Archive for January, 2008

Somebody Really Needs to Slap Carrie Lauth

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I really should be slapped. Seriously. Someone really should reach right through the blogosphere and slap me on the cheek for not writing up a proper review of AdSpy Tracker.

I’ve meant to, really I have.

It’s just that I’ve been really lazy busy lately.

I’m just ashamed happy that it took Kelly mentioning the topic on Moms Morning Show yesterday to refresh my memory.

So here’s a quickie review before I get to my DUH! moment.

AdSpy Tracker is a tool that you use to track your Google AdSense activity. You simply place the tracking code on your sites (and this wasn’t that difficult at all, the how to is VERY detailed and I only had to resort to ONE frantic instant message to Kelly McCausey who first told me about it to get it done, and then it was only a silly error on my part).

Then you log in to your AdSpy account and see what’s going on. AdSpy tells you all kinds of juicy and valuable information, such as:

  • Exactly which keywords people are using to enter your site
  • The actual Google ads people are clicking on
  • The pages those ads are located on
  • The ad formats that are getting the most clicks
  • The Click Through Rates of your pages

Yesterday Kelly mentioned the fact that it’s difficult to tell WHICH ADS are making money on a particular site that’s earning income through AdSense. After using AdSpy she learned that it was ONE page on one of her sites that was earning the bulk of the money – so what do you think she did with that information?

She built more pages like that one to get more results!

When I first got AdSpy I let it cook for a couple of days then started looking at the stats. What I found was that one of my sites that did pretty well with AdSense was making most of its money from two or three pages.

So, I immediately spent about an hour tweaking those ad blocks to make them more irresistible to clicking, as well as building a few more incoming links to those pages. Here’s what happened.

That site now earns more every day than my entire network of sites did two months ago.

I’m pretty pleased with that, to say the least. ;)

So. My advice to you, if you’re using Google AdSense, is to run not walk to this little website: AdSpy Tracker and pick up yourself a copy. This is a one time buy people. You don’t have to pay every month for it. It’s ONE. TIME. And you can use it on ALL your sites. Ok?

Ok. Here it is again: AdSpy Tracker.

Cause tracking is really important for us lazy busy internet marketers. :)

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Content Site Update

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I mentioned in this post about improving what I’ve got in 2008, and in this post I listed some specific changes I made to a content site one day.

By way of update, I’ve seen a couple of things already, namely I made two affiliate sales. This site hasn’t made an affiliate sale in many months so that is definitely not a coincidence. I’m happy about that because it means the trend will continue.

No big jump in traffic yet but I hired a ghostwriter to write an article for me, so now I’ll submit it around the web to get more incoming links and traffic. More updates to come!

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Remember my free sample?

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Remember last week when I mentioned the free week long test drive I got as a result of this blog?

Well Saturday in the mail I got a free $50 Borders gift card thanks to the Dodge folks. Cool. :-)

Blogging can make you money AND get you free stuff.

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Great Advice: Just Get Started

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Kelly McCausey shared some awesome advice for people who haven’t yet begun their internet business but who want to do so… if you haven’t read it yet, go see it here.

I echoed Kelly’s words in my comment. Last week I stated that I was also committed to improving my existing projects and sites this year instead of beginning anything new – but that doesn’t mean I won’t experience growth.

Content site #1 (not in terms of how old it is, just that it’s the first one I’m working on improving) has already seen an increase in affiliate sales and activity (in the form of emails from subscribers). I’m stoked about that. :-)

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Making It Better: Content Site #1

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

When I said I was going to update you on my “Making It Better in 2008” progress, I wasn’t kidding!

Here is a site that has been gathering dust for FAR too long. I haven’t added content to it or made any changes in over a year (although I have sent out a couple of newsletters to the list.)

I thought of selling it, but decided to keep it since it fits into my overall target market. I also had some ideas on how to improve the site. One of the reasons I wanted to start with this one is because it makes NO money. It’s the only site I own that doesn’t generate sales or Adsense income.

So, similar to the thinking of a person who pays off their debt starting with the lowest balance for the psychological boost it will give them, I am starting with this one. Anything would be an improvement. LOL!

For starters, this is a content site all about limiting screen time. It has articles on why too much TV is a bad idea, and ideas on what to do instead. It makes affiliate recommendations, mostly books about research on TV’s effects and a couple of other products (some from Amazon.com and a few ebooks). It has a newsletter (actually just an autoresponder with a bunch of messages) with tips and ideas for family time that don’t involve screens. There are over 1,000 subscribers on the list. There is serious potential there, so I need to work on getting those folks to buy too.

I thought it had potential however, and was already getting some decent traffic and had incoming links from similar sites in this “un-TV” genre. It gets search engine traffic from a couple hundred unique keyword phrases.

Here is a screen shot of the Before:

And about half an hour Later:

You probably can’t tell a whole lot from the pictures, but I did the following:

  1. Removed Adsense ads from 90% of the pages. The ads were making NO money. When I emailed a friend about the site, she said she wasn’t surprised that this was the case, since the ads were showing up all about watching TV on the computer. DUH! People who are trying to watch less TV aren’t likely to click on ads about watching TV, are they? So that was an obvious thing to change.

  2. Changed the left nav menu so the links were smaller and shorter. I also added several affiliate recommendations to the left menu, and that font is a bit larger, making them stand out more.
  3. Wrote a bolder, more direct headline.
  4. Made the font larger and bolder on the right nav to draw attention to the newsletter sign up box.
  5. Added a picture of a product that I found on Amazon, it’s a perfect fit: a device that plugs into a Tv, computer or video game that enables a parent to set a timer that will turn the device off completely. This is a higher priced product than most I promote so I’m interested to see if it converts well.
  6. Made the page wider to give it a more modern look.

