30 Days Later

I started a new project on Sunday. After doing some research and a lot of thought I started setting up a new website. I’m using Joomla for speed.

I’d bought my domain name and uploaded Joomla on Sunday evening. Monday morning I was ready to go. I took my daughter to school, then came home to set to work.

I installed a new theme, and plus some important components. (SEO etc). That took me to around 11am. Then did some more research into what products to put on. Next, I set up a landing page for the first product. And before I knew it, it was 3pm and I had to go back to school to pick my daughter up.

Can someone please invent a machine that slows down time so I can get more work done please.

I found this interesting article yesterday on BoingBoing.

The researchers show that “right-digit effect” influences consumer perception of sale prices. When the right digits are small, people perceive the discount to be larger than when the right digits are large. In other words, an item on sale for $211 from the original price of $222 is thought to be a better deal than an item on sale for $188 from an original price of $199, even though both discounts are $11.

Here’s a link to the full article.

I’ve mentioned before that I run a modified 1966 Ford Anglia Van. These vans are quite rare, and with the two litre engine that I’ve fitted, mine is quite loud too. Because of that, it turns heads where ever I go. People come up to me in the street to chat about it, I get notes left under the wipers asking if I want to sell it, people point, wave and take pictures. I’m quite well known in my village because of it. And this month, it is being featured in Retro Ford magazine. My 15 minutes of fame.

So, what’s this got to do with anything? We all know who John Chow is don’t we. Well I was just looking back on posts he’s done, and I wondered what caused the popularity of his blog to explode. So, I went over to Alexa.com and looked into his history. This is what I found.

Wow! Look at that leap around the end of September 2006. So I looked further, and it appears to be ‘The Digg Effect’. Johns post about Googles Biggest Whores appears to be the culprit. And thinking about it, I remember finding the blog from that same post in Digg. Now, look around other blogs and you’ll find the same thing. One post has been made that causes a bit of controversy, or a bit of interest. The world goes mad, and there’s no looking back for some people.

So, in a shameless attempt for popularity, here’s a picture of me wearing a dress.

This came out of a joke from one of the car forums I frequent. Now, whatever you do, keep it to yourself. Don’t Digg it or post it on your own blog

A new site launched yesterday to help affiliates with their campaigns. It’s called Destination Unknown and has been set up by two guys I know from Wealthy Affiliate, Dave B and Thad. It seems to be like a budget version of Immediate Edge. Each month they guys set up a campaign and take you though every step, explain what they’re doing, SHOW you what they’re doing (Google ads, websites, keyphrases etc) and then publish the results when it’s done.

‘Oh no, not another blog plugging his mates scheme for a commission’ I hear you cry.

Well, yes and no. First off, there’s no affiliate scheme, so won’t be making any money out of it.

Second, it’s limited to 200 members so you need to get in quick. Third, they’ve reduced the price to $47 a month.

And fourth, I joined yesterday.

I must admit, the site isn’t brilliant, and I’m not keen on the blog like structure, because the comments are backwards. They’ve set up and run two campaigns to there was some content there for us and it was difficult working through the comments they left each other on the blog. I had to start from the last page and work backwards. There should be a forum for that. It was only when I downloaded the PDFs they’d produced for each campaign that I found the comments were in there, the right way round.

What impresses me both is that these two guys are relatively new at this. Thad started affiliate marketing in July 2006 and quit his job a year later. It gives you inspiration to motivate yourself and do well. Well, it did me. I’ve ‘known’ Thad since January 2007 when I joined WA, and I thought he’d been doing it a lot longer.

But what about the campaigns? Well, both the campaigns were Google Adwords. One of them made an amazing 998% ROI! It had a CTR ratio of 5.75% and an actual conversion rate of 60%. The other had a higher CPC so the ROI was lower at 157%, but had a conversion rate of 76%! When was the last time you had success like that?

I’m off to do some research!

Over at Income Hero, Adomas wrote about the 30 Day Challenge and how also Dan Raine earned almost $15k doing his challenge last year. People following his progress didn’t make anywhere near as much. No doubt his challenge gave birth to ImmediateEdge but that’s a different story.

So this morning I’ve knocked up a quick list of five attributes I think you must have to be successful. If you think of any others, drop a comment on the end.

