Webmaster Tips for making MORE money

With my recent success in promoting Clickbank Download products, I thought it was time to step up my affiliate education and take a dive into the deep end with Online Dating. Online Dating is a well known competitive niche so no better place to learn I thought.

Apart from joining and flirting with girls online in the name of research, The amount of Online Dating Affiliates in the market suggests that Online Dating has its perks. I thought I had a good understanding of PPC from my previous research but let me tell you that to even break even in Online Dating, you need to learn every detail of search marketing to even survive. After spending over 500USD into PPC traffic I got very friendly with an increasingly annoying term called ‘Google Quality Score’.

In competitive niches, the RoI is usually low for most of the high traffic keywords and against the big boys with deep pockets and higher commission arrangements with the merchants you need an advantage or at least level the odds as much as possible. You can be assured that when they are spending thousands of dollars on their PPC campaign, their Quality Score will be optimized to be as good as they can get. For those even newer than me at this game, basically the better your QS, the cheaper it costs for your traffic. Its Google’s way to ensure that their search results are relevant or according to one of my affiliate managers, ensures that Google’s income are assured.

It seems to me that Google has a dislike to Online Dating affiliate sites and my new Online Dating domain can’t seem to get above Poor QS for any keywords however I optimize the ad or landing page. My Direct to Merchant campaign seems to do better and suggests to me that I need to start making my domain more online dating-y in the eyes of the Google gods. This goes in line with the word on the street that Google is using SEO factors in their PPC, not a bad thing in my view for a late starter like me.

My strategy at the moment is not 100% but I have a few ideas. For the new domain have just knocked up a simple comparison page on the advice of my Singlesnet affiliate manager who has been great. I have also brought another dating site at http://www.onlinedatingland.com which I’ll use for some research and alternative approach.

My return for my PPC investments isn’t that bad actually and just about breaks even so I hope once I get my campaigns set up I can make money from the niche. You can check the above sites to see what kind of stuff I have been doing in the future.

Today I wanted to introduce a great affiliate marketing resource that I have been spending a lot of time on recently.

As you guys know, I’ve been looking into affiliate marketing. Now, I already know a bit about Internet Marketing with a number of successful sites, so most of the e-books I found to mostly filled with basic online marketing material with a small part about the stuff that I needed to learn.

I joined PepperJam recently and found a link to Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom in their resource page. I took them up on the USD1 offer and enrolled.

Now this is what we are talking about!!

Interviews with Super Affiliates, Case Studies, Step by Step guides (Affiliate guides and not article marketing or what have you), monthly Affilaite magazine, all great stuff and I’ll be continuing my subscription due to how helpful AC has been to me. This is not a common occurrence let me tell you.

I’ve been a member for just over 2 weeks, downloaded and listened to about 7 hours of interviews on my iPod, read 2 magazines and I’ve barely scratched the surface. For beginners, they also have a step by step tutorial which takes the complete beginners from zero to profits in a unique system. I already make 4 digit profits a month so I didn’t go through this process, maybe later when I have more time.

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I’m happy to say that our article directory script is 90% ready and its mostly the site admin stuff left to do. Therefore, we are launching the client side today, located at http://www.xenyo.com/articles/ .

I expect there to be a few bits and pieces missing for a couple of weeks as we work to perfect it for the product Launch.

Affiliate marketing wise things have really improved and have already broken my 2008 target. The majority is through PPC affiliate marketing and I really need time to scale things up more and fine-tune.

Time being the keyword here as we are also about to launch an upgrade to one of our existing projects. Its all good I suppose as things are getting crossed off in my to-do lists.

Take care, I need to go do more research on what products to promote on our first proper PPC affiliate marketing project.

Happy New Year everyone!

As you know, i am a firm believer of setting targets so this post will be about our targets for the new year. We’ll break it down to 2 sections, first regarding my general targets and then the second part about targets for some of our projects.

Matt’s targets
1. By First Quarter - Finish off or drastically reducing time spent on consulting and freelance work and focus on our projects.
2. By First Quarter - Double average 2007 monthly income. This will be tight but hopefully will see progress by March.
3. Spend more time looking into affiliate marketing - Depending on no.1., hoping to break into 4 figure monthly income on affiliate marketing by April or thereabouts.
4. Start steady membership subscription income on IRateThis by first half.

