My focus has been on my other projects, but I’ve already stated that I intend to use site marketing techniques and perhaps a few cheap tricks, like submitting this blog or particular posts to Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc. And it will be interesting when a few readers stumble upon this blog through one of these sites and looks back at one of these posts, clearly stating my schemes to lure them into my lair. How will they feel? Will they leave nasty comments? Will they be blogging furiously about how I conned them? I wouldn’t mind. Free backlinks!

What I’m doing with this blog is strange, nay mad. Around the time I begin my promotion of this blog, I will tell you step-by-step what I did. That’s right. Visitors are going to come to an internet marketer’s blog and see me discussing how I brought them here.

One of the secrets of promoting your blog is to not make it obvious that you are promoting your blog. Pose as a surfer who just found a cool site. Oddly enough, sometimes it’s so obvious that they’re the site owner that it’s pathetic. But I will not put up a facade. Yes, I will blatantly self-promote this blog at first, but the point is that they are coming here because some of my content piqued their interest, regardless of where they found the link or who suggested they check it out.

Which leads me to ask this question: who is my audience? Right now it’s just me. But I expect that maybe, possibly, conceivably, feasibly, other internet marketers or people curious about making money online would be interested in reading this blog.

I’m not spamming with gibberish and links with “LOL CLICK HERE” anchors. I’m not selling or promoting anything (yet!) and this isn’t one big sales letter. Since I started this blog I’ve made less than $35 across my various streams of income, but I won’t see a penny of it until I hit my minimum payouts. Nope, making money online isn’t as easy as they say.

I did a few things to prepare myself for my first visitors. First of all, I’ve added AdSense. Yep, finally. It’s the least I can do at this point. Unfortunately at the time of this writing they’re displaying ads for SUVs and World of Warcraft (WoW) gold and power leveling services. This kind of thing is common with contextual ads and should get fixed very soon. I’ve added a hidden StatCounter to this blog to see if I get any search engine or other organic traffic before I make this blog “live.” This new version of Life Conquest is already up on Google but I’ve yet to do any intention SEO so we’ll see how this works out.

I may end up putting “Digg it” or other links so when I do get some visitors, if my superb writing impresses them, they can share my posts with others.

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Today is going to be a busy day. Time to go out there and take the first real step in conquering my life! Here’s the battle plan, soldiers:

• update each of my three Blogger blogs with two posts

• submit each blog to five blog directories

• build a complete profile and join five MSN Groups to market one of my blogs

• find two forums or subforums related to my secret niche and begin posting

• build four HubPages, one for each Blogger blog and one for this blog

• build four Squidoo pages, one for each Blogger blog and one for this blog

• submit four blogs or blog articles to small social bookmarking sites

• brainstorm articles for the major social bookmarking / news sites

• finish this blog post and include any results, difficulties, and random insights

The hardest part here is going to be writing the posts. Only one of my blogs features a few articles snagged off one of those free article databases. The rest are written by yours truly. I also try to keep my posts fairly long. Some bloggers out there say you should make many short posts (250-300 words) frequently. In each blog, posts are always almost always 500 words, and a few are over 1000 words. I’m pretty much trying to make each post into an isolated article; an article that could be read and fully understood without needing to read others for background information. This way each post can potentially be submitted to article sites, social bookmarking websites, etc. or added to my HubPages. The most tedious part will be setting things up for promotion: registering accounts, going into my e-mails for activation of my accounts, submitting blogs, applying for MSN Group access, etc.

Around 3:00 AM this morning I wrote updates for my other blogs for the next three days, so I can focus solely on these new projects for now. Anyway, time to get some hours of shuteye for the day ahead of me. Will finish this post tonight.

Later that evening…

Well, I just finished my to do list for the most part. I updated each blog, and submitted them to five directories. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which directories only list blogs over 3 months old, but we’ll see when I get the emails. I didn’t do any Squidoo pages, but I did build four HubPages.

