Worried that WSO you bought for $17.95 won’t bring you the financial freedom you desire?

by Internet Marketing Pro on May 15, 2012

My favourite business podcast by miles is the roller coaster ride of adsense marketing by Justin and Joe at the Adsense Flipper’s podcast.

One of the lines that always gets a smile from me comes right at the start of each episode:

Worried that WSO you bought for $17.95 won’t bring you the financial freedom you desire?

I often wonder how many people actually buy WSO’s (or Warrior Special Offers) to make them such an attractive target for the internet marketing shyster.

Enough would be my best guess.

Praying on the unprepared, the new, the clueless get-rich-quick schemer.

It’s a shame too, because no doubt amongst that whole heap of utter nonsense right through to the no-longer-groundbreaking, re-hashed systems, there are probably a few gems.

But few people will ever find them. Because the smart money has moved on. And those left are unlikely to action any of it.

And even more unlikely to be successful from it.

And is there any wonder why?

wso-ebook-ghost-writer-wtf

I would be amazed. First class Amazed, if this outsourcer has any idea how to do this himself.

He’s looking for someone to come in, write him a guide that he has no idea whether would actually work, and he wants to pay you – should you be foolish enough to apply – the grand sum of $100 for the privilege.

And you know what is even more depressing?

wso-ghost-writing-applicants-list

5 people are willing to do it for him.

This dross is then going to be shammed out as the guide to help newbies make their first buck online.

Has there ever been a more fitting case of the blind leading the blind?

Words fail me Internet.

Well, the 277 previous word’s not withdstanding. You get what I mean anyway. Sigh.

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Search Engine Pandering Post Penguin

by Internet Marketing Pro on May 5, 2012

Crafty. Take the edge of your evil updates by naming them after cute, cuddly creatures.

I had many theories on the outcome of the Penguin update, chief of which was that my sites were only temporarily punished whilst Google’s number crunchers crunched their numbers.

I woz wrong.

Interestingly, I experienced something I have seen many times before on – and unless you have 300+ live domains, it’s probably something you won’t have seen yourself. Google robbed Peter to pay Paul.

Yes, what was lost from 20% of my biggest sites ended up being (almost) evenly redistributed over 80% of my smaller sites.

Overall? Traffic stayed roughly the same – it dipped 20k daily hits all truth be told, but I can’t say that’s 100% Penguin related.

Two of my biggest sites dropped 50% of their traffic overnight – and after much digging, this article from SEOmoz leads me to believe it’s because I was actively building links using specific keywords / phrases.

Shame.

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Mad Bad Adsense

by Internet Marketing Pro on April 28, 2012

It’s been a good four weeks or more since my last post, and over 6 weeks since I decided to re-refocus my online business aims.

I was just getting into the re-believing stage when I saw a post over at Spencer Haws’ Niche Pursuits about how he got banned from adsense for doing what, at a 1000-foot glance, appears to be what I am now doing.

Oh dear. oh-dear

The worst of it? He’s not alone.

All of those guys are (or were) doing what I planned to do.

Back to the drawing board?

Not quite.

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What happened Market Samurai?

by Internet Marketing Pro on April 8, 2012

market-samurai-rate-limiting

What happened Market Samurai?

You used to be cool :(

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The Adsense Project: 2 weeks in

by Internet Marketing Pro on March 19, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I made the major decision to kinda revamp pretty much what I had been doing before, and – as they say in the Adsense Flippers Podcast – scale the shit out of it.

Well, first of all, my scaling has not quite got off the ground yet.

Long story short, I had to get a day job once again, and my good working hours between 8-6 each day are being ‘wasted’ growing my new bosses business.

Which kinda sucks.

But, I’m not being defeatist. I can see that my previous attempts didn’t work, and I may be down right now, but I’m not out.

The new plan: a recap

After much internal debate, I decided on the following as my new business model:

Highly informative micro niche sites, monetised with Adsense and Amazon.

It’s a brilliant master stroke that so few others have tried.

Ahem.

Ok, so it’s actually the tried and tested formula used by a bucket load of internet marketers.

