Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

I got a little goodie package the other day from Zac Johnson. Sorry for the delay, I just been super busy here in December. However, no good deed EVER goes unnoticed. Zac has been a true inspiration and I’m subscribed to his feed, and I visit his blog daily. Zac got to meet Mark Cuban at BlogWorld in Las Vegas. From recent posts it looks like Zac will be attending AffiliateSummit West 2008 at Las Vegas ( Feb 24-26). Unfortunately I won’t be able to make that because of my third child is due really close at the first of March. Zac is going to be on the panel “Super Affiliate Strategies that Work” along with Kris Jones (CEO of Pepperjam), John Chow (JohnChow.com) and Amit Mehta (SuperAffiliateMindset.com) who is also part of PPC Classroom in which I am currently enrolled and participating in.

Thanks for the package Zac!

I caught a post over at Josh Spaulding’s titled Link Building Campaigns - Do You Need One?. It really reminded me of all my travels throughout forums and seeing people write about “doing this” “don’t do that” and all that other mumbo jumbo. It seems like almost every-time I seen someone step up to the plate and portray them-self as a “knowitall”, they end up writing something that doesn’t even make sense. Josh was quick to point out that when people tell you that if you make good content, then you don’t need to build links, they are most likely (in my own words) full of shit.

I recommended this post because I have actually read almost everything Josh has put out on his blog and the Warrior Forum. The guy is a real class act ETHICAL marketer. I find myself hanging onto his blog during my time of reform. Whether he knows it or not, or ever finds out, he has written a TON of great content that has made me stop and take a long, hard look at myself. I’m not saying that I will ever stop my aggressive marketing tactics, but I have definitely taken a lot of what he says and does and tried to apply it to myself. I don’t know if I will ever completely stop some of my aggressive (aka blackhat) marketing, but I have definitely slowed down.

Go read his article and he also posted a link to another great ACCURATE post about proper link building.

Ahh Dammit. Another good blog down. I was over at Sitepointand saw CashQuests sold for $15,000.00. I guess a “congrats” are in order for Kumiko. I have always enjoyed her posts and unique writing style. I believed she kind of wrote like I did, with nothing held back and always expressing herself in truest form. She is also quite brilliant. I figured a lot of blogs to sale since the Pagerank bitch slap. Kumiko also did an outstanding job establishing the CashQuests brand instead of her name.

If her name would have been the brand then it probably would have been a tough sale. Now the new owner can swoop right in and take over the money making posts that makes up Cashquests. While I am happy for, as it truly is “all about making money” I guess, I am a little pissed. I am looking forward to the new posts of the owner. I am all about people proving themselves. I have saved myself a ton of money, (and hopefully others) by staying away from fakes and posers and letting people know about them as well. If this owner doesn’t introduce themselves and provide a little background, well I guess that’s one reader lost.

I do not see how this new owner is going to adapt to the writing style of Kumiko. How could they? She’s one of a kind. Will CashQuests turn into a censored “I don’t have the stuff to say that” type of blog? I hope not.

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!

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.

Really short and sweet, I realize it’s Halloween, my girl and kids are yelling at me to get off the computer, but I just came across something that I read and immediately printed out. I can’t go into how awesome this post is, (I will follow up later) but simply head over to Andrew Wee and read Ruthless For The People.

It’s a short post but I can also save you some time:

You can:

• If you haven’t done so, Register at Earners Forum
• Head over to Andrew’s “Ruthless For The People…A Blog Story” thread
• Click the BACKIT Icon (top right corner with little green in the icon)
• You’re done!

Just take a few minutes out of your day and read what Andrew has written. It’s ranks in the top 3 posts I have encountered online. BTW — This ends at midnight tonight, so time is of the essence. Take a few minutes right quick and go have a look at the posts, it will help you in more ways than I can explain. You’ll know what I mean when you read it. Anyway, if you like it give the “Backit” button a click and help support the post and Andrew. Also, if you have not already done so, I would suggest bookmarking Andrew’s blog, it’s a daily visit for me and I love his Friday Podcasts.

After you read it, feel free to come back and discuss it. I am heading out with the kids for a few hours, but will be back later on this evening. Happy Halloween!

I got this question in a forum this evening. People sometimes stretch their niche blogs so wide that they don’t know where it begins and ends. A little example would be something like this.

Instead of having a blog on a topic with 10-20 categories, try to dig a little a deeper. The deeper you dig, the easier it is to get ranked for the keywords. What I try to do is take a domain and for this example I will use DVD Players as my example.

So we would have –> dvdplayers.com (probably someone’s domain :) )

Then we would setup folders and yes I say folder. I am not a big subdomain type of guy. We could argue all day on the aspects of folders and subdomain in terms of SEO but if your using Wordpress difference then WTF is the point? Anyway….

DVDplayers.com would be our “mama” site. This is the site that needs updated the most actually. While all your niche specific blogs will need constant updating, generally speaking those would be like review type blogs. In essence, I have found that getting product reviews in mass quantities is a lot easier for writers than having someone working on your mama blog. You can actually just work on the mama blog and have the niche specific blog reviews outsourced, and this will cut yor time tremendously, it’s almost AUTOMATIC :)

Ok now dvdplayers.com and then we have folders like this:

dvdplayers.com/orion              dvdplayers.com/panasonic      dvdplayers.com/sony

Don’t even know if those are DVD brands, I just use an Xbox 360 :) Anyway, the point is to keep these blogs topic related. You don’t really want a blog where you have dvdplayers.com reviewing every single category of DVD players because it’s quite possible to get overwhelmed. Besides if your outsourcing the reviews, then you can have a writer work on one blog a piece. It gets much easier when you get into it yourself, I promise.