I’ve Been Lazy
I haven’t been completely lazy lately, I have been busy, but I have neglected a few of my sites. I’m working launching this blog as well as a fitness blog, but I haven’t been posting as much as one should on a new blog. There’s a couple reasons for that:
- Fantasy Basketball - I’ve been busy working on HoopsAvenue Fantasy Basketball. I want the league to run flawlessly which means the application needs to perfectly user-friendly and bug-free. I’ve been putting a lot of time into getting all that together so it’s completely ready for launch on October 1st.
- The Olympics! - I’ve watched the Olympics every night it’s been on. I am hooked. Tonight is the closing ceremony, though, so that will be coming to an end. I’m going to miss the Olympics for sure.
- Lack of ideas - I still don’t have a 100% focus for this blog. It’s good to laser target a blog to a specific niche, but I guess I am going to go after multiple niches. I want to talk about entrepreneurship, internet marketing, and my own projects.
I also have a full-time job and try to work out regularly so my time is limited, but hopefully I can pick up the posting pace!
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4 Easy Ideas To Keep You Out of the Cubicle
What’s your primary reason for blogging? I’m sure you enjoy doing it, probably enjoy the topic, but most likely your main reason is to make enough money to not have to work a “real job”. But, are you looking at all your money making options? It’s important to diversify as you never know what might happen to your blog. Even one of the most popular bloggers John Chow fell out of favor of Google and saw his traffic crash! The same could happen to you. The question is: are you prepared to handle it or will you be dusting off your resume when it happens? Here are 5 Easy Ideas To Keep You Out of the Cubicle:
- Start another blog/website - Assuming you have a blog, you’re already online, but if you only have 1, you could be in trouble. Use your online presence to launch another blog or website in a completely different niche to protect yourself from the fluctuations of the market. Make sure you are interested in the topic though!
- Offer resume writing services - Since you have a blog, you must be a pretty good writer. Why not take those writing skills and offer cover letters and resumes for people who do want jobs. I just did this myself the other night. The first few will take some time, but once you get a system in place, it’s easy money! You can charge upwards of $100 per resume/cover letter if you’re good.
- Tutor - This one isn’t for everyone, but I have personal experience in this area and would highly recommend it if you are an expert in some school subjects. Math tutoring is probably the most lucrative and easy to find clients. If you can tutor calculus (like I do sometimes), you can command high fees. Another thing to point out is that tutoring clients are unlike any other kind of client I have dealt with…they LOVE to pay you and usually want even more of your services (if you’re good, of course). Keep in mind, though, that fees can vary greatly by geographic location.
- Freelance - Granted you’ve probably already thought of this one, but if you haven’t, you really need to consider it! With sites like Elance and Guru, anybody can market their services. If you enjoy writing, doing SEO, programming, designing, or creating graphics, you’ll have plenty of clients to offer your services to. The key is to find something that is extremely easy for you to do, then you’ll feel like you’re getting paid for having fun.
I hope this post has helped you come up with some new ways to make money doing what you love!
Entering my First Contest!
I’ve got HoopsAvenue, spwidgets, and The Fitness General in my website portfolio so it only makes sense that I enter The Sports Dollar’s Contest of Sports Sexiness.
The contest is real simple. Bloggers such as myself earn “tickets” by doing things like making a post (like this one) about the contest and linking to sponsors and subscribing to sponsor RSS feeds. There are 4 ways to earn tickets:
- Write a blog post like this (5 tickets)
- Subscribe to the Sports Dollar RSS (5 tickets) like I just did!
- Link to a sponsor like NESW Sports :) (1 ticket)
- Subscribe to a sponsor like Fantasy Baseball at Razzball which I just did! (1 ticket)
Actually I linked to 2 sponsors and its 1 ticket each so that’s 13 tickets right there. Now, there are 10 bonus tickets if you complete all 4 steps, but I’m not sure if that would mean I would need to subscribe to all 20 sponsors RSS and link to all 20. I can’t do that unfortunately so I’ll just cross my fingers on getting the extra 10 tickets.