But I have got my own spin on it – and more importantly, I have done this before and I am seeing strongly positive results from my taster sites.

Progress – Slow and Steady wins the race

Right now I have a list – an ever growing list as it happens – of seed keywords.

A seed keyword can be anything really – take Golf for example.

I throw this keyword into market samurai (affiliate link), and run the keyword generation > analyse keywords process on it.

Then I sort by ‘searches’ and look for anything with less than 150k competition.

This is basically my past, proven formula.

So, importantly, I know it works.

Content Creation Strategy

I am only taking on niches I understand personally, or I can get my hands on the products myself, for video reviews and stuff like that.

If I don’t know it, think I might get bored of it, or just think it might be ‘easy money’ then for once, I have decided to stay away. I hope I can maintain my resolve.

In terms of content, I am prioritising the following:

  1. Video reviews
  2. 1000+ word articles
  3. 500+ word secondary content

I am aiming to keep my keywords / niche choices low key enough to require little in the way of backlink building, as this is a huge time sap.

I understand that it’s really important, but my content should hopefully bring in backlinks organically because…

For once, I am not creating shitty content.

Yes, a spam free, informative, useful network of sites. It’s like everything I used to stand against.

But honestly, with quality content, you don’t need to worry about Google changing their algorithm and catching you out.

Because simply, you’re doing exactly what they want – making the web a better, more useful place.

My Strategy for Choosing a Niche

My niche research involves making sure Amazon sell a product in the £50-£150 mark that fits my niche perfectly.

Taking the golf keyword, this might turn out to be a specific type of club – maybe a recovery driver or something. God knows, my golf knowledge is pretty limited – needless to say, it’s not one of my niches.

Also, it’s pretty crucial that the adwords CPC’s are relatively healthy. Anything £0.45+ is ticking my boxes.

I found plenty of technology related adwords that have CPC’s of £10+. Petty crazy. But as I say, I am not chasing the money like that. Also, I think technology has got to be nigh on impossible to get geeks clicking ads – we are highly optimised to be blind to all forms of advertising.

Next steps

Niche research for batch 1 is done.

Product’s have been found, good adwords identified and I am beginning to write the articles and make videos where possible.

I am not able to rock out a site per day as I would like, but anything is better than nothing – and I know I am in this for the long haul.

I hope to keep updating this blog every 2 weeks at the moment – basically whenever I have time – as I want to use this as a means of keeping myself accountable – even if I only get 5-8 uniques a day here :) Thanks to each and every one of you by the way, if I knew your names, I would list you all and say hi!

Is anyone else doing anything like this out there? Don’t be shy – let me know who you are, and if you have one, your blog url so I can return the favour.

Chris

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Lovely Bittersweet Lemonade

by Internet Marketing Pro on March 5, 2012

lemons-are-pretty-goodThere’s an old saying – when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Well, life has handed me a good size portion of lemons as of late, and unless I am sorely mistaken, I think I got some lemon arrears too.

Damn those bitter lemons.

Everything seems to have gone pear shaped. Or lemon shaped.

Sorry, that’s enough fruit metaphors for one post.

But seriously, my ‘business’ as of late has collapsed. I am not ashamed to admit it – rather that than bury my head in the sand and pretend everything is fine.

So I need to come up with a plan, and relatively fast, as my online passive income streams are beginning to dry up.

This is obviously scary.

I have had a nice amount (£1000+ pm) of passive income coming in for the past 5 years, and with the way the UK is at the moment, that seriously has helped me weather the storm.

Plus I now have a baby on the way.

Moan moan moan

Anyway, I have been really struggling to come up with a replacement for my old methods – which have been scuppered by the abundance of, for want of a better phrase, free shit all over the internet.

If you can distribute it digitally, someone will, and that makes a right mess of the market place for the rest of us.

Which is why I like physical products – you can’t download an iPhone. And if you could, you can bet your last Apple share that their stock price would be in the toilet right now.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to come up with the killer strategy. This has been keeping me awake at night for months now.

I have my ecommerce stuff ticking over – and that’s good, but as I have talked about before (and will be doing even more so in my forthcoming free ecommerce book), new ventures take time.

