WebMarketingSucks.com

I’ve learned that there’s only so much one human can do in 24 hours. At first you want to do everything yourself. One, because you probably can’t afford to hire anyone, and two, you probably don’t think anyone else can do it as good as you can.

Hopefully you’ll eventually be making enough money so you can afford to hire other people to do some work for you. (Hire as in outsourcing, not employees. That’s a completely different situation.) Sometimes you don’t think you can afford to hire someone, but in reality it’s costing you money not to hire someone.

The part about thinking that no one can do it as well as you is a mindset and ego thing. In reality, there are probably many people that can do something better than you can. You have to let your ego go and realize that.

The point at which to start outsourcing may not be easy to see. I know that I should have done it much sooner than I did, but my ego and thriftyness kept me from doing it. Finally I realized that I’d never be able to complete all the things I needed to do and that I needed some help.

What really made the decision crystal clear for me was the realization that the things that were not getting done (because I didn’t have the time) were actually costing me money. The second thing was the realization that no matter how good I was at this or that, there were still a lot of people that were better at it than I was. Sure I can build a website but am I great at it? No. Do I really even want to be? No not really. It might take me a hour to manipulate an image and it might take a professional 2 minutes. That was the turning point.

It was challenging at first. Who do you trust? Where do you find good help? What’s a good price?

More about that in another post…

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, why outsource, work efficiently,   work for hire, internet marketing

Has anyone else noticed that google adwords conversions keep going lower and lower? Is it just me? From what I read in the forums it’s not just me.

Over the last couple of years, but especially since about January 2006, I’ve watched my adwords conversion rate steadily decline. Yes there is more competition of course but there seems to be more to it than that. After all, there’s been more competition on Yahoo Search Marketing too, but my conversions there have remained the same or even increased!

In some markets, ads that used to have a 14% CTR now barely make 1% and get 1/10th of the impressions they used to. These are not “trendy” markets that just fade away, these are solid, year round niches that get traffic all year.
I think some of this may have to do with the google “quality score”, even though google says that the quality score only effects your minimum bid and not your rankings. (Not that I believe what Google tells me by any means.)

It’s also been speculated that Google is using the adwords conversion tracking and/or analytics data to “decide” what sort of profit you should be allowed to make. I tend to believe this one because I’ve seen evidence of it. Granted I can’t prove it but the coincidences are too many for me not to at least consider it. In general, the less data you give Google the better in my opinion.

But conversely, my Yahoo Search Marketing CTR, impressions, and conversions continue to be strong. Over the years my Yahoo/Overture cost per conversion has been a fraction of Google’s, and those stats are increasing by a large margin. Overall, my YSM cost per conversion is about 1/4 of Google’s.

Microsoft Adcenter is still too new for me to have a definite opinion. The interface is a pain in the butt and so I don’t use them as much as G and Y, but I have also found their cost per conversion to be far less than Google’s. Granted, Microsoft Adcenter’s traffic is only a fraction of Google’s or Yahoo’s but they’re one to keep an eye on for the future.
So in conclusion I’ll say this…Google Adwords is not the only game in town, and it’s definitely not the best either. They are the 900 pound Gorilla and they know it and act like it. The grumbling about them in the forums continue to grow and I know that many companies and webmasters continue to tire of them and shift more of their advertising budgets to other venues. I’d advise everyone to at least consider doing the same. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket as the saying goes.

Technorati Tags: PPC, Google+Adwords, internet+marketing, traffic+generation, Yahoo+Search+Marketing, CTR, click+through+rate, Microsoft+Adcenter PPC+Conversion+Rate

If you’ve been in the adwords game for very long you should know the importance of deleting keywords with low CTR’s. If you’re not familiar with the concept or the reasoning behind it, here’s a brief outline.

Part of the way Google calculates the ranking of your ad is by the click through rate (CTR). In simple terms, the more people click on your ad the higher it will rank. That combined with your bid amount is what determines your placement in the rankings. This is determined on a keyword by keyword basis.

