Holiday Greetings!

It only seems right at this time of year to stop and wish all of you and yours a Merry Christmas/Happy Holiday Season and a Happy and Prosperous New Year ahead!

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Got My First Ever Check From ClickBank!

I got an early Christmas present from ClickBank - my first ever check from them! I say it's a gift because I didn't figure I'd receive it until I got a few more orders from different credit cards, as their terms of service states. Unless I've missed something, I thought I wouldn't receive a check until that happens, regardless of the size of my balance, but I guess there's must something about this gift giving time of year.

Hey, it seems only fair anyway...I've had my account for over a year, and I certainly haven't caused them any trouble as far as disputes with customers or anything like that, so I think I deserve to be paid what they've owed me for quite a few months anyway. Especially since those inactivity fees were going to start eating away at what little I had coming to me before long.

My last sale was about seven months ago, so I'm not sure what caused them to write the check, but I'm certainly not complaining! I do wonder though if this means from here on I can be paid immediately on reaching my payment threshhold. That would be nice to know, but I guess I'll find that out when I get a few more sales. For now though, I'll certainly accept this little unexpected surprise!

Blog Improvements Underway

I was lucky enough to stumble on a great blog recently when the author was offering to do a review of your blog if you were one of the first 3 to respond to his post. I was the third. Shortly after that he kept his word and posted a very candid review of this very blog, offering several major ideas for improvement.

I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until I got the email saying he responded, so I had never even stopped to wonder what he might have to say. He got right down to business though, immediately pointing out several common "beginner" mistakes I've made, and outlining the improvements he would advise to be made.

Maybe I was expecting just another, "Yeah, that's nice" kind of response, but he really took this seriously and offered some blunt, no-nonsense, almost step-by-step instructions on how to make this site more appealing to you, the reader.

I really appreciated that. It was nice to finally get some honest, impartial advice from someone who's an experienced and successful blogger. So as shocking as it was to hear that I had made so many obviously newbie mistakes, (no coincidence there, either!) it was nice to get pointed in the right direction.

I mean, I never really set out to create a "successful" blog here with this...it was more like just a place to record my own thoughts as I go about experimenting with my little internet business ideas. But if you're going to do something, whatever it may be, you might as well strive to do it well...so I don't see any reasons NOT to use the ideas he offered to make this a better blog. I've already added a profile description, as he recommended. (And moved those irresistable little AdSense ads a bit further down the page!) And I plan to make the other changes as I'm able, as well.

So if this blog begins to look a little different, maybe you'll be noticing along with quite a few more readers if it works out well! Or it might not even be noticeable, who knows? Feel free to let me know what YOU think of this blog too...I kind of enjoy getting the feedback, and I'd be glad to do the same for your own blog, too.

Thanks for reading!
John

Getting ClickBank Affiliates

A recent reader found my blog by searching Google for "getting ClickBank affiliates", so I'd like to address that here today. I like to follow the readers' lead when possible, and write about what people hope to find here.

ClickBank has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000+ registered affiliates waiting to promote their products, so that is definitely the #1 place to go to find affiliates to sell for you. It seems counter-productive to try competing with the mighty ClickBank website itself, so I would suggest to just let it do the work for you. Afterall, that's what it was designed for.

So I think the key is to make sure your ClickBank Marketplace listing is order, being well written and correctly describing your product. If that is already the case, and your product is, in fact, something fairly well in demand, the affiliate recruiting should pretty much take care of itself.

And it shouldn't take long to get started either, since many ClickBank affiliates often choose to promote the very newest products available. The idea is to get a head start against their competition. If a product is fairly popular, there is usually lots of competition among the affiliates before long.

Outside of this, most sites include an affiliate link to offer the opportunity to promote the product using ClickBank. If your site already gets a substantial amount of traffic, this is probably something you want to include to attract the most affiliates you can.

If you've already done all this and still aren't seeing many affiliates getting involved...you may want to try raising your commission percentage offered. ClickBank now allows you to offer as high as 75% commissions. That might sound like a lot to give back, but remember that each sale from an affiliate's efforts is a sale you wouldn't have had otherwise - and you got it with no effort on your part.

I'm not really an expert on this subject, since I've only been on the affiliate side of the fence since I've been involved with ClickBank. But their website gives you all the details you need to get started as a seller. That's what's great about ClickBank - they make the whole process easy.