That’s it for now. Later on this month I’ll: add some more content, hire a ghostwriter to write an article I can send out, do some keyword research to guide me when I add new pages, and look for more appropriate affiliate products to recommend.

Stay tuned. No pun intended. ;)

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Make Everything Better

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Everyone’s been talking about their goals for 2008 lately. When Kelly posted that she has made some BIG changes in her business in her efforts to keep focus and that she wanted to improve all her existing projects this year, I decided to share my own goals.

I’m also devoting this year to improving my existing projects. Nothing new!

I shared this goal with the ladies on Moms Morning Show last week as well as my fellow Mom Masterminders, and it seems that a few of us have a similar idea. I did release a new product this month, but it has been in the works since last month, and it is being sold on an existing site that fits my target audience and larger goal, so it doesn’t count. ;)

However, for the remainder of the year, I will not do any of the following:

  • Buy new domains
  • Launch new products
  • Start new websites

I recently finished up my 2007 financials/paperwork and was happy to see that I did double my income from 2006. And as I wrote about earlier, I unloaded a bunch of sites and projects and still didn’t see a decrease in my income (which I was actually expecting!).

So, I’m even more determined to continue reaching my current target markets with the products and websites I already have. To that end, I’ll be spending one month on each of my existing projects just improving and tweaking.

Thankfully I have the ladies at Mom Masterminds to give me their feedback. I’m also going to post my progress here so that hopefully you can benefit and also share your thoughts.

Just off the top of my head, here are some of the things I plan on doing:

Content Sites

  • Review the home page. Is there a strong call to action? Good copy?
  • Look at my autoresponders. Are my thank you pages recommending a product? Read the emails that are scheduled to go out. Do I need to change anything? How are the affiliate products converting? Do I need to update any redirects?
  • Look at stats from AdSpy and see how I can tweak the Google ads for higher clicks.
  • Do keyword research and see what hot products or pages I can add.
  • Write articles to promote the site and improve traffic and search engine listings.
  • Continue providing informative free reports to drive traffic and affiliate commissions.

Products

  • Tweak sales pages and track results of changes made.
  • Provide affiliates with more resources (more articles, ads, reviews, reports, etc)
  • Write articles to promote products

What about you? What are your goals for 2008 (post your blog url in your comments if you like) and how are you going to bring those about?

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I Rarely Do This

Friday, January 11th, 2008

But I’ll make an exception because I think this free report has amazing value.

Armand Morin (yes, THE Armand Morin, the one you’ve heard about if you’ve been online for more than 5 minutes and the guy behind Big Seminar), has just released a report called An Obvious Truth.

I don’t recommend a lot of free reports because many of them are too hype-y or fatalistic for my taste. I’m a simple kind of gal, and that’s one of the reasons I really enjoyed this report. Its simplicity and its truth.

I also learned a couple of neat tricks that I want to immediately put into action!

Armand also has a great writing style. You’ll enjoy it, I promise. Download the report here:

An Obvious Truth

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Internet Marketing for Broke Moms

Friday, January 11th, 2008

The other day at Mom Masterminds, a member posted that she had a friend who wanted to learn how to make money online. The friend in question was a single mom of a 2 month old. She was asking for suggestions on what to tell this friend.


Yikes!
I feel for this mom already. I remember looking down at my 6 week old infant in my arms and thinking,

“I would rather sell my used underthings on eBay than go back to work and leave this child.”

I don’t mean to be crude, but that’s how I felt! I also wasn’t single at the time (although my income was sorely needed), so I can only imagine the stress. So I told her that if I had a friend in that situation I would say the following:

Scoop up $23 from the grocery budget or sell someting on eBay or borrow from Grandma. Then:

1) Register a domain – Pick a registrar. I like InternetBasedMomsHosting.com because my friend Alice Seba makes a quarter or two when I get a domain there, but you chould choose any one you like. Buy herfirstnamelastname.com $8

2) Get good hosting – I love Momwebs, $15 a quarter

3) Install a WordPress blog on the domain. Free.

4) Start blogging. Prolifically. Daily. Or more often. Find your voice. Find your passion, find your body of knowledge (everyone has one), find your target market, get readers and people following you, etc.

5) Market stuff as an affiliate.

6) Observe what your readers buy.

7) Rinse, repeat.

You know what’s funny though? When I read her query and then responded, I didn’t see the part about her being a single mom of a 2 month old! When I went back and read that, I realized that this mom might need some urgent, replace-a-paycheck type of money.

With that info in mind, I wrote another response. It read like this:

I would recommend she do some type of work at home job.

Nell Taliercio would be the gal to ask for information on that. Or if she has any kind of skill, she could do some Virtual Assistant work by the hour.

If *I* were in that situation knowing what I know now about making money online, I would immediately start marketing my services as a VA doing transcription or something else like it. Something that would give me immediate cash money in hand.

And I would build up my passive income on the side doing what I mentioned in post above, because although it takes a little time to build, every mom needs passive income especially when that baby starts to grow and take far fewer naps. ;)

So. I hope that is useful to you, especially if you’re new to this blog. And new to the idea of making money online. It really is quite simple, it’s just a lot of work, over and over again.

p.s. eBay doesn’t allow folks to sell their underthings anymore. Not that I would do that, ever.
I have a blog. See how it works? :-)

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Blogging Can Get You Free Samples

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

I’ve gotten free stuff before, but this takes the cake. See what my newest sample is?

It’s a 2008 Dodge Caravan. It’s sitting in my driveway for one week. Apparently the Dodge people consider me their target market, and they wanted me to take it for a test spin for a few days to see what I thought (and blog about it, of course!). They even gave me a free camera to snap a few photos.

If you’re not blogging for business yet, better get started. As Kelly McCausey says, we bloggers are da media. :-)

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