Originally Google automatically shut down your keywords if the CTR went below 0.5%. Then they changed it so those low CTR ads would continue to run if you wanted them to, but they would charge you even more.

Which gets us back to the importance of deleting low CTR keywords. Google gives your whole account an overall “quality score.” (They may do this on a campaign level too.) So if your account contains lots of low CTR keywords then it will drag down the quality score of your whole account, which will make you pay more for all of your keywords.

I’ve experimented with this on and off over the years and It’s amazing to me how drastically this can affect your bottom line. I generally delete any keyword with a CTR lower than 1%. Sometimes though that deleting gets put off or forgotten about which is not a good thing.

I’ve had this one campaign running for about 18 months. It was so dialed in that for the first 6 months it averaged a 600% ROI overall, with some keywords making 1000% ROI. It was awesome!

Then, about a year ago, the ad positions and ROI started to nosedive and I had to drastically increase the bids just to maintain position. (In hindsight, this was probably due to the landing page quality score which I’ll address in another post.)

This went on for about 8 months (down, down, down) until eventually many of the keywords were not even profitable anymore. But I kept at it. I was beating a dead horse I know, but I couldn’t stand to see this cash cow go down in flames. These keywords that used to make me so much money were now virtually worthless. The prices I had to pay to place well made the keywords no longer profitable.

So I kind of forgot about that market and went on to other things. Recently though I thought I’d give it one more shot. I put the ads up again, tweaked some things and some of them started to do alright. Nowhere where they were before but still profitable.

Then I said “screw it!” I started deleting dozens of low CTR keywords. Any under 1% was gone. Regardless of if they used to make me money or not, they were gone.

And what do you know…the remaining keywords started to place higher. It was simply getting rid of the low CTR keywords that did it. Within a couple of days the average position of some ads went up 2 places. In fact all of the remaining kw/ads started to rise in the listings. Some of them started to get dangerously close to #1 (which I generally try to avoid) and so I actually had to start reducing bids. (What a problem to have!)

In my experience, just pausing the adgroup or campaign doesn’t help. In fact, in my experience deleting the adgroup doesn’t help either. (I guess because they’re not really deleted, you can still undelete them if you want to.) You have to go into the adgroup and delete the actual keyword for it to have any effect on the account. Then you can delete the adgroup if you want to, but the important thing is to actually delete the keywords themselves.

So if you haven’t noticed, the point of this post is to DELETE ALL OF YOUR LOW CLICK THROUGH RATE KEYWORDS! Do it and you’ll save money.

And since this week Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) is also starting to use CTR to rank pages you should probably start deleting your CTR KW’s in your YSM account too.

Delete away and save money! How easy is that?

Technorati Tags: PPC, Google+Adwords, internet+marketing, traffic+generation, Yahoo+Search+Marketing, CTR click+through+rate

PPC prices keep going up. Google’s far reaching and overbearing tentacles can send your PPC campaign down in flames. MSN’s Adcenter is just a joke and Yahoo Search Marketing, is still as slow, strange and corrupt as always.

SEO can take months to show and results and it takes a lot of work too.

So what’s an internet marketer to do? Cloak that’s what!

Lots of people have heard of cloaking but most don’t really know what it is. If you read some forums the pious and arrogant often deride it as “cheating”, “unethical” or just plain bad. But the reason many of them don’t like it is because it flat out works and it beats out their pages in the search engines. There’s nothing bad about it, there’s nothing unethical about it, and there’s definitely nothing illegal about it! (Search engines are not legal entities and don’t make laws regardless of what they think about themselves.)

Most people probably see cloaked sites quite often and don’t even know it. It’s actually fairly common but of course it is “under ground” so to speak. Many of the REALLY BIG internet marketers use it although few will actually admit it. It can really be a black art and it’s often shrouded in mystery.