Wish me luck in the drawing which comes September 4th! I’ll let you know what happens.
How Not to Ask for a Link
So the other day a guy e-mailed me about getting a link on HoopsAvenue. I have been very generous in linking lately and it has resulted in a number of free link exchanges even where I’m obviously not getting as valuable of a link in return. But, this guy took a rather interesting approach. He claimed I had copied one of his pages and, “if I’m gonna do that sort of thing” I should link to him. LOL. So I went to check out the page he claimed I copied, which was the “Write for Us” page. They weren’t even close! So I e-mail him back (probably shouldn’t have) and tell him I don’t see the similarity. He continues to insist the pages are too similar and lets me know he’s had a beef with my site in the past. Sheesh, what a way to try to get a link! Needless to say I won’t be linking to his site.
The 3 Key Web Metrics
If you’re running a website, it goes without saying you should be signed up with Google Analytics. In case you aren’t aware already, Analytics will track just about every web traffic stat you could possibly want from unique visitors to bounce rate to where they are coming from. And, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Analytics can be very confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking for so that’s what I’m going to help you with in this post.
Another service you need to be signed up with if you are running a blog on your site is FeedBurner. For the longest time I had heard of FeedBurner, but never bothered to check it out because I was managing my own RSS feeds just fine. But, now that I’ve signed up for it, I realize how important it is. FeedBurner basically tracks how many subscribers you have to your blog. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s a reliable indicator. They also have some other traffic stats that are free, but I haven’t taken a look at them yet. FeedBurner is also owned by Google.
Ok, now that you are signed up with or at least aware of these 2 crucial services, let me get to the meat of the post. There are 3 key web metrics:
- Subscribers - if you are running a blog (like this site), your subscribers are critical. RSS is becoming more and more popular and your most loyal readers will be subscribed to your blog. It also gets them to return to your website so you want to see a positive trend here.
- Registered Users - surprisingly, I think a lot of people overlook this metric and, in my opinion, it’s the most important for a lot of sites. Registered users, like subscribers, are your repeat customers, the ones you can sell to over and over again. You need to encourage and reward user registration.
- Unique Visitors - obviously you want to know how many people are visiting your site and the trends there. You can get all that easily from Analytics. For some sites, I’d say to pay attention to page impressions, but that really depends on the site.
Of course if you are a commerce site, you want to pay attention to conversion rates and the like, but I’m focusing on building your marketing lists here.
Now, it would be nice if you could focus on all 3 of these web metrics at once, but it’s not always that easy. If you’re running a blog, you might have a very hard time getting registered users. After all, why should someone register? If you require registration for commenting, you’re just going to annoy people. Most blogs should probably just forget about user registration and focus on subscribers. However, one way to get people to register that I’m sure you’ve seen is to give something away like a free e-book when someone subscribes. Otherwise, make your RSS links prominent and encourage subscriptions. I’ve even sites that offer exclusive content only available on RSS.
Some sites do lend themselves to getting user registrations though, particularly community sites. I’ve been pushing user registration to my fantasy basketball league on HoopsAvenue because you obviously have to register to run a fantasy basketball team. It requires some commitment. There are really only two requirements to building a good community: worthwhile content for members, easy/prominent registration process. Focus on those two things and you’ll be in good shape.
The 3rd and final web metric I mentioned is unique visitors. This is a combination of things from your SEO to partnerships to visitor retention. Everyone and their Mom knows about SEO so I won’t touch on that today, but how about your partnerships? Are you trying to build valuable link partnerships (or are you just e-mailing high PR sites arbitrarily and offering nothing in return?)? Especially in today’s web with social networking, it just takes some viral content to get an avalanche of links.