If you haven't already registered as a seller with ClickBank, you can find step by step instructions on how to do so, including frequently asked questions and answers right here: www.ClickBank.com/Sell_Products

Hope this helps when you're ready to unleash the next big ClickBank best-seller onto the internet!

Totally (Really) Free Online Classified Ads

If you're looking for some totally cost free online classified ads websites to advertise on, here's a good list to start with.

I can't say I've actually tried these all yet myself, but I just clicked on every one to make sure they're still up and running. After removing a few that were either invalid, parked pages or just something other than totally free, these were the sites that remained.

These sites appear to be good for getting some totally free classified ads on the web. Give them a try, and good luck with your promotions!

http://www.classifiedsforfree.com/
http://www.craigslist.net/
http://www.hyt.com/
http://www.usfreeads.com/
http://www.recycler.com/
http://www.inetgiant.com/
www.1second.com/1america.htm
http://www.citynews.com/
http://www.theadnet.com/
http://www.epage.com/
http://www.backpage.com/
http://www.freeclassifiedads.com/
http://www.bestmall.com/class/

Free Keyword Research Tools

Have you been searching for some free keyword research tools to use - ones that actually work well too? I've posted a few on this blog as I've come across them, but I'm still finding more. So I think this calls for a page to list them all on so they'll be handy to find all in one place.

I'll update this post as I find more to include every so often. And I'll put a link to this page over on the sidebar so this will always be easy to find...for myself as well as you, the readers! (There are at least a few of you out there I hope!)

Please comment or email me if you find that any of these are no longer valid, or if you know of any others that work well that we could add. Thanks in advance!

Here's the list...

WordTracker: (The FREE version)
https://www.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Discovery, from Trellian (The free keyword search tool - seems to work pretty well)
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Google Keyword Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool (You need to register for this one, but it's free)
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Google Trends (Most popular recent searches on Google)
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Try them all and see which ones you like best. You've got nothing to lose - but lots of good, targeted traffic to gain if you choose the right keywords for your sites! And come on back here if you need to find the best free keyword research tools to use again. Good luck with your searching!

A Google Indexing Surprise

Here's something I find pretty amazing. There are lots of articles all over the internet on how to obtain a high ranking in Google, and it usually involves building lots and lots of backlinks that point to your own site. So people endlessly write articles and place them on the articles websites, and post blog comments and forum posts which include a link to their own site...all done in the hope that someday their site will be ranked in Google because of this. Well, something just happened to me that makes it appear that it doesn't matter so much how MANY backlinks you have as much as the quality of the websites that you have the backlinks from.

I have a very small and simple blog I've set up to help me sell items in the local newspaper. A few posts ago I mentioned this, and the only attention it ever got was from the newspaper readers who saw it in the ad. Then of course the newspaper stopped allowing websites to be listed in the free classified ads, so I got a little discouraged because that ended what I thought was a great idea. I didn't get nearly the number of hits when I only included a phone number in the ad and mentioned the domain name on my phone's voice mail.

Then I tried selling a couple of items on http://www.craigslist.com/, where you can apparently include a link to your own website in your ads. I was a little disappointed in the results because although my sales blog got it's share of instant traffic after listing the ads, it still wasn't resulting in any Google AdSense ad clicks, which I had hoped for. However, something unexpected came out of this, just a week or so after I posted those Craiglist ads.

I checked my blog's stats on http://www.statcounter.com/ and was very surprised to see that one of the hits was referred by none other than Google itself! I knew that meant that the page had somehow been indexed by Google! And it has, as of today anyway when I checked. So with no backlinks at all other than the ones (I think a total of just 2) from Craiglist, my little blog site has been included in the mighty Google's listings! Someone had apparently entered "220 volt air conditioner for sale Delaware"as their search request, and it gave them a list of sites, with mine being #2 on the list! (Second only to a listing on the University of Delaware website.)

This is pretty amazing! I was under the impression that Google wouldn't find and include your site unless you had a certain (fairly large) number of sites which link back to it...but this is obviously not true.

