Income  Jan – June, 2011

Ebay Partner Network: $1074.13

Text-Link-Ads: $220.60

Amazon: $241.44

Own Product: $385.00

Clickbank: $111.84

Adsense: $43.61

Total:  $2091.62

Of this total, only the Amazon & Clickbank are new income since I started back up my efforts.  Now that my full-time job is finished, i have more time to put towards my affiliate and product marketing. Now I admit, this is hardly anything to retire on, let alone pay the bills. I use the income to pay for monthly subscriptions and to try out recommended tools, hire outsources, etc.

Notes:

Ebay earnings are from a total of 8 sites running either BANS or PHPBayPro to show rss feeds of targeted products.  I am in the process of moving my BANS sites to PHPBayPro, due to lack of updates to BANS by the current owners.

Text-Link Ads:  I had been earning about $100/mo with them, but I updated my blog and did not update the plugin for the ads, so all my ads cancelled. I’m slowly getting new advertisers and increasing revenue from this source once again.

Amazon:  New efforts began April of this year

Own Product: These are training plan sales to my list which I’ve written about in the past. This is likely my best source of new income in the near future.

Clickbank: An alternative monetization based on the teachings of Mike & Kelly in Bring the Fresh

I’ve since started a handful of Amazon affilaite sites and have made about $180 so far on about 5 sites that I put up in the past 8 weeks (spent minimal time putting them up, lots of time checking statistics, lol).

Anyway, i just wanted to give you a quick update on me and what I”m doing and I hope to post more in this space soon, and get back to my roots of internet marketing when it all seemed so fresh!

My next step is to monetize the list even more with my own product offerings.  Creating your own products is a real time sucker however, and that’s been my sticking point.

I’ve got lots more ideas for how to really get this thing to take off, so stay tuned. Sorry for the lack of specifics…no secrets really, just not enough time to go round.

BTW, I’m using aweber as my autoresponder. Give it a test drive today.

The 2nd site was one t hat was intended to have a “sticky post” at the top as  a site introduction. Well that sticky post got bumped down in a site redesign without me realizing it.  I still have to go back and fix that one.  The point is that you need to periodocially revisit your sites from the point of vew of a first time visitor and see what it looks like. You may have a few items to clean up.

However having links on every page of your site to every other page of your site dilutes page rank and takes emphasize away from your “money page” or the  page that “pays the rent”.

One solution is that will both allow your overhead pages to be indexed, but still control page rank flow through the site is to add a “no-follow” attribute to the links to overhead pages on the subpages of your site.  But how do you do this with wordpress?

While I haven’t tested this yet, I’m sure others have thought of it. In the php code for your header, sidebar or footer, it’s possible to do a check to see what page you are currently on. If you are not on the “home” page, simply employ one set of code that includes the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute.

I’ll have to check and see if the “SEO Optimized” WordPress templates I’ve seen and been using employ this strategy.

If you are intesreted in more insights like this, sign up for my newsletter up top and to the right. If you want to get this type of information directly from the source, check out Stompernet’s Stomping the Search Engines 2.0…it’s free if you simply sign up for their list.

Regarding control of page rank flow…each p age needs a minimum amount of page rank just to get indexed. Too many outgoing links will dilute the page rank of each page and risk enough outflow so that the page itself may not get indexed.

Controlling the flow of Pagerank means putting more flow of PR into the important pages of the site…the ones that will make you money.  With regard to WordPress, one of the popular widgets available is “archives”.  Depending on whether you have your archives listed monthly, weekly or yearly, t his list can get quite long.

Thank about it from a user point of view. Does having a monthly list of archives help them find old posts when there is almost always a “search” feature on the site?  Is it helpful to have each month of archives listed on the front page?  Probably not.  It would be just as sufficient to have a single link to the “Archives” from the front page, and have that link be “no-follow” as well.

Perhaps this simple strategy can help control the  page flow so that it does not leak to less important pages, and instead you can send it where it needs to go…to the pages that “pay the rent”.

UPDATE:  Looks like this solution has already been solved with a quick piece of header.php code fix. You can either do it yourself, or use the Duplicate cure plugin. Here are some references:

Addicott Web

Fix your page header – You should insert the following code into your theme’s header file to make sure that certain pages (such as the homepage, posts, pages and category pages) are indexed by search engines spiders, while certain others (feeds, archives, etc.) are excluded

If you want to learn more search engine tips like this, you can sign up for my mailing list over thre ot the right, or just go sign up for Stomping the Search engines 2.0 right now (it’s free!)

To find it, go here: http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/recommends/stomper999 Click on Day 3 and scroll down to this  headline The RIGHT Keywords + HIGH Search Rankings = TARGETED Traffic = MONEY.

