The webhosting problem I mentioned yesterday is still going on. They are apparently in the process of putting accounts back up but they haven't got to mine yet. That means many of my most profitable sites have been down for 24 hours. Very irritating indeed.
I've decided to move as many of my sites from that webhost as possible to a new one. I'm leaning towards HostRocket.Com
One of my webhosts (of the 5 that I use) has been down for the past 10 hours or so. This is extremely frustrating because many of my most profitable sites are hosted by this webhost. They are apparently experiencing some technical difficulties.
I'm not so mean as to call them out (name them) in this blog entry because everyone has technical problems now & again... BUT... I will direct you towards a web host that I've never experienced any problems with (so far, anyway.)
Lately I've been experiencing a very annoying thing with this blog (and others that I run.) I run all of my blogs on the Blogger format, and overall I love it. It's not quite as customizable as WordPress but I find it much easier to make a good looking blog with it (perhaps just because I'm used to it?) But recently I've had a problem.
Blogger seems to be adding a background=red html code to my "nofollow" links. And not all of them, just some of them. (And no this isn't just my SEO for FireFox, I have that turned off to see how my sites look without the ugly red "nofollow" backgrounds on links.) This seems to be a recent thing. Is this something they are doing on purpose? And if so, WHY?!?! Please Blogger, don't make our blogs less customizable. Let us control how they look! I don't want red backgrounds on "nofollow" links, they look horrible. In fact I will have to stop using "nofollow" entirely if they continue to do this because editing out the style=... on all of my "nofollow" links is wasting way too much of my time.
If you are a Blogger (using Blogger) who has experienced this as well, let me know what, if anything, can be done about it.
Directory submissions are a big part of most people's SEO strategy. Unfortunately most directories are a complete waste of time as they are basically ignored by Google due to their low quality.
The V7N Web Directory is an exception. Not only is it a PageRank 6 directory but it's laid out in the best possible way for SEO as it was designed by SEO experts. And unlike most directories it actually has real human reviewers (in other words don't waste your money submitting to them unless you have a site that is worth being included in a real human reviewed directory!)
And yes it costs money to have your site reviewed by the V7N human reviewers ($49.95) but for a life time link on a trusted resource, $49.95 is a very good price. Many of the pages where your link will possibly reside have a PR 4 (and remember it's most important to look at the actual page your website will be residing on) compare that to most directories which usually have a 0 or at best a 1 or a 2 for the page where your link will be. Also compare that price to how much you would be paying for a PR 4 link somewhere else (see Text-Link-Ads for example.)
I suggest taking a look at the particular category where your link will best fit and see what the PR is for that page. Also consider that it's very possible that PR 4 could grow to a 5 (maybe even a 6?) in the future.
Instead of wasting your money submitting to hundreds of worthless directories, put your money somewhere it will bring you real results.
I promote a lot of different types of products as an affiliate marketer and I've had more success with sexual enhancement products than any other. As they say "Sex Sells." Although I have also tried the porn market with almost no success at all. My feeling on that is there's just too much pornography available for free for it to be a high conversion market.
There are two major reasons I like promoting sexual enhancement products as an affiliate:
#1 Very high commissions/commission %. Many programs offer a commission % as high as 50%. On some sales I make close to $250 in commission. My average commission on sexual enhancement products is about $75.
#2 Very high conversions. There's nothing more frustrating as an affiliate marketer than sending lots of traffic and getting no sales. Sure there are ups & downs in any market but if you know what you are doing a 1 in 50 overall conversion rate with sexual enhancement products is very possible. In fact that's about where I'm at this year. I'm sure it can be even better.
I think the sexual enhancement market is still growing. I'm seeing more and more penis enhancement type advertisements in magazines & on television which are adding legitimacy to the market. And lets face it, men will always be looking for an improvement when it comes to this area.
What else? The women sexual enhancement market is just now being tapped into.
So which affiliate programs do I recommend? I've tried most of them so I think I've got a pretty good idea of which programs you should try and which ones are a bit of a waste of time.
#1 OaInternet. They're #1 because they pay WEEKLY. They pay 50% commission on all orders. They've never been late paying me. And I've made more money with them than any other. The one downside is that they don't give quite as much support as some of the programs I'll be listing below.