Persistence

If you want to be a successful affiliate you need to be able to stick at a job. Even when things aren’t going right. Some successful affiliates have said that they can make almost any campaign profitable. That comes down to testing. On the Wealthy Affiliate forum when anyone asks a question about a campaign, the answer usually is, ‘Have you split tested?’. If you have an Adwords PPC campaign set up you can set up two adverts and have it display them in evenly over time. You can then pick the better performing ad. But it doesn’t stop there. Ditch the not so good ad, and add another one. It might perform better than the good one. Successful affiliates are constantly tweaking their campaigns to get the best out of them.

Self Belief

If the campaign isn’t going too well and you’re not getting good results, you might think ‘oh sod this, affiliate marketing sucks’ or ‘I’m crap at this’. Successful affiliates believe in them self. They WILL be rich. They WILL make this campaign work. Success tends to breed self belief. Have one good campaign and you know you can have more. If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you possibly think you will be successful? Napoleon Hills classic 1937 book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ is a great motivational book which will teach you how to believe in yourself. I read it a couple of years ago, and it did change my outlook.

Ingenuity

People who want to get rich by selling online tend to think there is a definitive guide to making money online. Follow the guide and you will reach your goal. If you’re doing something that everyone else is doing then the chances are you may make money, but not a great deal. Great affiliates ‘think outside the box’ (I hate that phrase!) and try different things to get their product to someone. They make their money doing something that no one else is doing. When everyone else catches on, they move on to different methods. They need to stay one step ahead of the pack.

Attention To Detail

If you are bum marketing or writing articles to promote your items you need to get into the mind of the buyer. This can be difficult if you are promoting something in a niche you know very little about. Whilst doing the 30 Day Challenge, I found the phrase ‘How to learn Japanese’ fits the critera (>100 daily searches <30,000 competition). There is a clickbank product too to promote. It would be great to do, but I know nothing about Japanese and language isn’t my strong point. I mulled it over and did some research and decided that I wouldn’t be able to put a good enough site together, so moved onto another niche. A great affiliate marketer would have spent more time than I did and put together a fantastic site with quality information that the reader could relate to. That’s the difference. Quality information that pushes the right buttons for the visitor. The more the visitor can relate to you, the more chance you have of getting that sale.

Discipline

And this one works for bloggers too. If you’re working from home it’s oh so easy to put your feet up and watch the latest edition of Overhaulin’ and say ‘I’ll get started when this finishes. Ooh, I do love a good Mopar’. I never put anything on that would distract me from what I’m doing. I take my laptop and sit at the table, get rid of all distractions and make a list of what I want to achieve that day. If the list isn’t finished then I don’t ‘play’ until it is. If you’ve not seen it, get the Social Media Daily download (it’s free). It helps you get organised with which social ‘web2.0′ sites to register and submit your sites to. As with most jobs, a lot of what you do is repetitive and it is easy to get bored. You just need to tell yourself it needs to be done if you want to earn enough money to buy that ‘69 Charger you’re after.

Here’s a great little tool that is being blogged about today. Enter the URL and it visualises where your links are coming from.

You’ll find it over at www.Touchgraph.com

It’s that simple. If you want to make money online you have to ‘take action’. So what does that mean exactly? It means you have to take what you’ve learned from all the ‘make money’ ebooks that are gathering dust on your hard drive and put it into practice.

We’re all guilty of it. When I started out I was the same. I’d buy the latest make money ebook, read it, think ‘yeah some good info, but it looks like hard work’. Then wait for the next ebook to come out and buy that to see whether they’ve made it any easier. After a while you realise that the information you are getting in the latest ebook is just a rewrite of the first ebook you read.

There is no ‘magic bullet’ in the affiliate marketing business. No ‘follow this easy step by step plan and make $2000 a day by the end of the week’. No one is going to do the work for you. It is down to you to say to yourself ‘I want to make money online, and this is my plan.’ Write it down. Any business that doesn’t have some sort of a plan is doomed to failure.

Write down your goals. Do you want to earn $100 a day? $1000 a day? Save enough for a holiday, or pay off your debts? Write your goal down, and how you plan on achieving it.

How are you going to achieve it? Blogging? Adsense? Bum Marketing? eBay? There are plenty of ways to make money online, some easier than others, but what you have to do once you’ve started is to stick at it. It will start small, and then grow and grow each month. As The Smiths once sang ‘These things take time’.