And right now, time is something I just don’t have.

I Got The Key, I Got The Secret

The key really is finding something (anything?) and taking action. Once you are ‘trying’, you can see what works for yourself, and then make the changes required to make it more efficient at bringing in the dollars.

But, as I say, I don’t know what that ‘something’ should be. Which has led me on to… drum roll … the warrior forum.

Now, Warrior Forum has it’s plus and minus points. I visualise it kinda like the Mos Eisley space port from Star Wars – never will you find a bigger hive of scum and villianey.

Maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s definitely got it’s fair share of bandits and con men.

Surely though, surely, amongst all the spam of daily Warrior Special Offers (WSOs), there is some gems amongst the dirt?

I had my eyes on a few ‘systems’ and I had even drawn up a short list.

edit: ok – I wrote this post about 6 days ago and was in the process of reviewing / narrowing down the WSO’s to a shortlist as above, but then I just couldn’t shake my gut feeling that this wasn’t a good course of action.

Cast Your Eye Over This

So… I went about looking for some podcasts instead.

I like podcasts as they are usually more truthful, and you can listen to them whilst doing other things – driving / commuting being the biggy. It’s a great way to learn as you do something tedious.

Over the weekend just gone (03/04 March 2012), I stumbled upon a podcast whilst looking for something similar to Pat Flynn’s (of which I have already listened to all of them, and you should too, they rock) – and have come up with a new source of inspiration.

The podcast is from Adsense Flippers.

Now, I have had pretty crappy success with adsense in the past. I think my record is one cheque per year, since 2009. Each cheque is about £80-90, so less than a tenner per month.

Pantaloons.

I always got discouraged when sites I monetised in this way pulled in like 67p a month.

My top adsense site has had a few £5+ months, but it’s completely automated so I should be happy about that I guess. I replicated that formula about 10x recently to no avail. Though I know why… but that’s for another time.

Justin Cooke and Joe Magnotti from Adsense Flippers put a different spin on things. They go for quantity – big time!

This is my kind of thing. I like to take smaller sites and scale. I just never put 2+2 together to do it with adsense.

Forward March

So this is my new strategy going forward. I don’t have their outsourcing team available, but I do have a concept to build on.

I’m full of awesome sauce again right now – I feel like I could stay up all night working on this. It’s good to have my mojo back, so a huge thank you to Justin and Joe.

edit (2): and also a super awesome thanks for the tweet

Anyway, if the adsense thing doesn’t work out, I will be bringing my ‘How I made $9876.45 selling lemonade online’ warrior special offer e-book out very shortly. ;)

Chris

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How Can I Make Money Online?

by Internet Marketing Pro on February 23, 2012

haha-businessBy far and away the most frequently asked question I get after people know how I make a living is:

Chris, how can I make money online?

I wish I could give you an easy answer.

There are thousands (if not more) methods of making money online – just check out Warrior Forum and their Warrior Special Offers (WSOs) for proof of that.

But just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for you.

From my experience, chances are, it probably won’t.

Mainly because you don’t get the whole story.

It’s easy to look at people like Pat Flynn, Chris Guthrie, or David Risley, and think – well if they can do it, so can I.

And that’s a great attitude to have.

I would go as far as to say, that is the attitude you need!

Because making money online is tough. You will not be seeing £12,232.75 in your first weekend, regardless of what bullshit you read in sensationalist ebooks or blog posts.

Making money online can be done – I know, I speak from experience – but it’s a long haul trek, not a short term cash machine approach.

Of course, then there is the other big question…

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£0 to Profit in 3 months – A Newbie Guide (Part 4) – Lessons Learned So Far

by Internet Marketing Pro on February 19, 2012

lessons-learnedA good few people have been following along with my progress on the £0 to Profit in 3 months series, sending me some great questions via email, the Contact Me page, and via instant messenger.

I think it’s really cool that I have inspired people to take action.

I’m hoping it’s because the methods I am showing you are easy to follow and not full of gimmicks. Plus I don’t do the: “how I went from £0 to £3983.45 in two weeks, and how you can too!” approach.

Also, I am always keen to learn from my mistakes and hopefully help you avoid them too.