Projects targets
Xenyo - Articles launch in January along with Article Directory script in BETA. CMS script BETA launch by end of first quarter.
CheckSaveBuy - Finish first phase development by first quarter along with steady monthly income.
IRateThis - Site upgrade to be released in January 2008 and continued growth in first half 2008.
ArticleGOLD - First Quarter target is to continue working on making everyday administration hands off for myself. First half target for the directory will be to brand it as one of the top 3 article directories.

Not setting any firm targets on our other stuff as I think we are over-stretching our team with the above already but if anything comes up, maybe we’ll need to increase our team or get some freelance help in.

What a strange title for this long due SEO post, let me explain.

During my late night surfing, I came across a Blogging Blog (??) with an article about keywords and more specifically how keyword tools seems to be showing over 1000 hits for the term ‘keywords MP3′. I thought it was interesting anyways so as we do at Xenyo, we’re gonna join their experiment and see how far we get with this post.

A quick check on http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com confirms their data but I have my doubts regarding the actual amount of hits reported. Basically with keyword research, I find its 30% keyword tools and 70% hunch … but hey even at 30% thats around 600 searches a day!!!

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Firstly an update on our affiliate progress.

Behind schedule is all I can say (stay with me though as we have made progress ..).

We have started work on the first of our main affiliate based sites and its a coupons site … not groundbreaking but hey it works and I think we can do it better than most so your not gonna change my mind.

I won’t release the domain yet but I am hoping to get the initial launch out before Xmas to some degree if only for search engine spidering.

We have followed the ebooks way of niche marketing and knocked up a quick affiliate content site about Zunes .. the Microsoft MP3 player.

What we did was to knock up a quick template site into a domain we had areviews.com which will host our niche affiliate content sites once I have time to make more.

I got a writer to write me up a few articles on Zunes for around $80 and uploaded those. There are 2 page that actually have affiliate deals on them at the moment on Zune Downloads and also Cheap Zunes .

Obviously more work can be done to make it convert more, etc but it gave me a good feel of what its all about which was what I was after really.

Anyways, to date the site has made me over USD100 in commissions so not bad going as its starting to get natural traffic in now and thats without much link building.

Other content pages were put up with no direct relation to the conversion pages which needs to be retouched such as Ipod vs Zunes which I think a link to the Cheap Zunes or something would be nice.

Also I need to find a good Zune Video Converter program to market on that page.

All in all, slow progress but progress at least. I blame it on the too many eggs excuse. Its a common trap and nearly as deadly as the ‘I will start after …. ‘ excuse, but more on that in another post.

WidgetBucks has started sending its October 07 earnings to its happy and relieved webmasters. The word is that a lot of webmasters that have held back on trying out WidgetBucks are now confident enough to give it s shot.

Don’t worry if you haven’t received your payment yet though as Mpire has said its going to take a few days before everyone gets their check/paypal.

The USD25 free offer is still open for publishers through here .

This is a question that is appearing in our forums a lot recently and to avoid repeating myself, I will do a post about it.

Quoting the Oxford Dictionary:

Marketing
the promotion and selling of products or services.

The question by itself is a lazy question and doesn’t provide the necessarily information that is required to allow a proper reply from people that wants to help. Some of the things you need to consider and point out if you are asking this question are:

• What are your skill sets?
• How much time are you planning to devote to making money via Internet Marketing?
• Do you have any areas of expertise in a subject or niche?
• How much money or resources can you spend on your ventures?
• What is your current knowledge of Internet marketing?
• Do you own the product or Service you are marketing?

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I suppose most webmasters have seen their Adsense earnings drop in the last couple of days.

Google has changed their ads so that only the title and URL are clickable and many webmasters are reporting lower CTR. Personally I see this as a move in the right direction as it means less accidental clicks and advertisers getting more for their money.

Comparing my stats I think I am down around 20-30USD a day. Its not too worrying as I decided to not rely on Adsense as my main revenue stream a few months ago. With this change it wont be long until Adsense isn’t my main money maker I think. Currently though it still represents over 50% of my daily earnings.

Its time .. err passed time for an update.

Things on the affiliate front is picking up after a slow start due to other commitments. A mini-site has been started and currently awaiting for Google to approve the PPC campaign. To be honest, not much research was done on it and its a popular niche - Zunes to be exact. Let me see how it turns out before I post more about that one.

Having some fun with publisher network referrals, mainly from this site actually. My referrals are growing everyday and the beauty of it is that the revenue from most programs lasts for a year. Yesterday I think it was near USD20 but that included a bulk one from Clicksor which basically compresses an approved accounts referral fees in one lot that was accumulated during the approval process.

All in all I think its still over USD10 a day steady and growing. Its also fun to see how your referrals are doing.