In case you haven’t read my postings on the various webmaster forums, a large part of my online income is made through ’s outstanding Partner Program. Well imagine my dismay this past week when Ebay banned GoDaddy’s IP range from accessing the partner feeds and API. After giving GoDaddy a day to mend fences with Ebay, and numerous calls with my hosting counselor (when you own a certain number of sites and a certain number of accounts GoDaddy gives you a real person to talk to, and not just a kid with a script and a phone) I moved several sites to Hostgator. Even though Hostgator offered to move my sites for me I refused for a couple of reasons:
1- I still have other sites that I left on the GoDaddy accounts where these were moved from, and I don’t trust giving access, even for a day or two, to folks I don’t know.
2- I had already lost 2.5 days of revenue and didn’t want to wait for the Hostgator guys to figure do my job for me.
So I spent several hours exporting and importing databases, and executing FTP transfers.
The end result? Those pages now load faster than ever and my visitors rewarded me on the first day back online with my best numbers yet. I guess I really was losing lots of customers due to GoDaddy’s slow loading times (the sites in question had to make API calls to Ebay each time the pages loaded).
Of course I can’t be too harsh on GoDaddy. After all it was Ebay that banned them in the first place, and my contact on the GoDaddy side did inform me that the ban was due to the actions of a soon-to-be-former GoDaddy employee, and not due to the practices of the company itself.
But funk dat. I want to vent anyway.
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
Yep, that’s what the seller of the currently hot “Get Google Ads Free” ebook is claiming.
Well, I happened to get my hands on a review copy, and to be honest, it’s not very “Free” at all. Most of his premise deals with utilizing other modes of website income, such as PPM and flat-rate banners and ads to defray the costs of Adwords.
For example if you are paying 10 cents per click, but are making 12 cents every time someone visits your site (average, of course..) the that can be construed as getting “Google Ads Free“.
There is only one problem here. Unless you have been doing this for awhile, or are already financially successful in other areas, as I and others are blessed to be, then you may not be prepared to float the adsense costs, which are billed to you at set intervals, until you get your checks for the other affiliate and PPC programs, some of which only pay once per month and even, in a few cases, once per quarter. Some are crooks and will never pay you at all.
So unless you are ballin’ outta control, or just plain stupid, you won’t do what the author suggests on his pitch page and run up thousands of dollars in Adwords costs. Google will get their money, one way or another.
You, on the other hand, may not.
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
I’ve played with alot of SEO programs, some very good and some very bad. Recently I was asked to check out the SEO Elite application, which has just released their newest version.
To be honest, I didn’t find that it was revolutionary, but I did get some value out of it. The modules that I found the most useful were the keyword analyzers and the email list gathering features.
For those not in the know, the email list gatherer will analyze the sites you designate, or those gathered from a keyword search, and will obtain a contact email address. If one can not be found on the site, it will instead gather one from the whois listing of the website.
This is both a gift and a curse, believe me. If you don’t scrutinize your results you could wind up emailing a google.com or msn.com directly via one of their many knockoff addresses. I have it on good authority that this is a good way to get yourself added to thier various spam lists, quickly, which could damage your ability to communicate with your legit customers and contacts, if you use an email address on your real domain (which I don’t recommend).
The directory link submission tool was not nearly as automated as it was advertised to be. I did have to manually enter alot of information to get that going properly.
The backlink analyzer was where the app really shines. Yes, I know that you can get the same functionality (somewhat) from doing Google queries, but for the newbie, or the lazy marketer, this puts it all together nicely. The analyzer will analyze the top sites in your category of choice and will tell you who they link to and who is linking to them. From there you can export the results into a link procurement project which guides you through ways to attempt to get links from the same, and similar, sites.
Overall if you are just getting started in the world of Internet Marketing and SEO, then I do recommend SEO Elite. Likewise if you are like me, and enjoy making the most money while doing the least possible work, then it’s not a bad way to go.
If you decide to go that route you can pick it up here.
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
Is Money really the root of all evil?
I find that hard to believe. I know that different religions take different approaches to money, and the amassing of it, epecially in very large amounts, but isn’t the root of all evil a bit harsh?
After all, unless I’m mistaken, all religions ask people to donate money (tithing, zakah, etc.) and I don’t see the clergy turning the money away because its “The Root Of All Evil”.
So this leads me to the conclusion that the priesthoods and scholars must knwo someting about money that the average person isn’t privvy to. There must be some redeeming quality about money that makes it justified, in spite of its less-than-holy reputation. There must be something about it that which makes all of the centuries of bad press be brought to naught.
I think that I’ve discovered that redeeming quality. It seems that money, in sufficient quantity, enables one to have the freedom to pursue the real goals of their lives.
Your goals are likely quite different than mine, but one think binds us. We both need money, directly or indirectly, to live.
But imagine that you find yourself blessed to be in a position in which you no longer have to struggle for money. Imagine that you have money coming from multiple sources in sufficient quantity that the loss of any one of them would not severely impact your freedom or livelihood.