Lastly, how is your visitor retention? In Analytics, check out the trends for your returning visitors and your bounce rate. Hopefully your bounce rate is low and declining, but blogs shouldn’t fret too much if this isn’t the case. Look at this site for example…everything most people are going to want is on 1 page so a lot of my visitors are 1 page and done, and I’m okay with that. If you’ve got a deeper website, you probably want to watch that bounce rate a bit more closely. Everyone should watch their returning visitors metrics though. If this number isn’t growing over time, you’ve got to ask yourself why? I saw a great post on Courtney Tuttle’s blog a while back where he looked at what would happen between 2 sites where 1 gets 500 visitors a day, but retains only 1% and the other gets 100 visitors per day but retains 10%. Those might not be the exact numbers he used, but the result, regardless, is that the site that only gets 100 visitors per day on day 1 blows away the higher traffic site in just a few months because of visitor retention. Not to mention, those satisfied visitors are probably marketing the site on his behalf via word of mouth.
Good luck watching your key web metrics!
June/July Earnings Report
Normally I’ll do an earnings report each month, but since I just started up my web business again in early June, I’m combining these two months. Also, as you’ll see, this report really should be called a Loss report lol 
I’m not upset I lost money though as I’m still in the investment phase of my web projects. Actually I only expect to break even on the year since I’ll be re-investing just about all my revenues. The goal right now is to build up traffic and revenue streams. Since this is the internet, costs are going to dwiddle done to about nothing once I get my designs, logos, and revenue streams set up.
So here’s the earnings report for June/July:
Revenues
Private Ad Sales: $86.36
Affiliate Sales: $76.30
Expenses
Domains: $48.12
Hosting: $20.00
Logos: $90.00
Affiliate Expenses: $125.93
Net Profit: -$121.39
So I lost $121.39 the past 2 months. No biggie. It actually would have been more if I hadn’t used a $100 YSM Credit when I was getting started in affiliate marketing. Counting that search credit, my ROI for affiliate marketing has been -66%! Whoa! Not good, but I’m just paying to learn. I’ve been reading Tyler Cruz’s blog and he started out at like -90% in affiliate marketing and now he is getting close to breaking even. In fact, he probably will be breaking even on his next update if all goes well. Because of the huge potential for making money in affiliate marketing, I could care less about this loss. It’s just like paying to take a class.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t even have to take a loss these past 2 months because I’ve got a $300 ad deal which is basically closed on HoopsAvenue. I just didn’t get around to posting the ad and requesting payment in time. Hopefully in a year I’ll be making a ton of money online and everybody can see how low I started! 
HoopsAvenue Gets a Traffic Blast!
In case you still doubt the effects of social media, check this out: HoopsAvenue got mentioned yesterday on BOTH Yahoo and The Sporting News in their blogs! Here’s the Yahoo link:
Yeah, that is a digg-able pic and, of course, I knew that when I posted it. It didn’t catch on Digg or BallHype (Digg for sports blogs), but it finally did get picked up. Of course the lesson here is to post quality content.
I’m also in the process of making a chunk of change on a private ad sale so it’s been a good day for HoopsAvenue! As far as affiliate marketing…let’s not talk about that
No Internet!
I just moved to a new place and I’ve been without home internet access the last few days! That’s a tough obstacle when you are an internet marketer! At least I’ve still been able to check up on my traffic and stats, and do some updates at work or using wifi. I’m writing this at a coffee shop actually.
It has not been a good week as far as affiliate marketing. No conversions! I think the old adage that only an idiot does the same thing expecting different results is ringing true here so I made some big changes today. I had been lazy in my keyword research and I think I chose way too generic keywords. I wasn’t even using keyword suggestion tools, I was just picking words that I came up with on my own for the most part. I just did a few things though to focus my efforts:
- Paused all but a few ad groups so I can concentrate on just a few promotions
- Used Yahoo’s keyword research tool to find more long-tailish buyer-type keywords to go after.