So fear not, aspiring web masters...it's not nearly as difficult to crack into those elusive Google listings as most of us thought! I don't know in how many cases it would be appropriate to place a link to your own website in a classified ad on Craigslist, but the point is that this is a high traffic website, and evidently just one high traffic website linking to your own is enough to get Google's attention. And that was news to me!

TinyURL, The Free URL Shortening Service

When you're promoting ClickBank products or other affiliate deals, sometimes those affiliate links can be rather lengthy. Too lengthy to even be readable in some emails, forum posts, etc. So there are lots of free services you can use that actually forward to your link from a different address to allow you to have a shorter url to use.

One of the most popular free link shortening services is http://www.tinyurl.com/. I had seen it before many times but never actually tried it until now, and I was suprised how easy it is to use. Like I said, you'll find lots of free services like this if you do a search, but this one doesn't force your readers to see any ads before your own page, which I've noticed some do. And since it's so popular it seems to make sense that it should be reliable as well. Plus, it always gives you a url that ends up being, true to their name, pretty darn tiny! Be aware that it doesn't actually HIDE your true url - that's actually considered "link cloaking" and is a little more involved - but it does allow people to access your link by just using the shorter one it sets up for you.

If you'd like to try it out, I've put a toolbar right at the top of this page to make it easy to find and use. And it is totally free to use, which you've just gotta love! Can you imagine how many hits that site must get? They state that it's in the hundreds of thousands of hits per month, so that could add up to quite an interesting little Google AdSense check each month for them I'll bet! Must be nice, huh?!

Impatience Part 2

One of my main focuses with this blog has always been using free, or almost free, alternatives wherever possible, and I'm still sticking with that philosophy. It's just that it gets frustrating sometimes how slow things seem to happen when you settle for these little free "experiment" type things I've been trying lately. You can't argue with the price when things don't cost you anything at all, but sometimes I think I should just start using some forms of paid advertising to make some things happen faster. I guess there probably is some truth to the "you get what you pay for" saying, and that's probably quite true in the realm of advertising! Maybe not always, but probably quite often I'll admit, even though I continue to test the possibilities!

All of the sudden I seem to have quite a few things on my mind that I'm anxious to get involved in and try. I usually like to stick to the one thing at a time rule, but I've recently stumbled into a few different things that I'm eager to try out, so I guess I'll be writing about them soon...probably one at a time though! Stay tuned!

Impatience

It's great that it doesn't cost anything to try this little blog promotion experiment I've described in my last couple of posts, but it's just not creating any meaningful results. The site is getting some traffic, but it seems to be falling off from what it got earlier. So this is starting to seem like more of a waste of time than anything else. I mean, it's pretty clear that I won't be acquiring any great wealth by using my time in this way, so I don't know how much longer I'll stick with it just to get one more sale before I call it quits. Maybe it's actually mostly the same circle of people that look at those profiles on that site or something, which would be tough to prove, but that's one possibility I guess.

Whatever it is, the traffic doesn't seem to want to purchase anything...just look at pictures or videos or whatever is posted. I'm sure that, with persistence, some sales would eventually be made...but it's not the best use of my time to keep striving for. And even though the Google ads that appear on the site are relevent and seem to be just what I would want displayed, they're not earning anything either. I guess I just have to chalk it up to beginner's luck that I earned that sale the very first day I started the promotional profile, so at least I do have that to show for my efforts.

Another Sneaky Experiment

Taking the idea in my last post another step further, I did create a blog to send visitors to the networking site profile to, rather than just linking directly to my ClickBank links. This way I can at least get an idea of how much traffic that profile is really creating. As I described in my last post, it's just a very simple profile I created using a public domain photo of an attractive young lady, and now it includes a link to what is supposed to be her own personal blog site. (When I say sneaky I mean it, don't I?!) Hey, it's just a little experiment to satisfy my curiousity really, and I don't plan on leaving it up for very long...unless of course it suddenly starts making money hand over fist or something! (Hasn't so far!)

It does seem to get quite a bit of quick traffic right after any kind of a post is made on the site it's part of. But in the week or so I've been trying this, I've noticed that the traffic pretty much stops after the post has run it's course. So if you don't post anything for a day, there's no traffic, since that's the only source there is. But it's a good test because of that.

