Bye Bye Forums

I am officially removing the forums from the site as they are receiving way more spam than helpful conversation. This is due to the fact that I hadn't appointed any moderators but then again, I don't think the forums received enough traffic to warrant anyone moderating the posts that weren't happening.

What I noticed was that some people started posting an average of 200+ threads/day for pr0n and the like. No bueno, so adios forums. Until we have a good reason to resurrect them, that is.

Of course, if you have any questions that need answering, feel free to leave a comment here and either I or someone intelligent will answer you in a reasonable amount of time.

Yes, I'm still here people so stay tuned. I have good things planned for you and your bank accounts.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Yes, I said it. Selling credit cards and other financial goods and services online is a good money maker. I recently checked out CashFlowFromCreditCards which is a multi-level marketing platform where users can earn money in two very different but equally as lucrative ways.

First, you can earn commissions by promoting credit card applications, free credit reports, auto loans, and a slew of other financial goods and services. An affiliate to the system made a video titled "Double Your Profits in 20 Minutes" where he not only doubles his initial investment but he more than quadruples it. After watching this video it dawned on me that it really is possible for ANYONE who signs up to make their initial investment back at the very least by following his step-by-step instructions here.

Second, you can make money by promoting the actual CashFlowFromCreditCards business opportunity. You can earn up to $65 per referral to the CFFCC system which is a really nice payout especially considering the new embeddable flash video they have made available to affiliates for promotion. Take a look at the FLV promo video below, as you can see this video carries my tracking code so if any of you sign up for the CashFlowFromCreditCards system by clicking through the video I will be credited for the referral. This tool harnesses the promotional power of videos online and is sure to change the way video promotion is practiced online.

Overall, I recommend giving credit card marketing a chance, especially during such rough economic times. The financial services industry is a 5-billion dollar industry annually and is growing each and every year. Check out CashFlowFromCreditCards and own your own piece of the multi-billion dollar financial services industry today!

Popularity: 5% [?]

I Just Blue Myself

I don't normally do this sort of thing, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Blueverse was kind enough to give me a little interview, so I obliged them with some answers.

Check out the interview here.

Sorry it's a tad long, but I thought I'd be thorough.

Oh and if you don't get the title reference, it's to a hilarious episode (and really, which one wasn't hilarious?) of Arrested Development where Tobias tries out for the Blue Man Group.

Outstanding.

Popularity: 5% [?]

As I'm sure many of you have, I've had my fair share of weight gain since high school. In fact, I gained about 25lbs and a few weeks ago at 201lbs, I was starting to get too big for my shirts. It was depressing to say the least. It was a good wake-up call as I was determined not to succumb to the shame of buying bigger sizes in clothes. Basically all I do is sit and stare at a computer all day, first at work, then at home. I mean, my eyes should be turning into little square monitors by now. So I figured something had to be done.

The first thing I did was stop driving to work. I live about two miles from the university where I'm a web developer by day, so I decided to start taking a bicycle to work. It's sweaty business but I have a little Hawaiian Breeze fan that cools me right down. The side benefit to this is that I don't waste money on car repairs, fueling up or a parking permit.

Biking to work did help the weight a bit but I could tell it was going to be a slow process. Then my wife mentioned the Master Cleanse and after some research, I started that. No, I'm not trying to sell you on this and if you decide to try it, do so at your own risk. Now I won't go into detail but let's just say -- it's cleansing in the way that Mexican food is cleansing. I won't say it wasn't difficult to avoid eating but the choice I had was much simpler to stick to: eat or don't. So I did that for eight days and was able to lose 15lbs, of which I gained back 2lbs (water weight) after two weeks and have since lost. Currently, I weigh in at roughly 186lbs.

So the other day, my brother in law showed me a website called hundredpushups.com. Essentially, It's a six week program where you work your way up to doing 100 consecutive push-ups and it's free. I figured -- I'm no stranger to push-ups; I did them a lot when I was younger, so why not? So far, I've finished day one on Monday and I'll finish up day two today. And in case you're wondering, I was only able to do twenty push-ups for the initial test but I'm determined to get to the one-hundred mark.

Popularity: 4% [?]

So I'm about a week into my experiment and I actually have ranked for some long-tail keywords. The particular keywords I've chosen are high volume so they're naturally going to be difficult to break into. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this difficulty has been the rumored 'sandbox' that Google places new websites into when they're related to high volume (and therefore, high spam) topics.

