I like to cruise and read up on what everyone is writing about. While I normally don’t read those general “let’s trade links” or “let’s have a contest every day” type of blogs, I do however respect when people write great, informative posts, or even posts that brighten their personalities. So starting off:

1. Derek Beau wrote a damn good post on 9 Sure-Fire Tips To Continually Improve Your Blog
2. Andrew Wee of course with another great Friday Podcast Friday Podcast: Are You A Prisoner Of Your Own Limitations?
3. Yaro Starak wrote a post that I actually got more from than most people. I read on average at least 10 magazines a week. My girl is always getting pissed at the stores because I am so fixated on the magazine rack. We have this thing where I simply hold up my wallet and she immediately comes back down to earth and realizes one of the major reasons why we live so comfortably now is because I am an information freak. Yaro wrote a post How To Make Millions Selling Ugly Shoes and it goes a long ways to show exactly how something so small in this world can bring you more money than you thought possible. Just the simplicity behind it is amazing.
4. I love reading CashQuests, for a second there when I first started reading I thought Kumiko might have been as brutal as mean. Maybe so, but I loved this post on WidgetBucks Is Run By Monkeys . I never once liked the looks of the program and found it quite hilarious that the sheeple were pimping it out on their blogs and forum signatures.
5. Of course Maki from Dosh Dosh always gives priceless information — Social Media Marketing In A Nutshell is an excellent primer post to get you to better understand the world of Social Media

I apologize right now for the amount of rants over the last few days. We just have some really smart operators running around the Internet and somehow, someway my path just keeps crossing with them. Pay close attention though, I am going to teach you a couple of things to get past the MSN Inactive Keyword crap they seem to pull on me every other day on one of my campaigns.

So my ad rep, she loves me. She gets a call from me at least every 3 days for the last month. I have explained my background, that I am smart enough to optimize a landing page for the almighty Google’s relevancy formula and get a low minimum CPC but I for the life of me cannot understand why MSN makes keywords inactive for me. Furthermore, every time they get reactivated they have only last no longer than a week before they are inactive and I have to call her again. God bless heart, she will surely have someone else being my Rep or she might do something drastic to herself. Who knows, I do know that this woman can take a verbal beating. Yes, I know we should not talk down on women and I assure you that I don’t but I damn sure make it a point that the company she works with are COMPLETE BAFFOONS!

So here goes the conversation the other day. I am well aware that they have a different bot crawling pages for each country. The MSN bot is a sensitive little prick. If you want a misspelling as a keyword in your campaign, you damn well better have it on your page.

What a nightmare. I am disgusted that this happened. I was promoting an affiliate program located overseas and was promoting it in the country they accepted payments and their general browsing population from.

Or so I thought…

Before I call myself to much of an idiot, let’s put into note that I have yanked about $4500 profit from another branch of this company in another country already here in November. I started on the 6th and been averaging about $550-$565 a day with this branch. There is hardly any competition there, and I could hardly believe it when I say what I was going to promote. I got a handy piece of software not easily found on the net that allows me to pick out products quick. Take that and the Adwords Editor and I made about 600 ads with around 3,600 keywords in less than hour. Who gets this kind of power? I do because I hate screwing around with paid advertising and I don’t like writing ads one by one. At least not when I can write 600 good ads, upload them and my keywords in less than hour. If the ad does not perform well over a couple of days, I simply replace it within my editor and reupload. Simple as pie.

Another kickass thing I use is something called Affiliate Radar. Yes, I can download every campaign that I massively build in the Adwords Editor and I plug that csv file into Affiliate Radar and I can easily spit out the correct format for Yahoo and MSN search Engines.

Total Time for 1 campaign across these 3 search engines, 600 ads, and 3,600 keywords = less than 1 hour and 30 minutes. Eat your heart out.

You have seriously got to be kidding me. Sorry if I appear slow, I try to stay away from bullshit like this as much as I possibly can. It’s things like these that make my life truly a lot easier because I know in my heart that their are complete newbs and most likely *morons* who actually watch this and most likely aspire to be one like one of these people.

The Next Internet Millionaire…

I have nothing against Joel Comm, as a matter of fact I really don’t know who he is other than the creator of show I see everyone talking about taking up priceless real estate in forums I visit everyday to interact, help and learn from other people trying to make a buck online. So why would this even bother me?

Because…

                     Because…

Because first off, for most of the people that have taken an interest in the show (shame on you), they probably have held on all season to see who wins. What makes me want to puke even more, is there are people who probably look up to these contestants and what they have accomplished………………………………..or trying to.

Here’s what they and The Next Internet Millionaire have managed to accomplish.