Only once you achieve such a financial status will you be able to truly stop the ridiculous routines that so many of us go through to make money. Only then can your “real life” begin.
I invite all of you to stop looking at the pursuit of wealth as an end or as a goal. As long as you look at it that way, it will likely elude you.
It wasn’t until I stopped caring abou money and focused on the things that I really want out of life that the money began to come easily.
I hope it does for you as well, my friend.
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
I’m a sponge for information.
Since my aunt first made me read “The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis, I’ve been hooked on picking up every book that I can get my hands on.
At some point that graduated into reading real-deal business material, particularly where marketing is concerned.
Guerilla Marketing is one of my all time favorites, but it’s not the absolute best when it comes to online sales and advertising.
Fast forward to my reading of The Black Mask Project.
This, perhaps overhyped, but thoroughly entertaining work is Guerilla Marketing for the Online World.
Sure, its scope it horribly limited (Search Engine “Black-Hat” techniques) but it does teach the casual reader some tricks that will probably net a few hundred extra visitors per day, if done right. If done well it could net alot more.
The method centers around ways to fool Google’s algorithm into ranking your content better than it normally would (or should). Of course if you’ve snoozed and haven’t monetized your site, then that extra juice won’t do much for you, but give you bragging rights among your buddies.
This is by the same folks who brought you Day Job Killer. and Adwords Miracle, both of which I recommend.
And yes, I make money if you buy them. Do you think I’d waste my time writing this stuff if I didn’t?
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
A kid that I know asked me yesterday how I make money online. Now being a true Chicagoan (Chicago, born and bred baby), I couldn’t give him all of the keys, but I did throw him a bone, so to speak. I told him that the easiest way to get started making money online, with the least amount of risk, is to begin blogging (this is one in a list of my blogs, and the only one where I actually use my real name) and to place Adsense, and other PPC/PPM, ads on your page. Of course Adsense only gives you chump change for showing their ads, but if you have a large readership it can add up fast.Put a few high-paying product links onto your page and you can begin making some good money.
Of course by now his eyes had begun to glaze over, as always happens when I start explaining Internet Marketing to people offline, but of course when he asked the inevitable question, the one question that all of us in this business get asked, my answer woke him up fast.
What’s the question, you ask? Oh come on, you know what it was:
“How much money do you make doin’ this stuff?“.
Yep. Wide Awake.
www.Zeaun.com | I Make Money online By Teaching You To Make Money Online
Shoemoney, of Shoemoney.com brought back memories for me. Those of us who are serial-entrepeneurs know the joy of coming up with business ideas by the dozens, some of which, when you look back at them, were patently ridiculous.
But I have to admit that the items that he mentions take the cake. I don’t think I ever would have sunk money into some of the stuff that he has.
But I guess it paid off in the end.
What do you think?
John Chow has written an interesting great article on Peel Away Ads.
I know lots of folks are using these to make good money, but I personally don’t use them on any of my sites. It’s more a thing of aesthetics for me, than anything. I just don’t care for how they look. But make no mistake, you can make big money with them.
Besides, as most of you will find, your adspace on your page can fill up very quickly. Peel away ads are a nice way to add another advertisement without taking up precious space. If this is a viable option for your website, be sure to take advantage of it!
Jim Karter has written a great article on Long-tail Keywords, and how to find them, assuming you have a website (like a blog).
Long-tail keywords are the bread and butter of the Adwords game, and I’ve personally done very well with them. Be sure to read his posting so you can do well with them too!
So unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re heard of ClickBank, one of the easiest to use affiliate networks around. Yes, there are other affiliate networks that you can make money with, some of them much more than Clickbank, but for the beginner, ClickBank is money.Now let’s put things into perspective though: You probably will not become a millionaire with ClickBank alone.
Why?
Because, at the time of this writing, Clickbank maxes out at $100/sale per affiliate. Now hypothetically if you could sell all $100 commission items 100 times per week, I admit that you could make $10k each week and probably buy a pretty little sportscar and impress your mom.
But that’s not real money, and it’s also not really likely.
Take into account that those $100 items are also among the most popular. That means that as a beginner, you would be going heads-up against some of the biggest, most savvy, internet marketers around. And if you add to that the inexperience of the beginner in keyword research and marketing strategies, that all equals almost imminent failure.
Now I’m not bashing ClickBank. I’ve made plenty of money with them, and I expect to make plenty more, but don’t snooze. You can lose big with ClickBank if you’re not careful. Not because clickbank will take your money (as an affiliate they will not) , but because most strategies for using ClickBank involve blowing tons of money on PPC marketing to make peanuts.
Here’s the key to making ClickBank bank:
Find and market very obscure items, that still pay moderately well. For example you could market a great book on how to stop hair-pulling (Trichotillomania) which, although a very niche market without a lot of competition, still pays over $30/sale. Now you won’t get rich on one ad like that, but if you actually work at it (yes Internet Marketing, done properly, takes work like anything else) and duplicate that strategy over 50 products, then you may very well be on the way to making a decent living at Affiliate Marketing.
Just remember, don’t put up more than you can afford to lose!