I've gotten a trickle of traffic from Google for the long tail keywords and I'm on page four for both. I can definitely hear the rushing rapids of pages one and two coming up soon though. It just pushes me foreward. The funny thing about this is - I've only paid for a few websites to advertise my link. Other than that, I've been writing articles, posting in topical forums and manually submitting unique descriptions to directories (although none have kicked in yet). Oh, yes, and I've been paying people to post on the website's forum.

All this and I get page four for long tail keywords! Ouch. This could get rough.

So now I'm researching other bum marketing methods as well as just methods that just flat-out help you climb the rankings. I'm also trying to think of a few clever ways as well, like link bait articles or some sort of side service that gets people to back-link the site. It works well for my Myspace Layouts site.

So that's where I am right now. I'll keep you posted on the status of this project.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I've heard some good things about Ringtones lately and I was thinking about jumping back in it.

Are any of you still doing Ringtones?

One thing I don't like is all the extra steps that keep getting piled onto these types of offers. That, and the way the top dogs are in bed with the ringtone suppliers already.

Other than that, I think I've learned some valuable things that would make it possible to do a few thousand a day in ringtonage but I'd like to know what you guys think.

Popularity: 5% [?]

These are my top five speeches about making money/sales. Feel free to comment if you disagree but these are the five sales speeches that make me feel inspired to stop being lazy and make it happen (it being money). I say NSFW due to the use of bad language, not nudity.

Boiler Room - Group Interview

If you can watch this without being inspired in some way, you might be dead inside. I've seen this clip more than fifty times and I'm still not tired of it. You should watch this at least once a week to remind yourself why you're in this game.

Glengary Glen Ross - Always Be Closing

I hadn't seen this until today when my brother in law showed me. What's good about this is that it shows what it takes to shake people out of their comfort zone and that's what it takes to make someone a closer. If you aren't closing, you're fired.

Wall Street - Greed Is Good

I couldn't make a top five list like this without including Gordon Gekko's speech in Wall Street. It's a way to remind ourselves that what we're doing is for the benefit of man kind. Greed makes the world go 'round.

Boiler Room - Telemarketing Pitch

Pay close attention to this one. This one makes me think of the myriad of cheesy landing pages out there. People just aren't trying and it's the biggest reason you hear complaints from people. "I can't make sales." Then you get the complaints on the other side from people having to wade through all the spammy sales pitch pages. Do yourself a favor and actually SELL your audience. Go the extra mile to have them choose you over the next guy.

Jerry Maguire - Show Me The Money

It's simple: "Show me the money." Enough said.

Popularity: 11% [?]

After talking with my buddy Will today, I was shocked to find out that he has alarming proof that Incentaclick was scrubbing leads shaving sales. If you weren't privvy to the commotion yesterday on WickedFire, check out his post here-

CX Digital... Massive Fraud?

It's a well known fact that affiliate networks scrub some leads here and there and as mysterious as their reasons seem, it's usually something logical (someone signed up twice, tracking was down temporarily, etc.).

But it's only when you can compare the same offer on another network (Will has now switched the same offer to eAdvertising) that you begin to see where lead scrubbing goes from slightly annoying to down-right damaging financially. And what's worse, CX Digital's own CEO apparently called Will and tried to smooth things over. Of course, Will blew him off stating something to the effect of "I said my piece. Read the forum post. I don't want to talk to you." and hung up.

And this isn't the first time people have reported being ripped off by CX Digital. Numerous other people responded to the thread with similar stories and it's certainly not the first thread on this topic.

To me, it's a huge red flag when the top dog of the company individually calls its affiliates to smooth things over when the company is obviously at fault. Sure, it would be great if my Gmail account got disabled and Eric Schmidt gave me a ring. But that's one thing, and this is definitely another.

So, CX Digital, what gives? Isn't it bad enough that we have trust issues with affiliate networks already? In order for our relationship to function properly, I have to be able to trust you to properly track sales, leads, and to not screw me out of money that is owed to me. Without that, I have to have faith that you'll just ... get around to it.

Well, I don't know about you fine readers, but I don't have that kind of time. This is pretty bad. I don't think I'll be using Incentaclick anytime soon. How about you?

Popularity: 16% [?]

$10,000.