On that site I've included a whole string of ClickBank links promoting various dating success tips that are available, and of course the google ads. There's only a single actual blog post, which just serves as an introduction really, and is written to imply that there will be more to come. Pretty easy to thow together really, and best of all...free! Might be just an amusing little waste of time, but I'll let you know how it goes.

A Creative, Sneaky, ClickBank Sale!

I earned a very "creative" ClickBank sale recently on a spur-of-the-moment kind of idea that didn't even cost anything to try. But it's such a sneaky tactic that I almost hesitate to even admit to what I've done! That is, afterall, what this blog is about though, documenting my successes and failures along the way to discovery of what really works, so it's only fair that I fill you in on this...but it is pretty sneaky!

I've been experimenting lately with one of the many social networking type sites, similar to MySpace. Like MySpace, it's also free to use, so you know it's going to be tempting to me to try to use somehow, since that's what I'm always after is free or very inexpensive promotion ideas. The problem is, most of these social networking sites are usually meant for personal, rather than business, use. So you have to be a little creative if you're going to try to use them to promote anything.

What I noticed was that whenever an attractive female's picture was posted on this site, their profile usually got a huge number of hits in a short amount of time. And depending on just how good looking the person in the picture was, there were also many comments posted from men about how great the girl in the picture looks.

So I had a hunch that if I were to create a profile for a ficticious female and post a picture of an attractive female on it, I'd get the attention of lots of the male members of the site. So I did just that and included a ClickBank link to an ebook on how to successfully meet girls and ask them out. And just like magic, within 12 hours of doing so I had a nice (although sneaky!) ClickBank sale that earned a $49 commission!

The bad news is, this was about a month ago, and since then I've made no more sales, so I'm about to delete this little experimental profile of mine. But it's tempting to just leave it on there, since it doesn't cost anything, afterall. But sooner or later they might start to catch on that the pictures I posted are free stock photos from one of the free photo trading websites! But before I do delete it, I might still try creating a blog to link to from that profile instead, where I can include several more links that might be of interest to those readers. Then I'd have measurable traffic to get an idea of how many are really hitting this link. Plus I could throw the good old Google AdSense ads on there too and see what they might come up with if I make the page about dating, etc. Once again, this is an experiment that doesn't cost anything to try, yet quite a bit can be learned (and maybe even EARNED) from it!

Hardly Worthwhile

It just occurred to me today that I practically never get any clicks from the Google AdSense ads I have on a certain site I won't name. It's common knowledge that Google does not permit websites to "ask" readers to click on their ads. In fact, they seem to want you to avoid mentioning them at all and to just let the readers' own interest lead them to click for more information. So I hesitate to talk about this, even though I usually write honestly about pretty much whatever is on my mind on this blog...but the click rate is so bad I'm considering just removing the AdSense ads from this page altogether.

If you think I'm exaggerating, try this on for size: 6 months, 3 total clicks for a total of 57 cents! I have heard that blogs about Adsense itself and blogs about blogging itself are notoriously bad AdSense earners, but I thought I would do better than 3 clicks in 6 months?! True, I'm talking about a page that gets only minimal traffic so far, since I don't even really promote it anywhere, but it definitely gets SOME traffic daily. I recently even changed to a template that now allows the ads to be positioned on the left side of the page, which has supposedly been proven to work best...but still only 1 click in the last month anyway. The ads look nice, they're blended to the overall look of the rest of the layout and they're all about various ways of making money...they just practically never get clicks.

I guess the problem is that most of my readers know exactly what the ads are since they probably also use them on their own sites. So most fellow bloggers and webmasters tend not to be curious or interested in them enough to click. But still, you would think these ads would be tempting enough to entice more than just 3 clicks in 6 months. I expected so, anyway.

I'm not sure what the real reasons are, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting proper credit for clicks I might be receiving. I have no way to test this if I'm not allowed to click on them myself under any circumstances. But if the ads continue to keep drawing practically no clicks at all, I'll probably just remove them altogether. Or maybe the Yahoo version of the ads might get better results. You never know until you try...and I guess that goes for just about everything in life anyway.

Discovery Of An Accident (Sequel to last post)

I figured I'll try to duplicate the success I had selling the lawn mower in the newspaper and sell the child car seat my son just grew out of. So I wrote a description for it and posted it with some pictures on the blog I used last time. Then I placed the free ad in the local newspaper, again including my domain name that points to the blog. Everything was pretty much the same as last time, so now all I had to do was sit back and wait for all the ad clicks again in between the phone responses, right?

