Ass Out Cash

Over the holidays I have been on vacation but haven’t done anything yet to improve my money making position. I have been playing with my kids, and dog, and spending quality time with my wife. After they are in bed at night I have been continuing my research.

I am reading 2 books right now.

1.  Multiple Streams of Internet Income – How ordinary people make extraordinary money online.

By:  Robert G. Allen : originally published in 2001, and second edition in 2006

2.  Cashing in with Content, how innovative marketers use digital information to turn browsers into buyers

By: David Meerman Scott : Published in 2005

I picked both of these up at the local library.  When I finish each I will give my review of them.  I have also been doing a good amount of online research.  There is so much information out there on affiliate marketing and making money online that it is hard to determine what is hype and what is good.  I am sticking to my earlier post that I am not going to pay for anything until I am bringing in cash.

I have also downloaded a free mind mapping software to help get my thoughts organized.  So far I have only used this as a tool to narrow my keywords.  I have created a tree starting broad and getting narrower to home in on some good specific key words.

.  Next post will be about free tools I use online to prepare for what I do.  Keyword searches, hit tracking, and more.

This post is going to bring the story up to date.  So I put up some domains like www.financialflattery.com strictly hoping for ad revenue.  To date I have 14 of my domains with different themes hosted.  As of today December, 14 2008.  About 2 weeks into my venture I have made exactly$.11.  Yep that’s right eleven cents.  This is the reason I started really brainstorming and hitting the research.  I guess it won’t be quite as easy as I originally thought.  On top of this, after alot of work, I see Google released Ad Sense for Domains.  Basically a domain parking setup similar to Sedo.  Is it any better I doubt it, but maybe will atleast list it in their search engine since they are taking a cut of the revenue.  I parked 2 of my domains with Google just to check it out.  Over 5 days I have had 6 views no clicks on theses 2 domains.  If you want to see what the Google pages look like, click here.  www.turbocobalt.com

So I have a few ideas I will be trying .

1. Keyword selection.  My existing sites are very broad.  Like www.cheesymeat.com is about cooking, any and all types of cooking.  I really need to break these things down into a niche.  I need to take one of my keywords and expand from there to get better rankings and a specialized crowd.  I should limit it to say Baking chocolate cakes. Then my keywords will be related to that.  Much less broad.
2. Content.  I don’t think the blog and news search results on my sites are unique enough content to get caught by Google, or yahoo.  I have looked at some of the content article generating software packages like Instant Article Wizard, or a program like Simply PLR.  HyperVRE is another program that caught my eye.  They offer a free and paid service, and seems like the real deal.  I signed up for the free service but haven’t done anything with it yet.  Here is a Case Study E-Book (right click – save as) about a guy who made piles of cash with this program.  Hopefully by next week I can talk more in depth about it.   There are alot of these out there.  Before I spend any more money I want to make some.  So for now I will be researching my content articles and writing them myself.
3. Search engine submission.  I don’t think submissions really work.  So I need back links to my site.  Back links are basically links to my site from other sites.  I am currently unsure how I am going to attack this.  I have a link from every site to my generic link page on a different site www.autoilluminate.com/list This just creates a there and back link.  I don’t think this is enough to make a difference.

I am sure there is much more, but this is where I am going to start.  My current goal.  No more money going out until there is money coming in.  How much, well anything above the .11 in 2 weeks I have so far is good.  My first goal as of today is $1.00 a day from Ad Sense.  We will consider the others bonus.

Next – I will optimize one of my domains to the above guidelines.

I did a lot of research on Monday, and had to take last night off to think about it all.  Before we get into all of that let me finish my story to get caught up to today.  Last I posted I got signed up at several affiliate sites, I had a site script I wanted to use and was ready to go.

I started posting up sites.  I didn’t really like the default layout of the DomainZaar software.  I have some php skills so I went to work modifying it to my liking.  I do like this script package because it creates links and searches based on keywords.  The search engines should see this one active page having a large number of links to other pages, and some content.  Those pages don’t really exist, but when the links are clicked, the index.php  is refreshed with the new keyword.  I am no master of Search engine optimization ( SEO ), but this site shouldn’t get immediately overlooked by Google.  There is also a news and blog search which returns some content for the page.

I am probably doing a terrible job describing this so just have a look.

www.cheesymeat.com and www.300kmph.com are 2 examples.

As you can see I have Google ads inserted, and I also have a area where I put ads I choose from Click Bank or Commission Junction.

At first this seemed like a good way to go, today I am not so sure.  More on that later.  As I mentioned before I have around 40 domains I wanted to setup.  When I had around 12 of them done, I accidentally overwrote some key files that I hadn’t backed up recently.  It never fails, I can screw up just about anything.  So I had to basically start over at the first site.  Note: BACKUP EVERYTHING AND OFTEN.

As of today I have 14 sites hosted this way.  Before I go any further, I wanted to do more research and thinking to determine if this was the most effective use of time and for returns.