So why the big fuss? Well the first time this was released it was a $497 course. The next time was released, it was a $1 course with a trial to a $40/month continuity product. Now it’s just plain free.

Why should you care about it?

Traffic = Money
Traffic to your blog equals money in the bank. Getting free traffic is all the better. Stomping the Search Engines two was the first course to teach every important aspect of SEO that you need to know in order to send page rank deep into your site, outstrip your competition of top google rankings and get all the traffic to your site…for free without paying for search engine PPC ads.

Well, if you want to learn SEO, this is basically the only course you need. So check it out now!

Well I’ve just learned that on 9/9/9, StomperNet is not only opening doors to new members, but will be lowering their price to an insane price of $199/month!

I can’t believe it! It’s truly the best internet marketing education there is online.

Here’s my link, use this to check it out. If you end up joining through my link, I promise you a great SEO bonus and link getting mindmaps.

Stomper Net Lowers it’s Price for the First Time!

AS far as what to write about, when you are starting you just need to learn the mechanics of writing. Waiting until you get all your research and perfect affilatie programs are lined up can be frustrating as you feel that you must do step A, then step B, then later learn that step C needs to come before Step A.

Here’ is what I would do.

1) Pick a topic you enjoy. your hobby, your sport, etc.
2) Think of a skill or task realted to that hobby…

• -How to knit one, pearl two
• -How to do a basketball layup
• -How to set a volleyball

3) Enter the phase into google with quotes around it like this “How to knit one, pearl two” and note thenumber of search results for that phrase

• “How to knit one, pearl two” = 6 pages!
• “How to do a basketball Layup” = 4 pages
• “how to set a volleyball” – 69 pages

*Note that at this stage you don’t need to focus on teh perfect keywords nor worry on how often this phrase is searched for. The idea here is to learn to write an article, post it on a web 2.0 property and rank for your kewyords.

Any of these will be easy to get your article to rank for your phrase very quickly!

Now set up an account at any one of these web 2.0 authority sites or take your pick among hundreds of others…these are just starter ideas
Squidoo
Wetpaint
Wordpress.org
Google Knol
Ezine Articles
Hubpages

Now write an articel on your topic at one of these sites. Use your kewyord phrase in your headline, at least once in the first sentance of your article, and 1-3 times every hundred words or so. Some people will say more often than that. Use your keyword phrase bolded or as a subheadline in your article as well.

Once your article is written, copy teh URL into your clipboard, and go to one of these bookmarking sites and make an account if you havn’t already

• -Digg
• -Propeller
• -Reddit
• -Stumble

Submit it to one or more of these bookmarking sites then let it simmer for awhile.

Tomorrow (or in a few hours), check google for your search phrase and look for your apge to show up!

This should give you confidence in how the process works. Try it with a few phrases in your hobby area. Even if you decide not to go inot your hobby area as your niche, you will have a nice small collection of articles that will be useful to the itnernet community.

The next step in this type of process is to put some anchor links in your web 2.0 pages pointing back to your “money” page, which could also be a web2.0 page like squidoo or blogger. Now youare building a network of information so that when people search for

• -how to do a layup
• -how to dunk a basketball
• -how to play point guard
• -how to shoot a three pointer

the likelyhood of them ending up on your niche site for basketball goes up exponentially with each new article you post.

hope those ideas help. Just get out there and try it and see what happens.

One commenter asked what it was that I did…sorry if I didn’t mention it before.   I made two major changes to my site which should be the first step anyone takes in doing on-page SEO.

1)  Title Tag – I updated my sitewide default title tag to use my 3 word keyword phrase (targets both location and niche) rather than using my business name as the title tag.

For example, let’s say I lived in Austin and my business was Neon Signs. I’m hip, so I named my business, Austin City Lights.  Before my update, My title tag would have read, “Austin City Lights – Home”.  Boring, but pretty common.

After my update, the title tag would say, “Austin Neon Signs – Custom Signs for your Business”

2)  Description

Description is a META tag.  Meta tags are descriptive information about your webpage.  Using plugins for wordpress or the advanced paramaters in Joomla, you can specify unique descriptions for each individual page on your website. This “meta” description is the default exerpt displayed by search engines in their search results.  By customizing this meta description, and again using my keyword phrase first, I ‘ve highlighted my business in the eyes of my potential customers who are typing “Austin Neon Signs” into their search engine bar.

So that’s pretty basic SEO 101…update your TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags to reflect the keywords you are targeting for your site and for that page on your site.

It may then take a few days to get your site spidered, but you can speed this up by pinging one of your posts or submitting it to a social bookmarking site or RSS feed.