Well, this time the newspaper quietly just deleted the web address from my ad. When I questioned them on this they said they don't allow web addresses in their free articles for sale ads, only phone numbers. So I asked if this is a new rule or something because my last ad was printed with the web address a few weeks ago. They said it must have been printed by accident, since only paid ads can have web addresses included. So my "Accidental Discovery" last time was actually CAUSED by an accident.

This is frustrating! You just can't get anything for nothing it seems. What an advantage that was to be able to publish a web address in a large circulation newspaper for no charge, even though it brought extremely targeted traffic literally overnight. But they realize this for what it is and decided not to allow it anymore...likely because I brought it to their attention, in fact.

Oh well. They do offer free photo posting on their own website...so perhaps I could brand all my photos with the web address. I could try that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they rejected any pics that advertised a web page for the same reason. They realize how powerful a web site can be to advertise with, since I could include a hundred more items for sale on it if I wanted to - none of which they would benefit from. But then, if they charged me $5 to place the ad, what good would the $5 or so the AdSense ads might bring in be?

It's easy to feel like you just can't win sometimes! You can though...I guess I just have to think bigger than this. I thought I was though - in addition to the AdSense ads I also included a few links to ClickBank products under my item description, as "recommended links". Problem is, nobody saw them anyway this time.

My other idea was to re-record the voice mail greeting on my cell phone to announce that web address first for people who are calling about the ad in the paper. Then, of course, offering to let them leave a message if they're interested. The newspaper can't stop me from doing that - they have to print my phone number!

This makes me feel like getting a great big bumper sticker printed for my car to advertise with - they can't stop me from doing that either!!! :)

An Accidental Discovery

I sold that lawn mower from the local newspaper ad very quickly. But I left the pictures of it on the blog that I listed in the ad, with a new post stating that it had been sold. Naturally, all the traffic stopped when the newspaper ad ended, and in turn, so did the Adsense clicks & earnings. This local paper also includes a listing of ads purchased in their seperate weekly paper, which is really just advertisements and is given away for free. So this ad just came out in the little weekly paper around the end of last week, so I started getting calls on the lawn mower again.

But here's the interesting part...I also started getting quite a few hits to the blog site again - and even several Adsense ad clicks! And once again, considering the number of visitors that statcounter.com reported - more than half of the visitors clicked on Adsense ads before they left!

So I seem to have accidentally stumbled on a partially devious way to make some money here. The ad continued to run, and even be run again in a separate publication, even though I really had no more product to sell. Yet, the traffic the ad brought in was so well targeted to the Adsense ads that appeared, the click-through rate was fantastic! So while they didn't find what they really wanted, which was the actual lawn mower I had already sold - many were more than willing to click on the ads for the information they provided.

This isn't to say that I plan on running a whole series of "for sale" ads for items I don't actually have for sale, but it appears if one was willing to do this they could probably earn quite a few dollars just on the ad clicks the want-to-be buyers would generate. Personally, this seems just a little too dishonest for my conscience, so I wouldn't actually run ads for things I don't have to sell. I'm not even very high on the idea of doing that with the plan of using a 3rd party dropshipping company to do the shipping of the items you advertise. That's considered a legitimate way to make money, and the hardest part of that is finding a dropshipping company that's worthwhile to use. But I do certainly see the benefit of using the blog to assist in selling items that I really do have for sale, so I will continue to do that whenever I have something to sell.

I must say, this makes it clear how easy it could be to create a substantial income from those targeted ads if you simply generate well targeted traffic. It doesn't even have to be a great amount of traffic, as long as it's very well targeted. So that's what I need to focus on is ways to do just that. But in the meantime, this was a pretty interesting little accidental discovery!

Another Successful Blog Experiment

I'm pretty satisfied with myself right now, even if I do say so myself. It's not much, really...(doesn't take much to impress me!)...but I think it's a good sign. That new blog I started really scored some pretty good AdSense ad clicks today.

