Internet Marketing Trip

I’d like to say I’m sorry, I’m not sure it makes a difference. You see, I started this blog, wainting to write and share my experiences and thoughts on my internet marketing trip. As you can see the updates are not very often, and it seems that this blog could die, like many blogs or websites.

However this is not something I want, and this blog should live. The truth is I am busy, very busy, think “Work” and lot of it. And I know Iam too busy because I am not really organized. I end up with tons of tasks at the same time because I don’t stay focus on the work to do. And I don’t do tasks in the right order.

An example, I try an idea for one website and it shows profitable, I should stick with it and develop it to be even more profitable. But instead I could create on another website and try something else. Well, at least I know my flaws and I know I’m not alone in this case.

Here in my “Write Post” section of Wordpress, I can see 3 drafts, I think the topic I wanted to cover were already all over the web so I didn’t publish them. Sometimes I also all the words in my head to write a good article, but they come when I’m already making something else. I should grab a voice recorder, it saves time and you actually speak more naturally than you write.

But there is some hope, after all, I’m blogging now. I have to learn about time management or self improvement, and focus on my goals. I thought about reading books like Getting Things Done, or The 4 Hour Work Week (that has been translated in French !). Maybe I could plan more my work.

As regarding updating this blog, maybe I should write about every little things I do, and the ideas I get from these things could be useful for others.

 Well thanks for reading this useless post I’ll do better next time (I’ll try), and if you have any thoughts, advices, anything, feel free to leave a comment.

So there is a seminar that will take place in Los Angeles (in a secret place), organised by Yanik Silver. Of course, few internet marketing gurus, for the occasion of the Underground seminar, are called secret agent and YOU too can become a the secret agent and learn from great gurus how to become a guru.

Yes, that’s like that. In short, from the invitations I received from the various blogs I’m subscribed to, you will have the opportunity to meet the big names, while other marketing seminars only let gurus meet between each others. This time there is a room for you.

Well, of course this 3 days seminar will just cost you… $3495. What a gift ! As other seminar sales letter will say, it could be the most profitable days of your life. $3495 for 3 days in Los Angeles, if you are in Europe like me, or anywhere except Los Angeles, you of course need to pay for your plane trip.

What I want to say ? They say : It’s for non-gurus, okay, but it’s still for successful people who have money to invest into just 3 days. Yeah it could be the most profitable days of our lives… until the next seminar, or the next launch of a big marketing strategy that is worth few hundreds or few thousands too.

So I know what some of you are thinking : I’m not taking action. That’s wrong, when you search well on the internet, you find everything, useful informations that can take your business to a next level, just apply what you learnt. Have you ever been to forums and read “don’t buy another ebook, you can learn everything here for free, just use the search function”.

I know I don’t update this blog often, but this is not the place where I’m making money, so please apologize if that’s not where you can find the most valuable informations, I’m not a guru. But I also think great things have already been written by others.

Real non-gurus can tell you this, and they are successful. And if they are successful they don’t really need another seminar. I say real non-gurus because lots of gurus define themselves as non-gurus, you know, they’re just your friends, people like you, except they just want few thousands. How to make 6 figures ? If you make a $1000 profit from 100 people in your seminar, you earned $100,000 (Okay that’s a bit simplistic).

My point is, if you have money, if you are sure this is worth it, if you are sure you can’t find something valuable on the internet for free that can bring you traffic and sales then just book your place to a seminar.

If like me, you know the website called “Google“, a kind of simple page, you enter a word and hit search, it finds something related, then you may be able to find the way to the “most profitable days of your lives”. Yes, it involves work, it always does, for any path you are choosing.

I mentioned forums, the one I visit : DigitalPoint, WickedFire. Then when you have found something you can and WANT to do, have a plan, stick to it, and do things. I’ll try to give examples of a plan in my next article.

Today was a day of a new record for the euro/usd rate : 1.5144 ! 2 days ago it was still at 1.47xx. I needed to transfer my PayPal balance to my bank account but… well here is the story.

You may don’t understand the figurre about the exchange rate, let’s make it a bit easier : currently, 1 euro = $1.51. So if you are a US citizen and wanted to travel to Europe and needs euros, you would have to buy them with your dollars. You would need $1.51 for 1 euro, or $151 for 100 euros.

In the other direction, if I want to go to the USA and need to buy dollar, the rate is $1 = 0.66 euro.

Back in 2002 when the euro was just born the equation was 1 euro = $1. So we wouldn’t really care about conversion. Today things are very different.