I haven’t published the HubPage for this blog yet. I’m going to build another two then publish them when I’ve submitted this blog to directories, sprinkled links across the web, etc. I’m going to do it all in one shot and see what happens. Note: it’s not a good idea to suddenly add tons of links (the search engines punish you for that) on your website or blog so when I say “all in one shot” I don’t mean submitting to 50 directories, doing 100 link trades, etc. but rather continuously promote this blog a bit every day. Ehh I don’t know what I’m saying.

I built a complete profile and applied for five different MSN Groups. I’m focusing on MSN Groups right now because I see a lot less spam and a lot more restricted groups. Interestingly enough, I was accepted to two groups I applied for a few days ago on my blank profile. I made a few posts on one, but the discussions on the other group don’t work for some reason. :/

I haven’t found any good forums to promote my secret niche, but I did find fairly very active one that is somewhat related, so it should be interesting to see how that turns up. I’ve made two posts so far.

I’ve yet to post articles on some smaller social bookmarking sites, but that will be done tonight before I go to sleep.

Overall, today was a very boring day. Not much else to say, really.

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I’ve mentioned e-books a few times already, and always with contempt. Let me just start off by saying that e-books in general are great. I’ve got tons of e-books, fiction and non-fiction, on my desktop and on my laptop for easy reading.

It’s the e-books you find on ClickBank and similar sites that piss me off. You know, if I had the patience and the knowledge to make an e-book without totally ripping off someone else’s, I would. The thing is, for most of these, you don’t need patience or knowledge. You can pay people to write them for you, you can reiterate a lot of what other people are teaching in their e-books. Or better yet, you can take the oldest tricks in the book, add something small of your own to it that isn’t exactly ingenious, and sell your techniques. A lot of what these e-books do is overpromise and underdeliver. That’s the tired e-book model.

And it’s not just the e-books. It’s the way they’re marketed, too. I’m positive most of you have seen the bold red title, images of these guys’ earnings or “proof” or “endorsement” that their product works, and the highlighted text (I’m not even going to bother highlighting this time). What you’re reading is a sales letter. I am sick of the common internet marketer’s sales letter. They copy off each other, propagating this shit across the internet. The worst part is that they are still making sales. If I ever write an e-book, I’ll skip that format.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few quality e-books out there, but they are a few out of thousands.

There is one person I know who is also fairly new to the online entrepreneurship game, and he has a site of devoted readers and is marketing e-books directly to them. The thing is, he doesn’t overpromise and underdeliver. He makes mini information products covering very narrow topics and sells them cheap.

Why is this a good model? First of all, he has a group of people to market to, sort of like an e-mail list. He has a site with tons of free information available, so his site is very “sticky” as they say. His site also has an active forum. And this is all in his own fairly tight niche. He has become a trusted source of information, and now he is selling mini products on his website along side his other affiliate product promotions. Making yourself look like an authority alone will boost your sales. Just ask the “gurus.”

So in a nutshell:

1. E-books nowadays are quite shitty for the most part. Only a few gems.
2. The way e-books are marketed is apparently successful, but I don’t know why because looking at the average e-book or other info product sales letter gives me a headache.
3. Making yourself appear as an authority therefore winning the trust of potential customers will boost sales. John Reese, a very well known internet marketing guru, made one million dollars selling his info product “Traffic Secrets” on the first day, back in 2004. I have not checked out this product, but the power of trust and authority is obvious.
4. If you have a user base or some sort of online community, look for unique ways of marketing e-books.

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Nobody is reading this blog now except me. That’s going to change by next week. I’m going to be promoting this blog and no, not just by submitting it to blog directories!

Yeah, it’s a few days old, but it seems weird talking to myself here. Then again it seems weird that I’m making a blog about myself. Even weirder is that I’m telling you (currently non-existent) readers that I am actually planning to promote this blog. I’m going to wait a few days before I do it, maybe post a nice attention-grabbing article instead of this boring “TODAY I DID THIS, TODAY I DID THAT,” sort of post which unfortunately due to the nature of this blog will be very common.

If you’re reading now and it’s some time in early July 2007, I’ll bet you probably stumbled here through Squidoo, HubPages, or perhaps a blog directory. I expect nobody to find this place from a search engine at this point, in fact I haven’t done any intentional SEO at all on this blog. And I need some visitors first before this blog spreads through word-of-mouth.