Next — the incoming cash flow

I left off last needing ads for my new site.  The package I am using comes ready for Ad Sense.  How do I sign up for that you ask?  Well either go to google.com/adsense or my preferred method, HubPages.  HubPages is a not only an easy way to get your Google affiliate account set up, but an excellent place to find and deliver information and articles for exactly what we are trying to do here.  Affiliate marketing. I am still exploring HubPages, and find it more intriguing the more involved I get with it.

Google limits the amount of ads allowed per page, and you tend to get repeating ads if you have a very specific niche anyway.  So I need a different outlet for affiliate ads.  Now what do I do?  Well I did what most web savy do.  Searched Google.  I came up with 3 affiliate sites I am content with for now, and some I may sign up to in the future.

First ClickBank.  At first I was confused as hell at what ClickBank was trying to do.  I was baffled by their website.  I was green and couldn’t fully grasp affiliate marketing yet.  Once I understood what I was doing and where to get it, I was un-impressed by the product offerings.  Just check out some of the sales pitch pages.  Some of this stuff is garbage (to you and I, maybe not to Mr. XYZ), and some of this stuff sells itself.  I even found things that I have been interested in buying in the past.

Next Commission Junction.  Commission Junction makes it kind of hard to get where you want to be.  To CJ you and I are Publishers.  We are publishing the ads and the adveritisers are the people who want their products sold.  Once you fill out an application for a publisher you are set.

I also signed up at Paydotcom.com.  This site is similar to ClickBank, and I have not used it much as of today.

There are tons of sites for affiliate marketing, Ebay has one (they rejected my application), LinkShare, LinkConnector, and alot more.  You can find a pretty solid list with reviews here http://www.affiliatetips.com/online-channels-affiliate-program.html, and several pages worth at http://www.affiliateseeking.com/netwo/23000002/1.html (I am not “affiliated” with these sites)

Next time — what do I do with all these ads?

I keep asking myself this same thing.  Now what do I do?  I have been in this game for all of 2 weeks so far, and can’t learn and read fast enough.  Well below I will document the continuation of my quest..

So I want to be an affilliate marketer.  Last time I told you I purchased some php scripts for content generation, set up a host at StartLogic.com, and was ready to get started. My next step was to start pointing my domain names in the right direction.  I own 45 domains in total.  A couple are dedicated to my other business startup, and some are just for personal / family use.  While I was at GoDaddy.com I went ahead and bought a few more names.  I have a pretty specific niche of names, and wanted to open my self up to a few more areas of the internet.  I mentioned in an earlier blog I am a repeat customer if service is good.  GoDaddy‘s names might cost a bit more than the cheapest places on the web, but the management utilities and other features are top notch.  I went ahead and pointed the name servers of the sites I wanted to utilize to StartLogic.

Now I have my domains, my hosting and some php scripts.  I began playing with the DomainZaar script package, initially I was impressed and happy with the default layout.  This package comes with Ad Sense ready to go, but seemed to be missing something.  I began tweaking the layout to suit my needs.  I added another ad, expanded a search box, added Google Ads for search, and just generally moved things around.  I prefer the way it looks now, but the real question is is the ad placement good?  I have no idea, that is on my list of things to research.

Next time – I need more ads…….

About 2 weeks ago (early December, 2008) I was surfing around the net, and stopped at Sedo to check my parked domains.  My account was up to a whopping $12.XX after 15 months on 40 domains.  I thought to myself, this is ridiculous, I can do better than this by myself.  So it began.  Did I begin the right way.  No, I didn’t do much research I just jumped and started treading water.  So if you follow me along my affiliate learning path (it may be rather rocky) maybe together we can make a few extra bucks.  I am not trying to make millions, just make some extra cash to pay off the bills.  If we find a way to get rich, well, so be it!

Before I detail how the first 2 weeks went some background on myself.  I am a 31 year old Mechanical Design Engineer.  I don’t necessarily like my job, but it is a semi-reliable paycheck.  After all I have to feed my wife and 2 (soon to be 3) kids and dog.  I am pretty technical, I have done web design in the past, and have some limited skills in HTML, PHP, and image manipulation.  Over the last year I have been starting up my own company focused on LED lighting and technology.  Unfortunately the stock market crash put a huge delay on my startup.  Only thing missing right now is capital.

Back to the affiliate marketing.  The first thing I did was look for a script that would compile as many pages as possible in the least amount of time.  After a minimal amount of searching I purchased DomainZaar for $99. DomainZaar is capable of setting up multiple domain names with different keywords on one hosting platform.  This was a great feature for me, as I own a lot of domains and did not want to host them all individually.  I will expand on this product later.

Now I needed a place to host my sites.  My business site is hosted at StartLogic and they have treated me well for several years now.  They support PHP , MySQL, and CGI, everything I needed for my application.  They also have services included that will do automatic installation of WordPress Blog software (what you are reading right now), and OSCommerce, a very effective (and free) e-commerce solution, and more.  When I signed up there was a special running for unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage for $5.95 per month, they also threw in $50.00 worth of Adwords credits.  Seems like a good deal to me, and I tend to be a loyal repeat customer when treated right.

Next episode we will discuss setting up accounts with Google Adsense, ClickBank, and Commission Junction.  Plus forwarding of GoDaddy domains.