Here's what I really did. I had a spare lawn mower that I had decided to sell by advertising it in my local newspaper. This paper offers free ads for inexpensive items, and they run for 3 days. Well, I thought I could set up a little blog just for this too, and post a few pictures of the mower on it, etc. And if I used my domain name, it would fit in the short classified ad they give you for free. (Only 4 lines.) I figured, who knows, put some AdSense ads on there too and see what happens - maybe I'll even get a few clicks.

The mower sold on the very first day, but I left the ad in the paper since it was free anyway. Boy am I glad I did! I got more paid clicks today than any single day back in December with my fairly popular baby-alive blog that month. And the clickthrough rate was way way better too - almost a click for every 2 visitors the page had today!

Turns out that this was a pretty good idea! Most of the readers who came online to see pictures of the lawnmower I advertised were finding all the lawnmower related AdSense ads hard to resist clicking on!

I'd like to think this confirms that I'm starting to figure this out, starting to know what I'm doing with this Google AdSense publishing. I can do this whenever I sell things in the newspaper and make a few more dollars on the AdSense clicks, while showing pictures of the items that wouldn't normally get to be seen in the newspaper classifieds. And it's all absolutely COST FREE, which is my favorite price in the world!

This also marks another ever so small milestine, but a milestone for me nontheless. I'm now more than 25% of the way toward that elusive First Ever Check from Google AdSense, which needs to be at least $100. (I'm over $26 now!) I know, it doesn't sound very impressive to most people I'm sure, but that will be a real cause for celebration the day I finally receive that first check from Google. I've already warned my wife to expect some celebration when that finally happens in the (hopefully!) near future! It will be nice to be able to show her an actual check, rather than those tiny little numbers on the earnings screen...and most importantly, it will mean that all this stuff I'm learning to do is actually starting to work.

Domain Forwarding Problem Solved!

Well, I should have called GoDaddy as soon as I started having that problem. Solving it turned out to be as simple as a 10 minute call to their toll free customer service line! Now I feel pretty FOOLISH (notice today's date?) for not having done so a week ago!

I guess I'm just bull-headed enough to insist on trying to solve "simple" problems like that myself, just by searching around the internet forums, etc. That USUALLY works for getting the information you need, but in this case, for whatever reason I couldn't find much help. In fact, I saw some posts by people saying that GoDaddy's customer service wasn't of any help, so I hesitated to give them a chance because of that. Now I'm sorry I did - it turned out to be a fairly simple matter.

For everyone else's benefit, here's what solved my problem: My domain wasn't forwarding because it (for whatever reason) was missing the proper forwarding IP address. So the GoDaddy rep. had me enter their correct forwarding IP address, which is: 64.202.189.170. I was told that no matter what anything else was set as, there would be no forwarding done without this. Another 10 minutes later that domain was instantly forwarding to my blog!

Needless to say, I have no complaints about GoDaddy's service, although I do think their help screens should explain this fairly simple detail. I was told they do, but as much as I looked for it I didn't see it explained anywhere.

Just goes to show you...sometimes you just have to talk to the right person to steer you back in the right direction.

Domain Forwarding Problems

I can't believe all the trouble I've been having with getting one of my domain names to point to a new blogger blog I've set up. I really only set it up to use for posting pictures of things I put up for sale in my local paper's classified ads, but I wanted to use a domain name I have with GoDaddy to point to it with so it's shorter to print in classified ads. The more I look around the internet, the more confusion I find about how (or if) this is possible to do. I KNOW it's possible because I've had this very blog being pointed to by my domain name computer-income.com for several months. That's the domain I had purchased through Host4Profit, (part of the PlugInProfit waste of time and money) which I dropped out of since it was too expensive. But the domain itself, actually through enom.com is still working great forwarding to this blog. I haven't tried calling GoDaddy about this yet, but I think I'm going to have to because I'm not having any luck with this so far.

Dealing With Distractions

Wow, I didn't realize it's been quite awhile since my last post here. Fittingly so, since I haven't been doing much with internet marketing. Seems like it's been one distraction after another lately. So be warned that now I've got a lot of writing to get out of my system - it might be a long one here today! :)

For starters, we got a new cat and then shortly after a new dog too. (Emmy and Pepe, respectively.) So that's certainly been an adventure at times - but a fun one! And I had all kinds of trouble with my laptop after my kids were playing Disney toddler games on it. I actually spent 3 evenings getting it right again. (Sounds like we need to supervise them more closely while they play computer games from now on, doesn't it?!) I've never seen the mouse pointer totally disappear before, with even the Windows setup disk unable to restore it...but I finally got it straightened out.

