… from a blog which is not affiliated with the 30 Day Challenge.

This is one of the reasons why I love internet marketing: your blog or website works and earns while you’re not around, even when you sleep. The other reason is that I can work on said blog or website in nothing but my underwear and a T-shirt.

This not only increases my August earnings to over $60, but I’ve hit my minimum payout for this unnamed affiliate program and should be expecting a $120 cheque in the mail in 2-3 weeks! This is my second cheque from online wheeling and dealing and it’s over four times bigger than the last one! I really, really, really, really, really hope that I keep getting cheques (sorry, I’m Canadian) in the mail each month, and I’m not just getting lucky. The thing is, traffic hasn’t increased much in the past few months, but I’m making more money. (Note that my 30DC goal is to make $100 solely from the 30DC, so this doesn’t count towards it.)

I’m earning more money with my other blog projects that I’ve put on the back burner since starting the 30 Day Challenge. It’s too early to say I’m disappointed in the 30 Day Challenge, because we’re just starting to get into the meat and potatoes of it.

But not everybody has been pleased with the way the 30 Day Challenge. Mark at 45n5 criticized the challenge for using parasite SEO and not really working to create something sustainable. I agree with him that what we’ve done so far isn’t really sustainable, but we’ve just started, and Ed has mentioned that there are still more things to do. Mark suggests to “Do what they do, not what they say,” but I think we are building up to what they really do, which is create and sell (or get others to sell) your own info product.

I’m going to chug along with the 30 Day Challenge, and if I don’t end up making anything, I’ve only lost a little time.

Technorati Tags: TDC, 30DC, Thirty Day Challenge, 30 Day Challenge, Parasite SEO, Online Earnings, Internet Income, Making Money Online, Making Money While You Sleep, Tumblr, Tumblelogs, Tumbleweed, Tumblespam,

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So I just woke up and saw that neither of my four tumblelogs were ranked, although one of my posts on Netscape was listed. A little disappointed, even if I would never expect to be listed in less than 24 hours. But this isn’t what I was afraid of.

While using SocialPoster, I noticed something. I noticed a lot of other tumblelogs on all of the social bookmarking sites! It seems the one problem of having a huge turnout for the 30 Day Challenge, aside from the increased bandwidth usage, is that when Ed posted Rob’s Tumblr and SocialPoster videos there would be a huge surge of freshly created Tumblr sites posted on the major social bookmarking sites.

It appears I’m not the only one who noticed this. The funny thing is early yesterday morning, just hours after the SocialPoster video was put up and before I was even finished all my tumblelogs, IndianPad banned Tumblr links from being posted.

The problem is that you have all this tumblespam on Digg, Reddit, Netscape, etc. which is getting very little “love” except from teammates and a few other fellow 30DC’ers. Most tumblelogs don’t have much in the way of content, while there are some that really do a good job of using great, even “sticky” content in just a few posts. Unfortunately most of those get buried in the deluge of other tumblelogs on the social bookmarking sites.

This publicity is also turning Tumblr into the next Squidoo, and may get “slapped” by Google in the future. Although a more likely scenario that could happen before the end of August is Tumblr deleting the blogs with the least valuable content on them. And seeing how almost everyone is posting a couple times and just leaving their tumblelogs alone, that might not bode well for 30 Day challengers. In fact, I think I’ll make another post on my tumblelogs today.

This challenge is going to be especially difficult since I’m working without a team and because my goal is $100. Now that I think about it, I have less than two weeks to make $100.

Technorati Tags: 30DC, TDC, Thirty Day Challenge, 30 Day Challenge, Parasite SEO, Ticks, Tapeworms, Tumbleweeds, Tumblr, Tumblespam, Tumblelogs, Blogs, IndianPad, SocialPoster, Web 2.0, Social Bookmarking, Googleslap, Content

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Just a few hours ago, I posted on my first Tumblr blog, marking the end of the strategic phase and the beginning of the tactical phase. We’ve laid the plans as per Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and now we wage war!

It is a battle against ourselves, against laziness and lameness, and tap into our potential. It is a battle against the internet, an unforgiving environment where you will find some of the most unsavory characters that have ever traversed the web. It is a battle against all odds to reach our goals before the month’s end.

I’m all open. All out on the internet now. I’m still finishing up my last two tumblelogs. I’ve submitted my completed tumblelogs to a whole slew of social bookmarking websites, not necessarily to get traffic, although that would be a bonus, but to get Google to notice my blogs and rank them quickly.

The tumblelog-building process has been enjoyable to say the least. My original plan of 2-3 posts ended up being 3-5 posts. I discovered that I could easily add video content which would complement and add much more value than just my text and odd picture. I also sprinkled affiliate links here and there. One potentially “killer” keyword phrase has about 34 000 results, but 400 daily searches according to GTrends. If I can even hit the top 10 I’m sure I could get a nice juicy slice of that traffic.

I also noticed that I’m probably going to have some friendly competition with fellow 30DC participants in a couple of my niches. I hope they can settle with being #10 as I steal 1st place on the SERPs. :p

Today is a good day, and if I get ranked and start getting some traffic, today will be quite nice.

And if I make my first sale, today will be super awesome.

Technorati Tags: 30DC, TDC, Thirty Day Challenge, 30 Day Challenge, Tumblr, Affiliate Marketing, ClickBank, GTrends, Google, Genghis Khan, Sun Tzu, Art of War

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All this talk about focusing on multiple niches reminded me of something that I dread as a struggling affiliate: the minimum payout.

For those who don’t know, many (I suppose all) affiliate programs have a minimum amount of money you must accrue before they write you your cheque. This can be a low amount, $10 for ClickBank, or it can be a high amount, generally $100 for many affiliate programs. They will withhold your money until you hit that minimum amount.

Without checking I know I have over $140 spread out among various affiliate programs. That first cheque I received last month for $25.78 USD? About half of that money was earned in February. You know, when the US dollar was worth a hell of a lot more than it is now. Just my luck. Yeah, it’s not much when we’re talking double digit earnings, but still…

The fact of the matter is, in some cases I’ll never hit those minimum payouts (maybe I can ask AdBrite to send me that $3 I earned). This is why I prefer major services like ClickBank, where there’s a whole marketplace of different products, and all earnings go into one account. Another solution? Drive more traffic and improve my click-through rate so I can hit those minimum payouts every month for every affiliate program. In other words, be less of a sucky internet marketer.

So you might be thinking, “If the goal is to earn $10 this month, what’s the point if I can’t hold that $10 in my hand?” The point is that you learn how to earn $10 online. Once you do, you can repeat it and keep repeating it until you hit that minimum payout. Or maybe you’ll sell your own product and won’t have to worry about how many sales to make until you can hold your money. Ed Dale mentioned that the 30 Day Challenge isn’t “just an affiliate program deal.”

Worst case scenario? I don’t hit my minimum payouts this month, but keep earning into next month and the next until I do.

Actually, that’s not even close to being the worst case scenario.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Nightmares, Shaving, Affiliate Programs, ClickBank, USD, Bank Account, Pitiful

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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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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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