So, in the month or so since the project began, here are the lessons I have learned, and some guidance on how to avoid or improve upon them.

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How to: Keep Multiple Gmail Accounts Open Concurrently

by Internet Marketing Pro on February 11, 2012

I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email – which allowed multiple open email accounts no problem.

But I got annoyed with Thunderbird as it hogged a ton of my disk space (my fault) and started bogging my system down.

Besides, its 2012, stuff like this should all be the net, right? In the cloud and all that jazz.

So I figured a way to achieve my requirement of 3 open Gmail accounts concurrently, without needing any dedicated email software.

Technically, this should work for any email service, I just prefer Gmail.

What You Will Need

Google Chrome + IE or Firefox

How To Do It

This is really easy.

Simply open up a regular Chrome window, and log into Gmail.

Then open up Chrome again in Incognito mode (right click on the Chrome icon, select open new incognito window) – and log into your next Gmail account.

Now, if you need a third (and fourth), then open up either IE or Firefox, and log in to you third (and fourth!) accounts.

It can get a little hectic – but I like to keep my two primary email accounts open, each taking up 50% of my second monitor at all times.

This tip can also be used for other services, like keeping two copies of Analytics open or whatever. Very handy.

At least I think so.

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3 Free Web Statistics Tools for Any Project

by Internet Marketing Pro on February 10, 2012

Some questions I get asked time and time again. I really should make an FAQ.

One of the biggies from friends and clients that have had a web site online for a few months and have passed the ‘beginners’ stage, is:

How do I see how many visitors I am getting?

As part of my setup procedures for any site, I always (always, always) install a stats package. Sometimes more than one. The reason why I will explain in a minute.

I always use the same three – depending on the situation at hand. These are (in no particular order):

StatCounter

statcounter-logoStatCounter is one of my favourite all time utilities.

It’s completely free (until your site grows to a certain size, which I have never reached), and it’s nice and accurate.

The support is also top notch, sorting out any problems I have had in a couple of hours tops.

They have superb instructions for installing their tracker on a ton of different platforms (all the biggies) and you can choose whether to show your surfers their logo, keep it hidden, show them a counter, etc etc.

Quite cool, quite old school also. It plays well with other counters too – so if you’re trying to work out if one of your web stat tools is broken, stick a StatCounter on and see if the two match (or nearly match).

StatPress Reloaded

statpress-reloaded

I have talked about StatPress Reloaded before, and I am still using it today.

It’s part of my ‘essential wordpress plugins’ list, so it goes on every blog I create as part of the install.

Now, it can be seen as a bit of a memory hog. Some hosts complain if you use it.

I always configure StatPress Reloaded with these options:

By default, it’s set to show you 7 days of stats (useless) and never delete any data. Well, that got me thinking – why keep it long term if you are only ever looking at 7 days worth?

So I set mine to delete anything older than 30 days, and show me the last 30 days. That’s a good enough trend line to see improvements / declines and peaks / troughs for week days etc.

StatPress had, until recently, never gone wrong for me. I have it on 100s of domains. The only time I have had trouble – weirdly – is on this blog. I’m not sure what’s causing it, but it’s messed up big time. So I may have to re-install it. Anyway, 1 out of more than 100 is good odds.

Plus it’s free. But it only works with WordPress.

Google Analytics

google-analytics

Hands down, my favourite stat package by a good long margin.

It’s built on Urchin, one of the original pioneers in web stat tracking. Only you don’t need to configure Urchin on your own server (you still can if you want too but act quick as it’s going end of life), so all the hard work is done for you.

The trade off, Google get all your stats. But they more than likely know everything about you and your site already, so what difference does it make?

Analytics ties in with your PPC campaigns, E-commerce funnels, day-to-day visitors, real-time users on your site… the list is almost endless.

It’s also nice and free. And it works with everything. Well, everything I have ever needed to track.

In Summary

Pick one from the above that best suits your needs.

StatCounter is lightweight but not uber-detailed.

StatPress Reloaded is WordPress only but is simple to install and easy to use.

Analytics is for serious, granular stat tracking and has a slightly steeper learning curve.

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