I also downloaded a couple of new ebooks, so I've been studying those. One was a book on using the wildly popular video hosting site, youtube.com, to promote your own websites with. It's one of those that's being offered with resale rights, and it already seems to be all over the place. Because of this I didn't really care about trying to resell it, so I bought it for only about $3.00 from a guy on eBay without the resale rights included. For $3.00 I think the information itself is much more valuable than just having another ebook that I could try to sell amidst all the others doing the same thing. (I've never been big on that kind of situation.)

Really, in this case, just using the techniques the book teaches seems more worthwhile than trying to sell the book itself. It's called "Tube Traffic", if your curious, and if I was you I'd do a search for it on eBay if you're interested in buying it. You don't need to pay the $37.00 to $47.00 that most people are trying to sell it for.

The other one I downloaded didn't even cost me anything. It's the new 2007 revised edition of Honest Riches by Holly Mann. And I've got to say, this lady means it when she says honest. I bought this from her about 5 or 6 months ago, and she just emailed me a link to download the revised version for no extra charge. I think that was a really nice gesture on her part, and one you don't usually see among the world of marketing gurus! Just another reason I so highly recommend her ebook. Now this isn't to say that she'll always give everyone free upgrades everytime she revises it in the future, but she did this time anyway. It was well worth the trouble too...it looks to be about twice as many pages as the last one, with lots of new step by step details, information and examples included.

As you probably know, I don't plug many things on this blog because I've always meant for this to be about stuff I've learned as I go along, but I really do HIGHLY recommend Honest Riches by Holly Mann. I hope if you do buy it that you'll buy it through my link right there, considering that I never steer you wrong on this blog, and I hope you appreciate that! :) I agree with Holly's honest policy, so everything I write here is what I've found to be true...not just stuff that I've decided to try to sell you.

So all distractions aside, now I'd better get back to work setting up some streams of internet income!

More Wordpress Discoveries

Trying to use WordPress, (is it Wordpress or WordPress anyway?) I've also noticed that it doesn't offer access to HTML control over the templates like Blogger does. So even though they have more templates to choose from, you don't have much control over their use. Not with the free version, anyway. And keeping in step with my usual strategy of using whatever free or inexpensive alternatives there are for whatever I'm trying to do, that would mean that's what I'm using.

So one of the problems this causes is that I can't install the code for the totally free web statistics program I've been using. (StatCounter.com) Wordpress does offer their own blog stats page, so maybe this isn't all that crucial, but I do miss not being able to use StatCounter. I've seen some techno-geek types who seem to know how to do everything saying there are ways to insert it as a text item on the page somewhere, but even then the referral information still can't be tracked - just total hits.

So even though many people seem to prefer Wordpress over Blogger, I can't say I do myself. My plan is to promote affiliate products and generate Google AdSense income, and WordPress seems to frown on using their blogs to do either. So there just doesn't seem to be any good reason for me to use it. The only possible one being the 3rd party plug-ins you can use with it to allow Google AdSense ads to be displayed. There's at least one I've read about that offers a "sandbox" feature that allows you to see the actual ads that will display in advance. I'd love to be able to do that! So that's probably the only reason I'm giving WordPress a try for at least one blog.

And one more thing I've find out...you can't really totally delete a WordPress blog once it's been created. You can delete your own work on it, but the name you choose can never be re-used again - it's permanently unavailable from then on. (Even to the one who created it.) Seems awfully final, doesn't it? I have enough trouble making decisions like what to name my blogs without knowing that it can NEVER be used again once it's used and deleted. I wonder if Blogger treats blog names the same way?

So maybe it would be worthwhile to go out and try to create every good blog name you can think of just to tie them up and possibly be able to sell/transfer them to others in the future? (I wonder if WordPress "allows" that?!)