How many people can say they've generated that much revenue in one day? Not many. In fact, you might not even believe people make that much or anything close in the affiliate marketing business on a daily basis. You'd be wrong, but you are entitled to your opinion. Your next logical question should be something along the lines of "well, Scott, how do you know?" Let's just say I know from experience that it's achievable and maintainable, but achieving that much revenue every day isn't the problem.

The problem is keeping it.

Depending on a lot of variables that I won't touch on right now, your profit margin for these types of sales can be anywhere from 15-50%+ if you do it right. While that might sound, taste and even smell like what you might imagine a million dollars would, think again.

What most seasoned affiliate marketers know and what many of the greener affiliates are starting to realize is that profit is never cut and dry in this business. Sure, you might profit $5,000 out of that $10,000 but where are you going to get the money to maintain your sales the next day? What about growth? What about variations in your profit margin? What about unforeseen expenses and things of that nature? Yes, it can be confusing. It's expensive.

Despite your large buffer of money, you always need more money to spend on ads the next day, and the next day, and the next day. This is a never-ending cycle that's hard to break free from. Don't get me wrong, you'll start building up a nice chunk in the bank account but it won't be what you expect. And all because for the business to work, you have to keep re-investing in the business on a daily basis. PPC (pay per click) is certainly not free.

Some people might be satisfied with a business like this despite the aforementioned drawbacks but if you're like me, you like to fix what isn't broken.

What if you could go from that 15-50%+ profit margin and take it up to about 95%+? Would you do it? I certainly would. And as I was doing it, I would tell other people about it in my blog. Not that it's some big secret, but it definitely needs to be discussed and utilized.

You guessed it. I'm talking about the golden goose, the holy grail, the cat's pajamas: organic traffic.

Now before you angrily hit the back button on your browser and talk about how much of a hack that Scott guy is, just bear with me. The people with the most successful affiliate marketing campaigns are doing three key things to be successful:

1. Bidding on short-tail, high-volume keywords
2. Paying much less than you per click
3. Getting paid more than you per lead/sale

I know; it's enough to make you want to curl up into the fetal position and cry. It's not impossible to out-do these guys, but it's going to cost you.

Here's the good news: you don't have to out-do them on pay per click if you can rank for the same keywords organically. Sure, it's a no-brainer but have you seriously considered it? If you ranked in the top ten results for a short-tail keyword or two and funneled that into your same marketing campaign, your profit margin would go from measly to grizzly.

In fact, if you're already sending PPC traffic to a website, you're already getting ranked organically for those terms. Now if you start getting other people to backlink to your site, you're going to start climbing the search result ranks. After a while, you can start diverting your direct marketing campaign money (PPC) toward getting more and more back-links. At some point, you're going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000-10,000+ backlinks and at least a few of those will be from authority links. Eventually, you can cut off your PPC spending altogether if you so choose.

Of course, at this point you'd be fully maintaining a website full of high-quality information and resources with a nice marketing funnel. Google would love you, Yahoo would love you and even I would love you. And you would love your profit margin.

Now whether all of this is 100% accurate is still up for debate. Call it another case study I'm doing, but I'm definitely gunning for some short-tail keywords with a couple of my landing page sites. If it fails, it fails and I'll definitely let you know (after a reasonable period of self-pity and self-loathing), but if it works, you'll definitely be the first to know.

Stay tuned.

Popularity: 6% [?]

As promised, I ran a one-month case study on a particular offer. In fact, it was this particular offer-

Consumer Incentive Promotions - $250 Grocery Gift Card - ZIP SUBMIT

This is offer #553 from NeverblueAds.

Here are the final stats for sales-

CPL: $1.20
Clicks: 9,689
Conversions: 2,228

Total Sales: $2,673.60

Advertising was done solely with Google AdWords on the content network to keep the study simple.

Here are the final stats for ads-

Starting bid: $0.50/click (Beginning of study)
Ending bid: $0.35/click (End of study)
Average CPC: $0.24 (Overall)
Average Ad Position: 3.3
Total Clicks: 7443
Total Impressions: 7,005,653
CTR: 0.11%

Total Spend: $1,758.60

And the ending total-

$2,673.60 - $1,758.60 = $915.00

And for the gritty details, here is the ad I ran:

Grocery Content Ad

As you can see, there's nothing amazing about the ad and the URL itself is a redirect. With a little updating, this ad can be improved significantly to increase the low CTR and increase the honesty factor of the ad (as it was slightly misleading).

Keywords: food stamp, food stamps, recipe, recipes

Popularity: 54% [?]