Internet Marketing Trip

Yesterday, in my “Finally Back Home” post, I mentionned that in my email box there was some very nice stuff, after I delete all the spam and newsletters that all sell the same things.

It was from Chris Rempel, the author of Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate, a very good ebook. I may write a review of it, I bought this few months ago. Anyway, Chris creates some special “VIP” marketing material that he promotes to his buyers list. I have to admit I truely like a lot all of his reports, and already own the “Conduit Method” and “Reverse Niche Selection“.

Chris always prices his products very cheap and they are of a very high quality and value. This time, back from my vacations, I had the pleasure to see he released “VIP Essentials“. It’s a package including :

• Website templates (html, XSitePro, and WordPress theme)
• Step by step traffic blueprints (free and paid methods)
• Outsourcing templates (sample job offers, project descriptions…)

This actually has been designed to help you build an empire of websites that use the Conduit Method. So what is the Conduit Method ? It’s, in Chris words, the simplest method to make money with affiliate marketing, and it truely is. More than simple, it’s even stupid.

The Conduit Method was the first VIP report Chris Rempel wrote, and it is brainless. I told you I liked all of his stuff, I own everything, it’s so cheap that you shouldn’t miss it, and above all it’s made for lazy people . You need to create minisites to promote products (well it sounds like normal affiliate marketing), but you just don’t have to think. Don’t think about the content, don’t think about pre-selling, don’t think about SEO, you don’t even have to know well the products you promote to sell them. I can’t reveal everything, but you will be able to create hundreds of pages if your only skills are reading and writing.

Now with the VIP Essentials, it’s even get better and faster. You get the high-converting templates Chris uses to create his “Conduit websites”. Just systematically add content to these, without much research. With the traffic generation blueprints, and the outsourcing reports you can be a Super Affiliate too. You don’t have to outsource any task if you don’t want to. But when you can afford it (it’s cheap really), the jobs involved being so simple, you will be able to relax and have the “work” done for you. Just check your stats to see sales coming.

Well I’m not urging you to check this stuff. Well actually I am, because it’s really good. I told you Chris makes his marketing stuff cheap :

• Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate was released last year I think, it’s $29.95
• The Conduit Method is $14.95,
• Reverse Niche Selection is $14.95
• VIP Essentials is $29.95

Even if you bought everything it would cosst you less than $100. And what makes this so good is that you can also immediately use this material, and profit from it. His reports are short, but very powerful.

Frankly, you should have a look at least to VIP Essentials, his last product and you will see what I mean. With it, you will want to create many websites. There are so many niches you can profit from, because you have no real work to do. And if you’re smart you can target products or services with high commissions, it works too. Highly Recommended Products. 5 stars !

I am very sure some people are already doing it but some also are just wondering if they can do more with articles than article marketing. Well, I think I have an answer, at least some ideas that could be expanded and that I have started to use.

The Common Article Marketing Strategy, or Do-It-Yourself

Articles are content, you can write some to develop a website, and to market your website, submitting to directories to gain backlinks. This is the article marketing as we know it, or bum marketing for some. I still do article marketing and when you are in a cool niche, with not so much competition, or promoting a new product that just comes on the market then you can dominate SERPs easily.

TIP : your article includes the name of the product in the headline and body, and the domain you installed a website for the product (your landing page, or mini site, blog) includes the name of product too. If you are promoting ONE product on its ONE website this workd very well. You may have already seen some www.ProductXYZreview.com.

Article Marketing – Pay For Good Work

So I have bought the 4 Hour Work Week (still writing the review) and there is a part about outsourcing. And since writing articles may be time consuming when you are not an expert on a field, you can hire a writer and have him writing articles for you. I have found some cool writers on digitalpoint forums, they work well and they are cheap. (I also have been scammed, articles not unique and then not usable…), so ask members with good or great reputation, this is your best bet.

Here is an example that I am using right now :

I’ve found a member with a very high reputation and itrader on digitalpoint, his rates are $0.01 per word. You will find writers at 0.015 or 0.02 and even more. What you want are the backlinks, even if the articles are “small”, you will still be there. So if your writer is professional, writes a good english, that’s fine. You can ask samples to see the quality of their works.