So what is cloaking? It’s simply showing the search engines one thing and showing a visitor another. Why would you want to do that? Well to give the search engines exactly what they want that’s why. They make their algorithms for certain pages to rank high and so you give them exactly what they want. The problem with that is that the pages that the search engines want are not necessarily the same one’s that your visitors want. It’s as simple as that.

With the search engines’ “god complex” they often force you to create content that they want regardless of what you the marketer, the store owner, the person who knows your customers best want to give your client. It often happens that your customer’s will tell you they want something specifically but if you give it to them your search engine ranking will suffer.

So I say give the search engines exactly what they want! They ask for it they get it. Then you also give your clients what they want and everyone wins. And the best part is, you can build hundreds or thousands of pages in a matter of minutes. Pages that the search engines will love. And think about it…if you can build hundreds of pages that fast, why not build hundreds of sites fast too! With cloaking you can do that.

Now there are some challenges with cloaking too just like with any traffic generation method. Obviously the search engines don’t like it and if they find a cloaked site they will probably delist it. The solution is to not cloak your “money site”, just build cloaked sites that point to your money site.

Another thing is that you have to have basic site building and web skills. You should know HTML and know how to set up a site and not be afraid to go “under the hood” to set things up. Of course you can also just hire people to do the work for you until you figure it out yourself. That was my first step. I hired a pro and then copied what he did over and over. I figure I saved myself lots of headaches by doing that.

So basically those are the only things you need to be aware of when considering cloaking. Other than that there’s really no down side to it.

Another thing…since you can build sites so quickly you can just build your own network of sites. The you don’t have to worry about going around getting links to your site anymore, you just create your own links! It’s pretty cool.

If you’d like to learn more about cloaking I cover it in my course. You can also find some info about it on the web but since this is something that the search engines don’t like, the cloaking communities tend to be rather tight and paranoid. They don’t want the search engines to figure out their secrets you know.

This is the cloaking software that I personally use I’ve found it to be the best and the easiest to use. It also has a good support community which is priceless.

So there you go. There’s the secret that many successful marketers use but few will talk about. It’s a traffic generation tool just like PPC, SEO, link-building, articles and the rest. Basically you can look at it as SEO (search engine optimization) because that’s exactly what it is. It’s just hundreds of times faster and more efficient than doing it the old fashioned way.

Just think, you can build dozens or hundreds of sites and thousands of pages pointing towards your affiliate sites, your adsense sites, or your own product sites. Basically almost anything that you do right now to make money online, you can amplify with the power of cloaking.

So that’s the story. Let me know what you think about all this by leaving a comment below.

Here’s to more profit!

Technorati Tags: cloaking, cloak, internet+marketing, traffic+generation, PPC, SEO

These are some tools/programs/sites that you may find helpful in your quest to make money on the internet.

Of course in my Internet Marketing Course I go into much more detail, and cover many more tools (many of them free), sites, and methods to increase your internet profits.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #3–Some Ways to Make Money on the Internet

Blogging
There is a ton of free info about setting up blogs so I won’t go into that here.

But if you’re looking to make some money with blogging then you may want to check out Rob’s course Blogging to the Bank. I met Rob a few months ago at a conference and he knows his stuff. He’s making over $1000/day blogging which is pretty darn good. His course shows you how he does it. He was selling it for about $100 but every once in a while he has a special sale for only $27 which is just too cheap.

Wordpress
This is generally the way to go for setting up free blogs. It’s easy to set up with the fantastico program in your web site’s control panel. There are thousands of people making little add-ons that do some pretty cool things, and there is a very active support community.

Blogger
Lots of people use blogger as their first blog because it is free and easy to set up. The negatives are that you won’t own and control the actual site/domain. Also Google (who own blogger) is known to quite often delete blogs that they don’t like. You might have fun playing with it or use it for getting links and traffic to one of your other sites, but for serious blogging wordpress is the way to go.

