Making Money

Ideas for making money, including my own business, websites, and ideas!

Where is InvestorBlogger? Where can he be found?

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It’s been a week since I posted last … and no one has missed me? Or have you? You’re just too shy to say so!

Either way, I have been pretty busy. I have been working on my affiliate sites. After Steve Sutherland (of AgentsChat dot com) coached me on setting up an affiliate site, I’ve decided to run with the idea and create several different sites starting from what I know.

It’s been a blast, but already I’ve got a functional site up at http://www.tesolteachers.com which you can check out if you are interested.

tesol

I have selected three different products to promote from the offerings at Clickbank (which has thousands of offerings) for people working in my industry and those who are thinking about it, and I’ve written three short ‘reviews’ of the offerings. As I build out the website, I’ll report occasionally the successes (and failures of this project) and my attempts at affiliate marketing.

So far, I couldn’t do any worse than I have done already. So let’s see what happens. I’m also working on converting one of my other sites to an AM type set up, especially as it doesn’t enjoy much traffic. I have about four other domains that are earmarked for conversion, but I haven’t done anything with them yet. It’s still too early to see if the sites will enjoy any traction in the marketplace.

I’ve heard a lot of tips about choosing your keywords and just keeping trying until you get it right. That’s what I’m going to do.

If you are interested, take a look at the site, then see what I have done. If you have any comments, let me know!

Making Money: EntreCards Launches Ad Network

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I’ve been running a small EC promotion for the past few months, and I’ve had over 20 signups for my mailing list! Thanks, guys! Of course, I’m still running the promotion so there’s still time to make a little extra EC before you are able to sell them starting next week! Sign up now!

Oh, and the feed’s borked at Google for some reason. I don’t quite know why but the stats aren’t working properly at all. Perhaps it was to do with the new theme that I put up last month. The theme had some options for setting feed, and so I used that instead of the FeedBurner plugin. Turns out it may have been a bad decision! I have only 1/5 of the regular number of readers being reported. And Google hasn’t really fixed things since January. TechCrunch has written about this issue, too. What is going on?

However, this shouldn’t affect the competition at all. And even better news about EntreCard.

ec ad network

The EntreCard Advertising Network that was announced last week is finally here. Check the blog to read the announcement:

Our much anticipated Ad Network is now online and fully operational! As a blogger, from your dashboard, you can toggle your “advert settings” for control over what ads can even apply to advertise on your blog, and each paid ad that wants to advertise on your blog will show up in a new column on your dashboard labeled “paid ads” just under the normal blog ads. From here, you can reject any paid ad you like, freely and quickly. Revenue generated from these paid ads will go to fund our future operations, feature development, more servers, and all that good stuff, as well as a war chest to cash out all your credits with (or all the credits of those who wish to cash them out!). So please approve paid ads proudly knowing you’re supporting Entrecard and the only true virtual economy in the blogosphere!

And rates are good for advertising at the moment! I’m tempted to run ads just to test the results. Pricing will adjust as time goes forward to reflect market rates. Promotional rates are just for the initial period. But will CTR be worth it? Would it be more cost effective than just buying credits and advertising on the regular network? At least with the regular network, you can get a day long ad! Could it be that the ad network’s greatest competitor will be their own EC system?

For bloggers, there will be the option to trade EC for cash by selling your EC back to EntreCard for cash. That system is still in the works at the moment! No wonder EC outlawed EC farms earlier this year! It would have ruined the whole economy. Of course, for your site, as blogger or advertiser, you still have to decide if the real estate you give to EC is worth the visits/traffic or time on site. My first experience wasn’t so positive for InvestorBlogger but this second effort may be better. Let’s see.

Affiliate Marketing 101: Getting my feet wet!

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A friend of mine has been making some progress in his quest to generate meaningful affiliate income. Me? None whatsoever. I just checked my stats at Clickbank to see what had been going on. In the last 30 days, I generated over 100 clicks or more but not a single sale. And that’s been like that for several months!

This closely corresponds with my failure to generate sales in most affiliate programs. The only exception to that has been the Amazon Affiliate program where I achieved respectable revenues and CTR rates. Without exception, the other products I have promoted have singularly failed.

And I have tried a lot of programs: including hosting, advertising programs, services, products, booklets, software and more… Generally, it’s a big fat zero. So I’m clearly doing something wrong.

Affiliate marketing efforts do generate success. I can see the clicks coming through for my efforts, but they do NOT translate into sales of any kind. Which means either my customers are not purchasing or they are not well suited? I think it’s the latter.

Steve from Agentschat has been sharing his pearls of wisdom on AM, and I’m beginning to understand how things work. It’s really quite obvious when you think about: step 1. find a suitable product; step 2. find a suitable market; and step 3. bring them together!

So I’ve done quite a bit of reading, have several domains that aren’t doing much business and would be WELL suited to re-targeting. I’ve also been exploring how article marketing works well even for low-traffic sites.

So right now I have two aims: 1. market our school site using ezine articles and try to gauge the traffic it generates; 2. turn one site into a type of review site for ESL related products – something I know about and can write well about.

Let’s see what we can pull off. There is one significant point of departure: I will be using WordPress for my affiliate sites since it’s quick, easy and powerful. I will need to choose some affiliate-friendly theme, and tweak the install properly. I remain convinced it’s a very viable alternative to handcoding sites, though the resulting hit on CPU dents its efficiency.