Back to my writer and his $0.01 per word, means a 300 words article is $3. You also have to know that many article writers offer discounts if you purchase in bulk, or for more words. But for the purpose of this example I’ll keep the $3 per article. I choose 300 words because EzineArticles asks articles to be at least 250 words.

Now depending on your budget, if you want to submit one article a day, it’s 30 articles and $90. You should be able to write few resource boxes. While your writer is busy, you could have started your mini site/landing page for affiliate programs or AdSense. This means you too have some work ! Write a review of a product, or articles for AdSense.

Once your website is ready, you can start submitting all the articles, but one a day is recommended. I am not an SEO expert but I’ve read that building too much backlinks in a short period of time could make Google unhappy. I don’t know what is too much, but with one submission a day you also ensure a regular flow of content.

That’s it, if you have an affiliate program that pays $20 then, with 5 sales you are in profit. It should be easy to reach this, remember you will still get traffic after your articles are submitted, so maybe you will have a more success in the month following the article submissions. And if you choose AdSense to monetize your website, you could make $3 a day and in a month get back your investment.

I recommend you to read the free report by Josh Spaulding, the “$5 mini site formula” (Nope, not affiliate link, it’s free). Josh explains how to make at least $5 a day with article marketing and AdSense. I enjoyed the keyword selection part and have myself experienced some great things from then. If you already have websites with AdSense, a few tricks with keywords could increase your earnings.

So even if you hire a ghost writer as I described or writes article yourself, AdSense is still a great way to earn money from your mini-site. Articles are great for long term traffic.

Articles and Selling Websites

Either you write yourself content or pay for it, you have content that you can put on your website. Just don’t copy articles from article directories to a new website and sell the website. On a website you want to sell, it’s better to have unique content.

Some people just sell websites without any marketing having been done. They are just good writers, so they build a website of say 20 pages and then sell it on forums, saying that the website is new, there is no revenue from it, but it has good keywords and if the buyer is good at SEO or marketing then it can makes good money.

That’s a good strategy, if this is on a topic where keywords pay well, or if you can recommend affiliate offers then you can have some people interested. You could even combine it with the previous strategy : having someone writing content for your website. You then sell it for more.

Or you can test how the website is doing. You will track performance and visits to the site and will have stats to provide to buyers. Then decide how much you can sell the website ofr. I’ve seen some people saying the value should be 6 months of website income, some have said 10. I can’t really say how much you should sell, but check the midascode blog for cool tips about buying and selling websites or their buying and selling website services .

Article Writing and Selling

Well everything is the title, I talked about writing articles yourself or hiring someone. This “someone” could be you, and people could ask your services. Forums are a good starting point. You can introduce your services at a very low price to get some people coming. You could even actually offer a free article to the first person who answers your offer. Don’t forget to ask people to review your work (risky if you write crap).

Be sure to know if you can write on any topic or if you are an expert on one or more specific fields.

Turn Articles Into Videos

That’s a great solution. First because if you have an article written, then you can just make a short video with only text and a little music. Second possibility, you can film yourself with your webcam or another video recorder, with you just reading your article to your audience. This is really easy and fast, your videos can just be just one minute long or less this is not a problem.

The main advantage is you can put your backlink to your website too, so if people like the video they can visit your website for more information. But you may also have seen that some YouTube videos are at the top of Google SERPs. So again : good keywords should bring you targeted traffic. Why not put your product reviews into video ?

Another place to put your articles

So unique content is good, you have written or bought it and now you have decide where to put it : on your website or blog, or submitting to article directories. There is another place for good content, and this is Squidoo. I have used it a lot. You may know Squidoo is really appreciated by Google, and you may have noticed some squidoo lenses are in the first page of Google.

It happened to me for some keywords and of course you can monetize your Squidoo pages with some affiliate programs and build backlinks from there pointing to your website. Squidoo lenses are so easy, fun and powerful for your business. Really, if you don’t have used it yet, do it. You can just put one article, then an Amazon or eBay module, a guestbook and some YouTube videos (hey why not the one you created).

Well that’s it for now. These are some strategies to market or build a website with articles, either you choose to purchase content or build it yourself, you NEED content.

It’s a very strange title, actually I would have found something better but I just can’t at this time of the day. So anyway, let’s make it more clear, this article exists to let you know about a little software that allow you to identify any color on your screen. This is Instant Eyedropper. What ? you already know this one ? Well, lucky you, I didn’t until today.