Yahoo Stores
As I mentioned in the audio, Yahoo stores are a quick and easy (relatively speaking) way to get an e-commerce site up on the net.

Their plans start at about $40/month and include:

• Store design
• Product catalog
• Shopping cart and checkout
• Customer service
• Marketing
• Promotion
• Order processing
• Payment processing
• Shipping and tax calculation
• Web site hosting
• Email addresses

That’s a lot of value for $40 a month. If you want to set up an ecommerce site this is probably the best way to go. That is unless you prefer to set all of this up on your own.

Yahoo Store Builder How to Information
Andy Jenkins is the go to guy for Yahoo Stores and his How to Create a Profitable e-Commerce Store course is the best out there. Andy know what he’s talking about and he has a few Yahoo Stores that bring in over 7 figures a year EACH! His Yahoo Store Builder program contains over 4 hours of video instruction along with a 200 page manual. If you want to build a Yahoo store then this course will get you started and show you a lot of shortcuts to quicker profits.

Affiliate Marketing

In my opinion this is the best affiliate marketing book out there.

Rosalind Gardner’s ebook The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s
Stuff Online explain the details and the ins and outs of affiliate marketing very well. (By the way, Rosalind is making a LOT more than $436,797 a year these days.)

It’s huge at 273 pages. She takes you step by step encompassing all parts of the business including: selecting niches, keyword research, finding products to promote, finding merchants, planning and building your site, selling, marketing, and managing your business. If you’re going into affiliate marketing then this is a must have. Even if you’re not going into affiliate marketing there is still a lot of very valuable information that any web marketer could learn from.

Making Your Own Products

Information products (Ebooks, audio, and video products) The real way to build wealth on the internet.
If you’re going to be making your own information products then you’ll find no better tutorial than the Underachiever iPack. (So named because these guys try to do as little actual work as possible.)

This is put together by two of the top dogs in the info marketing game-Frank Kern and Ed Dale. I’ve met and talked to them both and they’re straight-up guys (but pretty nutty.) They know this business inside and out and both make many millions of dollars a year selling little $30-$40 ebooks. They’re offering 3 DVD’s filled with audio and video presentations and PDF’s. They’ll teach you in great detail how to find profitable niches, create your own info products, build web sites, and market your business. The Underachiever iPack is not cheap let me tell you up front. BUT if you’re going to make a go of information marketing then you will not find a more comprehensive course to get you started. I’ve learned a lot from them both through their courses and also at their live conference presentations. One more thing…Frank is known as one of the best email marketers/writers out there. You can learn a LOT from him just by reading his emails.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #4–Niches, Customers, and Keywords

Finding Niches

If you’re going to make your own products, promote affiliate products, or sell or market anything online then you’ll need to do some niche and product research. How else will you know what your customers are searching
for? Even if you already have a product or a niche that you’re in, you still may want to use some of these resources for further research and information.

Clickbank.com
See what’s selling already and promote it yourself as an affiliate.
Find a hot product/niche, make your own version of it, sell it.
Get ideas for your own products or possible affiliate niches by looking at other products.

Amazon.com
Search these sites to see what people are buying and what they’re interested in. Chances are, if they’re buying here they might buy something for you. You can drill down through the categories and find niches upon niches and sub-niches upon sub-niches. For instance on Ebay you can click on a category and it will show you all of the sub-categories along with the top10 selling and most searched for categories. On Amazon you can drill down into categories and it will even show you related categories and other items that people bought. On Magazines.com
you can find all kinds of niche magazines. You can bet if there is a magazine for some thing, hobby, sport, etc. that there are people who are interested in it and probably spending money.

Nichebrowser.com
This is a very good FREE niche research product. It’s got tons of bells and whistles and will really cut down on your research time. It combines a lot of search and research tools into one place.

Wordtracker
Wordtracker is the granddaddy of keyword research and is the best. It’s very comprehensive and you can make a huge list of keywords and also find related words that you may have never thought about with it’s thesaurus feature. It also can look for common misspellings, which is quite nice for getting traffic that your competitors probably miss.