John

Experimenting With Wordpress

I hear so much discussion about which blog site people like to use more, Blogger or Wordpress. I've been using Blogger so far, so I thought I'd try Wordpress for my next project since so many people seem to prefer it. I've got to say though, I don't know if it's because I started out with Blogger first or not, but I find Wordpress pretty hard to figure out. It's got some nice looking templates and maybe a few more features, but I definitely find it harder to figure out how to accomplish what I want to with it. And there's very little help along the way...you just have to grind through and figure out how to do what you need to do by trial and error until you figure it out. Plus, you can't insert Google AdSense ads without downloading some sort of a plug-in first, and I don't believe they even allow you to post affiliate links. So if you're totally new at blogging, in my own humble opinion, I would still recommend Blogger myself. Hopefully they'll get their own bugs worked out before long, too.

I did stick with using Wordpress long enough to create a little blog just to try it out, so I need to start promoting it and get some inbound links set up for it. I'd like to see if I can at least duplicate the modest success I had with the Baby Alive blog this past Christmas season. But I still need to figure out how to deal with that plug-in that's required just to get the AdSense ads posted to it.

AdSense or Affiliate Commisions?

I've been reading some information lately on both affiliate marketing and AdSense publishing. I guess sooner or later I need to decide which one I really want to concentrate my efforts on, since they are really two completely different and separate things.

I suppose you can certainly create websites that promote your affiliate links and also have Google AdSense ads displayed, but it seems like it's probably better to concentrate fully on one of the other. At least in the early going, since they really are two different things.

I love the idea of Google AdSense publishing because so much of what you have to worry about with affiliate marketing doesn't even apply. For instance, you don't have to worry about link cloaking, since you're not using links anyway. All you need to do is create a website, or blog, that has enough information on a given subject to attract people, bring in some well targeted traffic, and then let the Google AdSense ads do their job.

Eventually I plan to incorporate both affiliate links AND AdSense ads on my site(s), but for now I'm going to concentrate more on using AdSense, since I've already had SOME success with it.

AdSense Nonsense on New Blogger

I don't know why, but I'm having problems since converting this blog to the "new" Blogger format, which I didn't really want to do in the first place but felt sort of forced to. I kind of wish I didn't now. Ever since I agreed to let it be converted I can't make any changes to the AdSense ads. It keeps giving me an error message that seems to indicate that the wrong account is listed. I even emailed Blogger about it and they never even responded.

On a positive note, I did get a new idea for another blog to draw AdSense clicks on, so I'll be getting that in order shortly. It will be interesting to see if a newly created blog will have the same problem with AdSense or not. I guess I might just have to remove AdSense altogether from this one and re-add it from scratch.

I don't know if this very blog is very well suited to using AdSense ads anyway though. To be honest, they're getting practically no results at all on here. I'm not really surprised though; I've seen several others write that blogs that are about blogging itself don't usually get much AdSense clicking action. It's like hey, there are no secrets here - people who read this know I make some money if the ads get clicked on. But write a blog on any number of other unrelated subjects and the readers of those don't even suspect it...so they feel free to click away.

Same thing with affiliate marketing links - people that are already ClickBank affiliates, etc., recognize an affiliate link from a mile away, so you need to get into "link cloaking" techniques, etc., to try to make it less obvious to them. It's like trying to sell books on basic sales techniques to already experienced sales people - they know all about what you're trying to do. So do I really want to try to fool them somehow, and can it even be done? I guess the old saying about being able to fool some of the people some of the time, etc., makes the most SENSE afterall!

John

Starting The New Year Right!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Now that the holidays are over, (and all the distractions that go along with them) I can get back to concentrating on this new business of mine. For a change, I'm starting this year with a PLAN, not just a wish for a way to make some extra money. It's a nice feeling.

Once again, the "baby-alive" blog I put up as more or less an experiment worked pretty well to get some Google Adsense earnings. And even with very little promotion from a handful of comment posts I placed in a few well targeted areas. So I'm excited just knowing that I could just as well create several similar sites and earn that much more income from them...and that's what I now plan to do.

That seasonal idea was a good test I think, since it drew a surprising amount of traffic pretty quickly. Although, as expected, by Christmas Eve it was pretty much the end of the AdSense clicks. It was exciting while it lasted though. But now I'll need to choose some non-seasonal subjects to create some sites about so that won't be a problem. Of course, seasonal subjects can be successful while they last...but as far as immediate ideas, January sure seems boring after November & December. Oh well, I'll think of something! (I hope!)

John