Why is it interesting ? Well, you may have seen some graphics that you like, maybe for a website that you will build, or for a WordPress theme, but you would have to download them and then use PhotoShop or another image editing software to identify the very specific color code at a very specific place on the graphic you see.

Well, I know this is a bit confused, so if you don’t know about this soft, visit Instant Eyedropper website, the tutorial explains it all, with pictures. Click and hold the left button from the taskbar icon and drag the mouse on your screen to get any color code. Best of all this very light software is free.

You want to know how I had to use it ? No ? Hey I write what I want ! It may save you a precious time and keep your eyes healthy (I said I write what I want).

Today, I wanted to add some AdSense to a new website I just created. As many of you know, it is a good thing to blend your ads colors with your theme colors (background, links, text). If you coded your theme you may remember the colors you used for your theme. But if like me, you just downloaded the theme then you would have to explore the CSS file to know the exact background color code, the exact link color code, etc.

Some CSS files are confusing and you often see more than 3 color codes in the CSS code. After several trials, it seems I didn’t identify the color code for the background so, I open a new tab and use a very useful website : Google. I found Instant Eyedropper and in few seconds I manage to identify all the color codes I needed to create the perfect pallette and have my ads blend.

So that’s it people, I hope I helped someone, I surely helped myself.

I just finished reading the How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress guide by Caroline Middlebrook and it is a good read.

There are many things you may already know about WordPress, and the first thing is this is a blogging platform. In this completely free guide (she even doesn’t ask your email adress), you learn how to develop niche websites, not niche blogs.

Caroline takes you through the whole process of installation of your blog and tells you how to structure your blog to make it a website. Of course, it is a useful guide, since it is a little about website monetization too . She also shares some resources for you to help improve your site. Resources like plugins, tools, and an AdSense theme.

If you are a beginner and want to launch your first website, this is a simple guide you must check. It will work too if you want to use WordPress as a blog, since the installation process is the same. The concept is “how to turn a blog into a website”.

I have to admit this is an idea I had for few websites, but still didn’t do it. I have a new niche idea to launch, the content is already written, but I’m not sure I can write on a regular basis on the topic. So launching a niche website will be my choice, and hopefully, it will be a money making website.

Plus, WordPress is so convenient to manage content, change design that I don’t want spend some time to build and code a website myself.

So, right, I knew how to use WordPress to make it look like a website, and if you are using WordPress for some time now, you may see how to do it too. But it’s always good to have a guide to rely on.

Caroline updates her guide regularly so don’t forget to check for updates. Give her your feedback and suggestions, sure she will appreciate.

Last words (repetition) : it’s free.

Visit Caroline Middlebrook’s blog, there are some nice articles too.

Okay, so I studied a lot, read a lot, and what I knew is still true : you have to work hard. Working hard is creating content for me, and for you too I guess. This is the hard part. From the DigitalPoint forums, I came to a website : Self Made Minds. Two guys are behind this website, they are sharing their experience and telling how they’re doing and also reporting their earnings (this is the fun part).

I really recommend you read their blog, it’s cool and simple explained and also full of ideas.

They of course built several websites, one of them is Coolest Gadgets, and it earns more than 10,000 a month, mainly about adsense. Again AdSense is for CONTENT websites. But, I also read a post on their site telling about “minisites” making maximum money, and showing us a minisite example.

Here is the post : Mini Sites don’t always make mini money.  All you need is a good idea, work on it, buy a domain and host your files, make some SEO.

Your goal first would be to make $1 a day for this one website. Then, how many websites can you create ? What if all your websites earn now $2 a day… Okay you understand. And don’t forget that with time you may have more ideas to add to each of your minisites.

Now, you have to do some brainstorming. I took a pen and paper and wrote down every topic I was sure I can write about. I have more than 50, and I’m sure you can easily do it too, even more. Then start writing. This is not so hard to write content for these websites, this could be the same process if you had to write articles and submit them to articles directories, to increase your backlinks for your main websites.

If you need ideas, visit forums, blogs, read articles about a topic and rewrite everything you think useful with your own words. You may also want to add links. What are the best websites for these topics ? Just use Google and find what are the top sites.

Even if building new minisites will not consume so much time, you also have to keep working on your main websites. So build your network of mini websites and make them profitable, but keep adding content to your bigger money makers.