I mentioned Squidoo and HubPages. Up until now, I only heard about these sites being used like article marketing. I’m not even sure if “article marketing” is the right term, but it is a form of marketing where you basically write an article, plug a product with an affiliate link somewhere in there, and submit it to a free article database. People can then pick up your article, put it on their blogs or websites, and due to the terms of use they have to keep the links in there and usually include a little blurb about the author (which you also write up and can put a link to your site inside). You build eleventy billion lenses or hubs, link a bunch together and include plenty of affiliate links.

I’m not going that route, but I am going to be using Squidoo, HubPages, and other similar sites I can find. I’ve been using HubPages for one of my other blogs and it’s just an RSS feed with some static extras, yet it’s given me an extra 20 uniques per day to my blog. It also offers a free backlink from a trusted domain (HubPages) which should help my PageRank quite a bit.

I’m hoping to do the same thing with this blog and get it off the ground.

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I figure I should explain in more detail what I did with my blogs and how they’re coming along. I haven’t had any more clicks but I am getting a few visitors. I’m tracking them with StatCounter, which is free to use for basic counting and tracking, and after you’ve got your first counter setup you can easily add more webpages.

Like I said earlier, each blog is hosted on Blogger and occupies a completely different niche. One is subniche of the money making niche that isn’t very saturated (yeah, I know) and the second is in the dating and relationship niche, sort of in the form of an advice column. The third blog is in a secret niche that can be as tight or as broad as I like. I’m optimizing each of my blogs for the search engines, but this one I’m going to very aggressively use SEO techniques. I have only eight keyword search terms that I’m using for this blog, but all except one had less than 7000 searches in January 2007 on Yahoo! and I can still market related products in the broader niche. I used the (previously known as) Overture keyword suggestion tool at SEO Tools to get these numbers. Although this tracks Yahoo! searches, generally you can assume these numbers are proportional to, but lower than Google searches. I’m hoping to get to the top or close to the top of most of these keywords. One of my blogs that I am still updating is always in the top 1-5 spots on Google for certain keyword pairs. They aren’t too competitive, but they give me some nice hits every week.

My attempt at marketing through Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Groups fucking failed yesterday. 20 hits overall, and most of my posts are buried under the spam. Today I’m going to just post on very small groups, less than 100 people.

I only have affiliate links on one of my blogs. I’m still looking for a good affiliate to market with one of the blogs, and I’ll have to find some physical products to market from CJ on my secret niche blog. Now, when I say “secret” I don’t mean it the same way other marketers and “gurus” say it when they’re trying to sell you something like “Adsense secrets,” “SEO Secrets,” “Affiliate Secrets,” “Weight Loss Secrets,” etc. which is so overplayed these days. I mean a secret in the sense that I don’t want to tell you about it. On the internet, the moment word gets out that you are successful in a tight niche, that niche, like a hot escort new to the biz, will cease to be tight and will become worn out in a few months time.

This is where a lot of people end up making money on the internet: niche marketing. If 100 000 people (probably lowballing here…) are trying to make money selling work-at-home products, will all those people make money? Of course not. Many will give up entirely, some will follow this niche into debt, some will make some extra pocket money, fewer will make a significant income, and very few will be living entirely off this niche. It’s the niches that nobody cares about where you will make make your bones.

But don’t let this mean you should put all your eggs into one tiny niche basket. Spread over a number of niches, or split your main niche into subniches and capitalize on that. Contrary to popular belief, I’ve had more success with less popular, strange, or “nichy” niches than the most popular ones. This is because of the immense competition you’re facing. Yeah, there are also way more people interested in that niche, but there is only limited space on that first page of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live results and sponsored links.

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I won’t beat around the bush and get to the meat of the post. What did I do today?

• did some keyword and affiliate research and built three blogs on Blogger, all in different niches

• wrote five short blog posts for each blog, published three today, will publish the other two in the next two days

• added AdSense to each blog

• submitted each of those three blogs to 10 blog directories

• updated my four previously made blogs with posts for the next three days (WordPress FTW!)