This blog is a month old and it was originally going to be about my experiences in the 30 day challenge. I stopped posting about it after a few days because everyone was posting exactly the same stuff. Not exciting for the reader. But something I have learned from the 30DC is that you need to provide quality content for the reader. Give them what they want. If you don’t, then they won’t come back. My style of writing is probably pretty pants when it comes down to it, but as long as I get my point across and the reader understands it, that’s the important thing.

Because it’s a new blog I’m only getting a handful of visitors a day. But I’m not going to give up on it. I know that you need to keep working at it, providing good content for the reader. Engage in the reader and get him to interact with you. Put your comments at the bottom please ;-). I’m going to keep at it, to build up a good reader base.

And you should too. Don’t quit because you haven’t made $100 on your first day. It doesn’t work like that. If you are selling ebooks, you might only make $5 a day from one ebook. But once you are, move onto the next ebook to promote. Make $5 a day from that one. Before you know it you’ll be promoting ten ebooks, making $50 per day.

But why should you listen to me? I’m not some make money online ‘guru’ (and why do they always put ‘guru’ in quotes?). Well I have been making money online since 2004. I run a successful online wholesalers which has steadily climbed to the top of Google for a handful of keyphrases, with competition in the millions. It didn’t happen over night, and it took a lot of work. My target was to be on the first page of Google, and I surpassed it.

So there you have it. I’ve probably gone off on tangents all over. It wasn’t planned, I just typed it out as it came into my head. Was it good or bad? You tell me! But the bottom line is ‘do something’.

Oh a quick comparison before I go. My hobby is classic cars. On the forums I go on, the number of people who say they saw an old rare model Escort on someone’s drive and they knocked on the door to see if it’s for sale. ‘It’s not for sale’, they are told ‘I’m going to restore it one day’. Ten years later, it’s still sat on the drive but this time it’s rotted so badly it’s unrestorable. This happens all the time. Let me tell you that ‘one day’ never comes. You need to take action now!

Technorati Tags: make money online, affiliate marketing, take action, ebooks

Didn’t like the other. Too dark. And I’m not a fan of Ferraris - I run a modified 1966 Anglia Van which gets a lot of looks. Even had a bloke in a Ferrari give me a wave! But it’s a good looking theme, so I’m happy.

So now the thirty day challenge is over, I’m going to be posting about all sorts of shite I come across during my busy days online. Not just money making, but anything that tickles me. Hope you keep coming back! (Please keep coming back!)

Technorati Tags: ford anglia van, ferrari, make money online

I found that I was spending all my time doing the 30 day challenge tasks that I wasn’t doing any blogging. I’d subscribed to a load of blog feeds of other people doing it, and realised that everyone was blogging the same stories, usually starting with ‘Ed said to do this’ and ‘Dan said to do that’. It all got a bit repetitive so I thought I wouldn’t bother blogging my experience.

Now that it’s all over, I’m going to carry on blogging. My biggest problem is finding the time, so I’m coming up with an action plan. A daily task list for me to complete if I am to make any money online. It’ll take some time to do, as I’m pulling a load of information in from all over, but when it’s done I plan on sticking to it.

Oh, and how much did I make in the 30 day challenge? Not a penny. Lots of visitors and click throughs to my affiliates, but no sales. But the important thing was that I learned a hell of a lot. What to do, what not to do. The techniques worked well, but no sales. It could be just down to the niche I was promoting.

Technorati Tags: thirty day challenge, make money online

After watching yesterdays videos and listening to the podcast, I realised I had more work to do. My original list of seven niches were more or less thrown out thanks to the technique taught yesterday. So I spent the afternoon and half the evening going through new ideas, getting the wife to suggest things, reading magazines for ideas etc etc.

You know when you leave a CRT screen on for too long, the image burns into it. You see it on old ATMs sometimes. Well last night I went outside to feed the rabbit. It was dark. Burned into my eyes was the Google Trends screen, overlaid with the Free Keywords page. I was looking at the rabbit but all I could see was a white square. Everywhere I looked there was this white square.

That’s when I realised - It was time to go to bed!

I have got a list of around 40 ideas and out of them around a dozen are probably viable. I need to go back and research the affiliate part, as it’s no good having some fantastic phrases if all you can’t make use of them.

Technorati Tags: thirty day challenge