#2 MoreNiche. I've made the second most money with MoreNiche. Although they aren't quite as good as they used to be because they've split into 2 companies: MoreNiche & WorldNiche. In fact, (#3) WorldNiche took many of the sexual enhancement products to their side. So you should sign up with both of them. Both offer a forum but the MoreNiche forum is more active since it is older.
MoreNiche also offers a program called "Making You Richer" which basically takes you by the hand and walks you step by step through being a success marketing their products. This may be a good choice for you if you are very new to affiliate marketing or haven't had any real success with it yet.
#4 Leading Edge Cash. The big downside to Leading Edge Cash is that they only pay monthly (and with a 1000$ min to be paid via bank without any deductions) and that they only offer a 30% commission on many of their products. That being said, they have the most user friendly interface and probably the best looking websites. Their products definitely convert at a high rate.
I've signed up with quite a few other companies as well but never had any sort of long term success with any of them. Many of the other companies seem very poorly run. One has yet to pay me despite owing me $191 (LongZ.) It's very stupid not to pay your affiliates on time. I could have made them much more money if they would have paid me on time. But that's a bit of a rant... Avoid them anyway.
WebMasterLife hasn't been a huge success for me but I have made some sales through them and they've paid me with no problems (they pay weekly as well) so they deserve a mention.
I've also just signed up with GenBucks who pay out DAILY ($100 min. to epassporte acount) which is pretty awesome. They look to have big potential with a large amount of different products to promote.
Social Bookmarking is a great way to get a lot of traffic to your site quickly. While social bookmark traffic is often very "surf" oriented (ie not big buyers of products or clickers of adsense ads) it's still nice to get a large influx of traffic and more eyes on your site. Some of these surfers may become longtime visitors of your site & perhaps even better some of them may find your site via social bookmarking and end up linking to you.
First let me state the obvious: The best way to get people to bookmark your site is to have good/interesting/unique content. Spending a little extra time to create meaningful insightful content is definitely worth it. For example say you have a blog that you are trying to get some bookmarking love: If you create one really good post you'll get more return than creating 10 BS posts.
To make it easier for your visitors to bookmark your site/articles/posts you should add an AddThis banner to your site (look at the bottom of each of my blog posts.) This can easily be obtained (for free) from www.AddThis.com
While there are some bookmarking sites that I think are far more important than others it's nice to offer them all up for your visitors so that no matter what site(s) they use they can bookmark your page easily.
So what are the bookmarking sites I think are far more important... read on.
The Top Five Bookmarking Sites In My Experience:
Digg.com - This is good particularly if you are "tech" related but they also have categories for many other things. Also good for political type sites. Depending on your site topic, Digg may be a complete waste of time. The traffic from Digg tends to be very ad blind.
Netscape.com - I find that Netscape is often overlooked by people who talk about the best bookmarking sites. Netscape can bring in high quality, less ad blind traffic (I've made sales through their traffic.)
StumbleUpon.com - You can get a HUGE influx of traffic if your site gets popular on SU. I had a site that suddenly out of nowhere was getting 10 to 12K visitors a day just from one page being on SU. While the traffic from SU is extremely untargeted and you will get very low conversion rates on ads and products from this traffic, the possibility for such huge volumes of traffic makes it a good one to focus on.
I've also noticed that SU traffic also seems to last a much longer than traffic from the other bookmarking sites. It's been over a month since I got that influx of over 10K a day to one of my pages (for a few days) and I'm still getting over 500 a day and sometimes it'll even flare up to the thousands.
Fark.com - It's hard to get accepted by Fark but if you are it's a great way to get backlinks. Why? Because others will find your page on Fark and consider it "worthy" to be included on their sites. I've received a nice amount of backlinks from my pages being featured on Fark. Del.icio.us - You can get some quality traffic with Delicious. Some people will search Delicious tags looking for something so if your site shows up high for that topic (or tag) you can come upon some pretty targeted traffic (by Social Bookmarking standards.)