#2 seems obvious and I should have done it from the start, but I had read so much about keeping up a good Quality Score by keeping your ad groups small that I actually stayed AWAY from the long tail words! I didn’t choose the most generic keywords, but looking back I don’t think a lot of the words are very buyer-ish. At this point I’m not going to worry too much about QS. You can always just create a new adgroup from scratch if you get a bad QS and want to start over.
One thing I’m not really changing is the products I’m promoting. I feel like they are decent products and at least one of them should be able to convert. If they don’t in another week I might just have to find new offers. It’s funny since I almost want to buy one of these products, but it has 0 conversions! For the most part I wouldn’t buy anything Azoogle offers, but this product I seriously think is pretty cool. Hopefully my visitors will begin to see the light! Haha, j/k sorta.
That’s it for now…hope to have internet in a few days.
Affiliate Marketing & Projects Update
Affiliate marketing is going not so well the past few days. After my first conversion, I got another conversion on the same offer the next day so that gave me some hope that this campaign would be successful, but I haven’t had a conversion since. To make things worse, I started promoting a MarketLeverage campaign, but it wasn’t tracking correctly at all. I have no idea how you even find the right tracking URL on their site. It is completely confusing if you are doing Search. They have the HTML and e-mail creatives laid out for you, but if you are direct linking, good luck finding the correct URL. Either I was using the wrong URL or their tracking was off. I will get in touch with them this week to see what is going on. Another thing that irritated me with them is I couldn’t find any help documents at all on their site…not even a FAQ.
Another mistake I made was yesterday I added too general of a keyword to one of my campaigns and it was getting lots of clicks, but no conversions and I thought about it and even though it is a targeted keyword, it is not likely to be a buying keyword. I think that’s the most important thing in this PPC game, you have to find the keywords that people will be buying with.
I did some work on HoopsAvenue yesterday and put up this cool new NBA Rumors page. It might not seem like much to you if you aren’t a big basketball fan, but NBA fans love this kind of thing. It is basically an aggregated RSS reader on the website and I made it very easy to sort. It’s also SEO friendly :) One backlash though was that my site had been ranking on page 3 of Google for “nba rumors” which is a query I monitor, but then I made a blog post announcing my new NBA Rumors page and now that blog post has completely replaced my main URL on page 3. I can’t find my top level domain anywhere in Google for that query. I can see why Google would do this since they don’t want people ranking too many pages for the same query, but I sure hope it is temporary. I have a feeling my top level domain will return to the rankings at least when that blog post is off the main page. It is something to watch though.
Overall I am pretty disappointed that I am not seeing results faster as far as affiliate income and traffic on HoopsAvenue, but I am trying to be patient about it. It’s just hard working full time and then trying to get this internet business going, very stresful, but I am hanging in there.
First lead! Woo!
Just got my first lead on Azoogle today, hah, that felt good. Well, I call it my first lead, it’s my first non-email lead since doing PPC so it was about $30. It’s so good to just see that it is possible. I was getting tired of seeing all those clicks and no leads. Actually I’ve been taking it slow so it hasn’t been that many clicks. It looks like this product could potential be a winner, in which case, I’ll start scaling the campaign. As it is for now, I’m just going to let it simmer and see how the percentages start looking. I’m getting antsy.
So I started promoting a few other offers as well now. I feel like I should be testing multiple offers at once, obviously. It’s just a matter of getting used to PPC and learning how to manage your spending. Now that I’m more comfortable with YSM, I’m running I think 4 offers or so now. I’m also with MarketLeverage and NeverBlueAds as of today so that’s more offers to go through. I like a lot of the ML offers, but their backend definitely isn’t as user-friendly as Azoogle.
Alright I just hope this isn’t a lucky sale today and I’ll get more to come. That product I made the lead on was actually an $80 or so purchase so it wasn’t one of those free trials. Just goes to show it is definitely possible to do this.