There is a positive point of view, if I want to buy something from USA, being a European, I would pay less than the actual cost. For example, if you need a hosting plan for your websites and choose the Swamp plan at HostGator, you would pay $12.95 a month. In euro with the 0.66 rate, you would just pay 8.54 euro a month.

If you bought that plan in 2002 (I don’t know if it existed at that time but, this is for the example), it would be 12.95 euro, so about 3.40 euro more per month.

Okay you understand now the currency rate changes influence our purchase, how much or how less we spend, but it also influence what we earn.

I earned some nice commissions and had more than $3000 (about 2000 euros) on my PayPal account. Since most of the affiliate networks I am working with are paying in USD, I have an USD bank account, here in France. So I can put all my USD commissions on this account, and then wait that the exchange rate to become better.

Remember $1 is currently 0.66 euro, let’s say suddenly  the rate jumps to 0.80 (yeah that would be very nice), I would have these $3000 = 2400 euros. I would have “earned” 400 euros without doing anything, just waiting. An if we were in 2002, then $3000 would already be 3000 euros !

Well that could happen if PayPal allowed me to transfer USD to France. You see, for PayPal, if you live in Europe, you can only receive euros. If I choose to transfer the USD, the conversion to euro is automatic, so I can only receive the funds at the current rate in my local currency.

Hopefully, some other networks pay by check or bank wire, and that’s okay for them if I provide them the right account number.

I could also wait that the exchange rate becomes higher and keep the funds on my PayPal account. Well, how long would I have to wait ? Hey I need to live too !

What’s a bit ironic is that you can open multiple balance at PayPal to receive payments in the currency you want. But in the end, when you want to transfer your funds to your bank account, you are forced to have it in your local currency.

This is not really cool from PayPal, if they send you funds coming from USA, UK, Japan, well any currency, they have these funds on their account somewhere, in the right currency, they would just have to process the transfer as they usually do, since they ask for your bank account informations.

Also, I mailed themseveral times to explain and ask for the situation, they just don’t want and say they can’t do it. What’s wrong is they automatically do the conversion, if you could choose to have no conversion made at the time of the transfer from your PayPal account that would be cool.

Yesterday, I blogged about the Caroline Middlebrook free Ebook which teaches you how to create niche website with WordPress. I also said that you could give your feedback or suggestions. I did.

 A section is dedicated to the blogroll, but there is something I was wondering for some times. I didn’t know how to add the nofollow tag to my blogroll links in some of my blogs. You see, when you edit your blogroll in WordPress, there are several link relationship options, but no rel nofollow.

So I asked Caroline if she knew it but she didn’t. I asked to her as I asked few days ago on DigitalPoint, but didn’t get an answer. I posted in the SEO section, because Google recommends affiliate links to get tagged by nofollow for SEO purpose.

Yesterday, I logged in on DigitalPoint again and asked for this same question, this time in the Blogging section and had a quick answer from user Richie_Ni. It lead me to 2 solutions.

He provided me with this nofollow relationship to wordpress blogroll solution from mydigitallife.info. You have to edit a file, nothing complicated, this will add the nofollow relation to all your blogroll links.

Now maybe some of your links are affiliate links or other links you don’t want to give weight to, but you feel some deserve some too. I just watched the comment, and the right solution was there, from Justin Cook’s blog : How to add nofollow to wordpress blogroll links.

Another file to edit, very easy, just copy and paste the code provided, and here is the result :

In your blogroll editor, you now have the option to add the nofollow tag to your links, individually. Save changes and you’re done.

I could post the codes directly here, but I’m sure the author would prefer to hear your personal feedback (and a little backlink).

If you want to add a nofollow tag to a link in a post for example, here is how it should look in your code view :

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”url” mce_href=”url”>Click Here</a>

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.

As some of you may know, I tun the blog Replicas Suck, the authentic fashion blog. Well, I also run more blogs and of course, these require time. Actually, this blog Internet Marketing Trip, and my personal blog are not as updated as the others I run.

Well, of course for now I’m not monetizing this blog and tomleroy.com, so that’s okay, but I would really want to have time to make them grow. Back to ReplicasSuck.com, I decided to make it run in auto pilot, until March.

What do I mean by auto pilot is having article posted every day. You may know there are plugins that will allow you to post new entries from RSS feeds, but that means your blog becomes a splog (spam blog).

So what am I gonna do ?