For whatever reason I haven't made much use of the Google Webmaster Tools in the past but today I logged in and looked around and it's really amazing the amount of information they give you. It's the same info (probably more accurate info actually) that you could get from some high priced software but totally for free and straight from the horse's mouth to boot.
They let you know exactly what sites are linking to you (you get a lot more info than if you are doing a "backwards link" check) and what the link text is. This can be very valuable information to let you know which of your link getting strategies are working and which are not.
They let you know exactly how many of your pages are indexed (this is very cool to know.)
They give you detailed information about how people are finding your site and where your site ranks for various important keywords.
Needless to say I recommend signing up with Google's Webmaster Tools. It's very simple to do (it takes about 30 seconds if you are familiar with using Dreamweaver and the like.)
One of the more important decisions you make is what webhost(s) to go with. I've used some webhosts that would not recommend and no longer use but most of the services I've signed up with and used have been pretty solid.
www.ANHosting.com - Although I have had some problems with short outages, overall they've been excellent and they are very affordable.
www.BlueHost.com - They are the newest site I've signed up with and I've been very happy with their service so far, although I must mention that today my sites on their service went down for a few minutes (Very frustrating! Every minute your sites are down someone could have been on your site clicking on your affiliate links or your adsense ads)
www.HostMonster.com - They've been excellent. In fact if I had to recommend just one service I think it'd have to be Host Monster. I don't recall my sites being down a single time (that I've noticed anyway.) I think they may also be the cheapest ($5.95/month with unlimited domain hosting.)
www.HostGator.com - They've also been very solid. Unlimited domains. I do not recall any service interruptions either.
I do not recommend using the Go Daddy webhosting service (I have tried it and have one site on Go Daddy hosting now.) - Although I do often use GoDaddy for buying domains. I also do not recommend StartLogic as I had some problems with their service and their billing.
I've been sort of going this way for a little while anyway but I've decided to make it official! This site is now more of a "diary" for me where I talk about what about what I'm doing in internet marketing. Now why would this be interesting to anyone? Because I'm making money. I've been a full time internet marketer (working from home) since the spring of 2005 so obviously I have at least some idea of what I'm doing (that doesn't mean I'm not still learning all the time. partly because the internet world is always changing, so you have to keep learning.)
There's already plenty of sites out there where people are just hawking various products (most of which are completely useless or even worse, a waste of valuable time.) I want this to be something different. More honest.
To start with the honesty I can tell you that this website originally was purchased to direct to a clickbank product via newspaper advertising (MoneyMakerJobs.com was the most memorable web address I could find) ... that project completely failed (as has my attempt at using Google's new Audio Ads feature) and currently I am pretty much anti offline advertising altogether. I just don't like it. I can't track the results easily. It just seems like a total guessing game. And why? When there are so many opportunities online. I don't think I will be venturing back into offline advertising any time soon.
Anyway I then converted this site into your standard affiliate product hawking site. I haven't really done much with that and the site sort of languished.
But now I'm changing it up again with a new more snappy site design and with more interesting content (at least I hope it's more interesting.)
Going forward I will be talking about the things that I really do to make money along with (just as importantly) the things that have been a total waste of time and/or money.
Well I hope you bookmark this site if you are new to internet marketing - I hope you can learn some things from my mistakes.
One of the most important things for success with internet marketing is focus. The ability focus and see a project through to it's completion may be the most important part of big time success.
Why?
Because so many of the type of people who want to work from home and do internet marketing are the type of people who are quite creative and who have a lot of ideas but who also lack a solid work ethic or ability to focus (especially when the boss is yourself!)
I definitely put myself in this category.
I have had so many great ideas (seriously!) and so have started soooo many projects based on those ideas but I know that I would be doing far better than I am now (and I'm doing alright) with a stronger ability to focus.
My advice is to think of all of the ideas that you may want to do. Buy up all the domains. Then choose ONE of those ideas, the one you are most confident will become a success and work only on that idea until you get the success you want with it. This is much easier said than done. But I have no doubt that if I had taken this advice myself, I would be making far more money than I am now.
So that's my advice of the day! Coming from a real internet marketer who really makes his living from home (for almost 2 1/2 years now.)