• started using unconventional traffic sources to promote my blogs

“Unconventional” traffic? Yeah, that’s just my way of saying “siphoning traffic from sites where many people congregate.” This means sites like Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups, Craigslist, etc. I hate marketing via these sites. Especially ____ Groups. Why? Because these are so commonly used these days. Marketing via Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups, etc. is futile unless you target smaller, restricted groups and take the time to register and make yourself trusted. Every single group that anyone can easily join, hell even ones that you have to apply for are full of spammers. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Groups are just three big circle jerks of internet marketers. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that many of these groups were made by internet marketers to attract a targeted audience. Regardless, I’m promoting my blogs through this method and I hope to find some legit, unpoisoned groups to work with. When I tried this last time, in a group of thousands of members with high activity, I’d get maybe 10-15 hits to a blog.

I’d really like to tap into the Digg/MySpace/Facebook/Reddit/Del.icio.us/Netscape/etc. type traffic. Unfortunately for this to work well, you need to write about something in the news, something controversial, something funny, something exciting. This is an internet marketer’s blog, so I won’t lie to you or beat around the bush. I have a few ideas of articles for this blog that might strike some discussion, or at least get me some hits. I’m not going to write them up now because I just started this thing and I don’t really know how I could properly monetize this blog (except with PPC ads).

That’s another thing you need for this to work well: content. To properly take advantage of a sudden influx of free traffic you need to have more than just that one article. Have a good archive of stuff that people might want to peruse through if they like your blog or your writing style. If it’s a full-blown website, have extra, quality stuff that might interest the stray visitor. Good content will keep your visitors on your site longer (therefore giving more opportunities to click an ad or buy something), and may even make them want to bookmark or subscribe to your feed. This is what webmasters and internet marketers call “stickiness.” What’s the point of flooding your site with visitors if they’ll leave after a minute? The more I work building gimmicky blogs and sites, the more I start to think that this isn’t the best way of making long-term money in this business.

Maybe I should bullshit my way through writing an e-book about how to bullshit one’s way through writing an e-book and sell it for $10. But don’t get me started on that…

Oh shit, I forgot to mention that I got a single click on AdSense today. No, it wasn’t one cent. Now I’m off to see if I can get my head around how to promote CJ products.

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I don’t know.

I, like most other new internet marketers and entrepreneurs, am overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways you can make money on the internet. I think you could lump them into three different, very general streams of online income. I like the numbered list from yesterday so I’ll use it here:

1. Selling your own product.
2. Promoting someone else’s product.
3. Advertising.

I don’t have a product, and I really, really, really don’t want to get into wholesale and drop shipping on eBay or my own store. If you think internet marketing sounds like a field of cutthroats and scammers, you haven’t heard about “wholesalers” who will rip you off faster than clothes during a conjugal visit. I don’t feel like paying $50 to merely get a list of “wholesalers” and “drop shippers” who are actually middle men (guys who buy from real wholesalers, jack up the price a bit, and pretend to be wholesalers or drop shippers) or just outright scammers. Also, a lot of the wholesalers have minimum unit purchases of 50, 100, 200 or more. I don’t have that cash right now.

So at this point, I’m doing #2 and #3. And by #3 I mean AdSense. As I said before, I have over a dozen blogs, most of which are now abandoned. Each one had AdSense ads on it. I also did a little ClickBank affiliate marketing, including doing review sites. I’ve made a few sales, not enough and none with a MasterCard so my money is still locked in there. If you’re not into affiliate or internet marketing, you might just be getting the feeling that this isn’t as easy as all those “MAKE MONEY IN YOUR SLEEP” e-book sellers make it out to be. E-book peddlers are so common now that I throw up a little in my mouth every time I see highlighted text online and in real life.

What are my income strategies now? I’m going to rebuild several blogs in different niches and restart my AdSense campaign. I’m staying away from AdWords for now as I look at how to promote affiliate products online. In terms of affiliate marketing, it’s been blogs and review sites. I got lucky with a few sales in the beginning but I just ended up burning a hole in my pocket to fund my AdWords campaign. I have several domains, unfortunately none are general enough that I can build several webpages in different niches on one.