I will just prepare some posts and edit the timestamp in WordPress. I even already started to do it.

Lots of people already know about it, this is a trick that is used by many bloggers. It is a cool feature of WordPress, that is recommended to use when you are on vacation. This way you can write your post in advance and decide when your posts are published.

I already had this idea in the past, but I also read about the “ping” that could make you banned from saerch engines or ping services.

You see, when you publish a new article, your blog is automatically pinged, and services come to see the new content on your blog. With a future post, there is of course no new content live, since it will only appear in the future.

So the services can think that you’re just abusing the system to tell the world your blog is updated when actually (it will be) it’s not. And then services, search engines, robots… ban your blog.

So there is a plugin I use that only pings when your post is live. Also, when you edit an old post and save it, WordPress is normally pinging the services too. Since it’s an old post, it’s not new content, this plugin will correct that too. No more pinging again for edited posts.

I use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. A similar one, that does the same thing is Smart Update Pinger.

So here is my plan, everyday :

• I choose a category,
• I write 10 articles for this category,
• I post 1 article every week for 10 weeks.

For example, today is Wednesday. I choose the “Watches” category at Replicas Suck. So one article is posted today, and the following 9 articles will be posted the following 9 Wednesdays. They are already written, I just edited the timestamps before hitting the Publish button.

Tomorrow, I’ll choose another category and repeat the process. 10 articles in another category, 1 posted every Thursday.

I have 8 categories to blog about at Replicas Suck. So that means next week, I’ll have articles going live everyday for 10 weeks. That hsould let me more time for my other blogs.

Yesterday I logged in my Commission Junction account and saw a new affiliate program was added. The website is Uneetee. I don’t know all the details, so you may want to contact them to learn more.

Here’s the concept : designers can submit their design to be printed on t-shirts and hoodies. Every day a new t-shirt/design hit the homepage. Each time your design/t-shirt is sold, you earn a commission. They also run contests and the winners (most sold designs) get bonus commissions.

Also since they have an affiliate program at CJ (and ShareASale from their website), you could promote your t-shirts portfolio from your blogs and website. The commission rate is set to 21% at both networks.

I know designers earn more money by selling their designs and logos directly to webmasters and various freelance works but this could be an extra income.

Some web designers are very famous and recommended online. Having a kind of gallery/store on their website could be a nice addition to their portfolios and their clients could reward them by buying a T-shirt.

If you submit your designs there, just contact me and I’ll be happy to promote your t-shirts on my various blogs. You can also join ShareASale using my link :) or CJ (no affilate program :().

Happy New Year. I know I’m late I already posted that at my personal blog, but I guess I am posting this on each on my other blogs and I can’t miss this place.

Happy New Year to all, I wish you the best.

Hey everyone, I already add a post about getting traffic to your website and blog, actually it was an article from Tay, at SuperBloggingTips.com (you can see my post about it here).

I’ve found this article at DigitalPoint Forums, and there were some others I alredy read in the past that you may want to check too.

Of course, you will find some similar tips but the point is to  burn it on a hard drive part of your brain, and also get some knowledge. Plus these articles are in a list form so you just take the elements you like, and maybe add some later.

So here are some resources that will help you to get more traffic to your website. I’ve found these articles at DigitalPoint but I suppose the authors of these articles would prefer to receive a linkback to their blog where they put effort and quality into it. So you may discover some blogs you didn’t know with great resources to use for your blogs.

 The first one is a Sticky in the Link Development section at DigitalPoint, made by Mr Kumar. Link building is of course a fundamental part of SEO.

Link Building Tips and Resources.

(Mr Kumar, if you’re reading this, why don’t you use the /%postname%/ permalinks structure in your blog instead of the Default one that creates a url like /?p=128 ?)

The second one has been published by superflytrainer. The title was 101 ways to get more traffic on DigitalPoint, but at Imutopia, the author’s blog, it sounds better :

101 Muscular Ways To Get More Targeted Traffic To Your Sites/Blogs Today!

For the third one I need to link to the thread by whatadeals, since it has not been published on another blog (at least I don’t know). But here is the website of the author : TeeVeeLive. Here is the article :

50 Tips On Getting More Traffic To Your Website

I hope you will like what you will read there and crash your server :).

Tonight, you’re going to celebrate Christmas so I wish you all a merry Christmas. I hope Santa Claus will not forgive you, anywhere you are, and hat you and all your family are happy and united.

MERRY CHRISTMAS