They have accomplished putting up a syndicated Internet Marketing Reality TV show online for you to view free. Cool right? No, it doesn’t make you cool and neither does watching it. If anything, it probably makes you stupider and most likely you spent valuable time watching it and not working on your business. Good job, you have just fell into Internet Marketing trap #1. You should be proud, treat yourself to a drink, like a whole bottle and later on, you can top it off with maybe some sleeping pills. Your going to need all this by the time I point out what a pile of trash this has become.

I won’t post much about this. This is a free tool that was developed to analyze Google results. Yes I know, how friggin awesome is that? I been using the software since last night and I am impressed. It does everything it says it does and it’s pretty damn fast. This guy would probably make a damn nice bit of coin selling it, but he offers it free here:

GTrends Made Easy

He has some information and a few training videos to get you up and running using it. Also, the owner posted in a forum
I Moderate that he will be coming out with some more videos in relation to utilizing the software with afiiliate marketing. I got to give the guy props, this is a super nice thing to do. If you feel like a Samaritan, remember to donate to him.

I haven’t posted all week. Yes I know, I suck right? I been super busy as November and December are my two busiest months of the year. I mainly do PPC in these two months and it requires a lot of testing, tracking, landing page setup, autoresponder sequence writing and all of that good jive. I love it! Anyway, enjoy that tool!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Before I even think about entering a market I try to gage as much demand as I can for the product or offer I am promoting. This really only applies to Pay Per Click promotions as I usually just go balls out on keywords I like when generating sites or blogs. When I am paying for my traffic though, this is a different story. I am very strict and disciplined to gage the demand of what I will be promoting. I got burned so many times last year it almost makes me sick to look at the money I just threw away for not engaging in market analysis.

Lately, the forums have been erupting with paid advertisements such as polls on landing pages that sent the surfer to a CPA offer after they voted. I do not know why all the talk is just now going on, as this has been going on for over a year that I know of. I only know this because I was doing it.

If your not familiar with the method, it’s basically watching all the news sites and trying to anticipate a hot story that will likely explode in large amounts of search volume. Take the Michael Vick incident and Paris Hilton going to jail as examples. People were making polls on their landing pages asking surfers if they thought Vick was guilty or if Paris was going to jail. Yes, you can make some money at this but you had be very smart and try to get in there at least a week before the story actually breaks. If you get there when the story breaks, then it really defeats the purpose. If Paris went to jail and your advertising a landing page with a poll asking if she WILL go to jail or not, it kind of kicks you in the tail right? Capitalizing on the buildup and beating everyone to the punch is where it’s at.

Good news has arrived! In my earlier post at the end of October “2CO Launches Their Affiliate Beta” I mentioned that 2Checkout was going to support Paypal Express Checkout. Well, after cruising around and searching for more information I came across this. It is been written in public that 2Checkout now supports Paypal. This is great news for people who live in countries where they cannot use Paypal or Clickbank.

The PayPal payment option will be available for all non-recurring orders in the following currencies:

• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Euro (EUR)
• British Pound (GBP)
• Japanese Yen (JPY)
• U.S. Dollar (USD)

If you haven’t already you should check out Mohsin’s blog post “No Paypal, No Clickbank, No Problem“. Mohsin did some extensive testing where he stated the following:

My own tests has proved that if i did not offer Paypal at my salespage as payment processing source, I lost more than 60 percent sales. I have offered both and tested 2CO and Paypal, and even i offered $1 discount to use 2CO, more than 50% sales come through Paypal. That is Paypal is a MUST HAVE at your Sales letter online.

He goes on to state that it was not easy for him as he was unable to have a Paypal account. He’s got some great screenshots inside of 2Checkout as it is still in beta and not open to the public yet, but Mohsin was invited it looks like, so he was kind enough to provide an early preview and inside look. Thanks Mohsin!

Popularity: 4% [?]

I knew with the recent PageRank bullshit that was going on that people would start selling off their blogs. I do not know if that was the case of Blogging Fingers but it seems that Matt has sold it.

I find this quite interesting, as supposedly Matt only monetized this blog for a month and reportedly brought in around $400. Here were the stats:

Alexa: 50,675
Technorati Rank: Rank: 16,329
Technorati Authority: 306
PageRank: There is 1 PR4 page, 10 PR3 pages 10 PR2 pages as well as 7 PR1 pages.

In September, which was the 1st month Blogging Fingers was monetized it earned just under $400 ($380). In the period Sept25th - Oct 25th $338 was earned. There has only been $20 expenditure for advertising so those are almost completely profit.

Income breakdown for September:

• $199 from Private Ad Sales (sponsored reviews, banner ads, text links)
• $188 from affiliate sales and referrals

Pretty crazy huh? He got $6,000 for this. So see it does not take long if you work hard at it. His traffic was pretty impressive (from a smaller blogs point of view), but I never really thought that something like this would take in $6,000.

Popularity: 3% [?]