You can use it for a single day for about $7-8, and they also offer weekly, monthly, and yearly options at very discounted prices.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #5–Driving Massive Amounts of Traffic

Search Engine Cloaker
This is one of my favorite tools for driving traffic. You can build sites with hundreds or thousands of pages really quickly. The search engines don’t like it but that’s because it works so well.

You can’t buy it until they first “check you out” to make sure you’re not a search engine employee. You have to sign up with your email address and then later, if you’re “approved” Peter will tell you how to buy it.
Affiliates

Recruit other people to sell/promote your product. Simple ways are through:

Clickbank.com
The largest marketplace for promoting downloadable affiliate products. There fees are pretty high and they have a lot of strict rules to follow, but they can drive lots of affiliates to your product.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #7–Putting Together a Money Making Plan

Miscellaneous Tools/Sites You May Find Useful

SiteSell
Sitesell is quite valuable for those who want a whole “do-it-yourself-package” that is both quick, easy, and holds your hand from start to finish.

Sitesell combines:

• Web site hosting
• Point-and-click site design
• Market research
• Blogging
• Newsletter Publishing
• Email spam checking
• Search engine optimization and tracking
• Pay per click advertising research and bidding
• Online help
• Customer support
• And more things than I can list here.

It’s an incredible value. You get ten times what you pay without a doubt.

So if you’re looking for a huge all-in-one web site package this is a great deal. It’s especially good for newbies because of all the hand-holding that they do. They really do take you step by step through the entire process.

The results speak for themselves…62% of Sitesell’s users are ranked in the TOP 3% of all web sites in terms of traffic. That’s an amazing statistic!

You can use their video tour if you’d like more information:
Video Tour of the Features

Xsitepro
This is a very cool site design program. It was specifically designed for Internet Marketers and is a whole lot cheaper than Dreamweaver and Frontpage. It’s much easier to use too.

Here are some of the things that XSitePro does that benefit Internet Markets:

• Quickly add google adsense ads
• Change template And the look of your site in minutes
• Quick site maps for the search engines
• Auto updating of menus when you add pages
• easy page editor/Quick learning curve
• Suggested Actions List to improve search engine rankings
• A lot more that other more expensive programs don’t do

GoDaddy.com
Register domain names for your site.
Aweber
If you’re going to have customers you’re going to need to communicate with them. An autoresponder service (like Aweber) is essential.

The basics of it are this: You get your customer’s email address when they buy from you, or if you’re going to give out a free report or something and then you can set up a series of emails to go out automatically to them. That’s why it’s called an autoresponder–because it happens automatically.

The beauty of it is, you can create a series of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 emails or however many you like, and these will be sent to your customers automatically. You can use this to tell them about other products you have, give them more information, sell them affiliate products, and a lot more. You’re only limited by your imagination.

I’ve tested a couple of other autoresponder services and Aweber is by far the best and most people in this industry will tell you the same thing. The price they charge is insanely low–less than $20 a month. So really, if you’re in any internet business where you have customers this is a “must-have.”
Conclusion
So there you go. These are a few of the products and services that we cover in my Internet Marketing Course.

But just remember…don’t buy anything just because I recommend it, or anyone else recommends it. Like I talked about in the audio’s, you need to be clear on your goals and vision (which we cover.) That way you can decide if a certain tool fits into your business plan or not.

Again, if you’d like more information on my Internet Marketing Course Click Here.

Good luck with everything and I wish you much success!

Technorati Tags: internet+marketing, web+marketing, internet+marketing+tools, internet+marketing+instruction, internet+marketing+course, xsite+pro, aweber, underachiever+ipack, search+engine+cloaker, keyword+monster, keyword+research, blog, blogging, profit, make+money+home, sitesell, clickbank, blog+ping, how+to, yahoo+store