My plan is to go niche this time, and I don’t mean the overplayed “making money at home” or “lose weight now” niches. They’re too competitive for an inexperienced small fry like myself. I also want to start promoting more conventional products like those at Commission Junction. I guess now is as good a time as any to start learning.

But for now I think I should get to sleep. My goal for tomorrow (er, today) is to start three blogs in completely different niches. I’m going to check out available niche affiliate programs and then do a little keyword research to see how tight of niches they really are. After that, I’m going to update my four still-active blogs, and then I’m going to see how the hell you promote CJ products. If anything exciting happens I’ll update later today or Monday.

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Funny how I’ve made over a dozen blogs, yet none of them were really about me. Funny how I’ve made several profiles on MySpace and Facebook, yet the only profiles that are my own are a single blank MySpace profile that I made over a year ago for the hell of it and a Facebook profile I’ve updated twice since I made it over three months ago. Up until now every blog and website I’ve made was a fake. From the successful internet millionaire to the diet reviewer to the dating coach, I’ve played many roles but never myself.

Why do I do this crap? To promote products, siphon traffic to websites, and make money online.

Yep, I’m an internet marketer, an online entrepreneur, a webpreneur, an electronic hustler, a virtual high roller. Actually, I’m a 22-year old student who is on a quest to make a living from the internet. I’ve made a few sales in the past year, but I’ve actually lost money if you count PPC advertising, domain registration, and hosting.

So what do I want? I want to stop working to feed my online “ventures,” I want them to feed me. I want to be able to wake up at noon and work on my laptop from my bed. Or work outside on a summer day. Or work on the toilet after eating too much spicy food. Or check how much money I’ve made since breakfast from my autopilot projects while lying on the beach on my private island (I wish!). See a pattern? I want freedom.

I’d honestly like to retire at 30, or at least be able to take it easy by then. More realistically, I would be happy retiring before 50. I say “realistically” but in reality this is something most people want, but many will never achieve. Even more realistic, less extravagant, but to me almost as appealing, would be simply building a livable stream of income entirely online. At least then I could build on it and make it grow. Being a young bachelor with no dependents, I can make this a reality.

So what am I going to do with this blog? I really don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before. Maybe documenting my journey as an aspiring internet marketer will help me, perhaps motivate me to keep on going. Maybe as I see some success, I will inspire others who are in my place right now.

Why “Life Conquest?” I was looking for a nice domain that I could use to start a large network of sites about self-improvement. I love strategy games (turn-based and real-time) and I’m a fan of military history, so the idea of Life Conquest just flooded powerful images into my mind like a horde of Mongol horsemen or the sound of over 100 000 Roman soldiers marching across a field to meet an opposing army. It’s these sort of powerful emotions and images that has kept me in the internet marketing game for so long.

Anyway, I started the site but pulled it pretty quickly when I figured I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I kept the domain because of those feelings and images it gave me. And also because I still had 10 months before the domain expired. But last night I decided to screw the gimmicks, forget the schticks, throw away the false profiles, and just make a regular blog about my struggles as an aspiring internet marketer. Since I can’t really make every post every day about everything I’ve done as it tends to get a bit repetitive at times, I’ll also talk about my thoughts about this business. Maybe I can let out some steam about the so-called “gurus” that many marketers worship.

But you know what’s funny? I have a slight inkling that this blog will be more successful and get more visitors than all my other sites (in the dozens) that I’ve aggressively marketed and failed. If this blog becomes even mildly successful, I’ll:

1. Shit myself.
2. Delete every e-book I’ve downloaded about building sites and submitting and spamming them everywhere, and “clever” PPC advertising techniques and SEO “secrets” that bring in server crushing traffic to shitty hosted blogs and sites.
3. Shit myself again.
4. I’ll make a post about how I predicted it and maybe take pics of my shit-filled underpants.
5. Mail bags of my shit to a few of the “gurus” that are at best, mediocre internet marketers. (Yeah, I realize I’m not exactly an e-millionaire, but I know shit when I see it.)

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