ and ‘publisher’. The advertiser is the party with a product to sell, while the publisher is the website owner who would like to promote products on their site to receive sales commissions.

I generally tend to only use affiliate programs that are part of a respected affiliate network. Affiliate networks that have been around for more than a couple of years and have a history of ALWAYS making payments to their members. I’ve heard too many horror stories of affiliates not getting paid and also stories of not getting the proper credit for sales that were referred to the vendor. In the end, the scam artists soon disappear as word gets out on non-payment. This is rare of course, but still I like the idea of being part of a large, established affiliate network. But stings if you are caught up in it! If you are interested in participating in a stand-alone affiliate program, make sure it is from a reputable company – probably from a bricks and mortar business that is also online.

How do you get paid when you are involved in an affiliate marketing program?

Basically, you get paid when a person visiting your site clicks on a link or advertisement that takes them to the vendor’s website and that person makes a purchase. The commissions are variable – hard goods such as sporting equipment usually pay around 5% of the sales price; digital products (ebooks, software, etc.) pay up to 75% of the final sales price. Payment is handled by the vendor if it is a stand alone affiliate program (Example: Amazon) or through the affiliate network (Example: ClickBank).

When do you get paid by the vendor?

Depending upon the affiliate marketing program that you join, payments are sent to you at a pre-determined interval – the usual time period is monthly. It is also important to note that there is always a minimum payment threshold that you have to cross before being paid – the average is around $100 in commissions. The affiliate marketing program or affiliate network does this so that it doesn’t have to mail out tens of thousands of checks for $2.99! Let’s say you made the $100 threshold and are ready to receive the cash. You have to check with the affiliate program to see how payment is made. Some affiliate networks mail out checks while others have the ability to electronically transfer the payment to you. PayPal is used for this by some affiliate marketing programs.

So what affiliate programs are out there and how can you make money online from them? Great question! The short answer is: everything under the sun is available! If you want to sell pancake batter recipes I’m sure there is an affiliate program out there for it.

The best affiliate programs to join:

Google Affiliate Network

LinkShare

Top Ten WordPress Plugins

Geoff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:40:55 +0000

Wordpress is a fantastic platform to blog and build websites. As you may or may not know, wordpress has the ability to ‘plugin’ programs into it that make your life as a website owner a whole lot easier. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different plugins available to use with your WordPress site. Out of all of those choices, here are my top ten Wordpress Plugins:

1. All in One SEO: this is one amazing and powerful plugin. It provides automatic SEO just with one click! The plugin comes with default settings (recommended by the developer) that can be changed depending upon what you want to do/tweak on your site. I pretty much leave the settings on default as they cover everything that I need. With the All in One SEO plugin you can – eliminate duplicate content, add keywords, change permalinks to search engine friendly formats, and add descriptions which also helps with SEO.

2. Google XML Sitemaps: another plugin that I can’t operate without. This will generate a sitemap.org compatible site map of your WordPress site. This format is supported by Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN/Bing. It is called Google XML sitemap because it was Google who first developed this protocol for use in its search engine. This plugin will automatically generate a site map and notify the above mentioned search engines when you activate as well as every time you update your site. When I use this plugin, my sites get listed in these search engines usually within 24 hours. Amazing!

3. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email – this plugin helps readers/visitors share information they found with others via email, bookmarks, or any of the social media outlets (Facebook, MySpace, etc.). This plugin is valuable because it makes for easy content distribution, doesn’t add a lot of clutter to your posts/pages, has Google Analytics integration. Try it out and see for yourself – it is located at the bottom of this post!

4. WP-Spam Free- nobody likes spam. When your blog/site increases in popularity, the amount of spam increases exponentially. This plugin eliminates virtually all spam from your comments. It works silently in the background so there is no need for CAPTCHA’s or anything like that. This spam blocker also is very light on the CPU/bandwidth front. Unlike some other spam blockers, this one won’t slow down the load times of your site.

5. Google Analyticator- this was the first Google Analytics tracking plugin for Wordpress. As such, it is the most popular as well. It supports all of the tracking mechanisms that Google Analytics supports such as external link tracking, download tracking, tracking without counting administrative users, and any other advanced tracking the user wishes to add. Google Analyticator works with a majority of themes as long as these themes provide the proper plugin hooks.

6. Date Exclusion- this is a handy plugin that eliminates the date/time stamp from your posts after a decided time period. Nothing like having an ‘out dated’ post on your site!

7. Easy AdSense – if you’re into using Google AdSense then this is the plugin to have. It makes setting up, placing ads, and inserting code a snap.

8. WPtouch iPhone Theme – this plugin rocks! It is much more than a plugin – it is a complete theme generator that transformers your WordPress site into a slick looking and operating site for not only iPhones but also works on all wireless devices like the BlackBerry. I’ve also found that sites (when viewed on a mobile device) load extremely fast. Awesome!

9. WP Follow Me – is a plugin that allows you to add a Twitter follow me tag to your site. You can change the colour of the badge as well as its position within your WordPress site. Great for those of you who love to tweet.

10. Shadow Box JS- this plugin allows users to display a large assortment of media in all major browsers without having the viewer navigate away from the linking page. It is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is very customizable. I like using this because it works and it adds to the visual appeal of my sites.

There you have it – my top ten Wordpress plugins that I cannot live without!

internet-makemoneyonline.com » Geoff

$10 to Read This Post

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