Nov 03

Rip out your F5 button

Blogs, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, WebWriMo challenge, Who? Me?, mAdsense 4 Comments

You need to stop refreshing your stats.

You all agree right?

You need to stop refreshing your stats.

Got it?

No seriously, STOP REFRESHING YOUR STATS.

Part of the shift to the businessman way of thinking means maxing out the “fire and forget” motto. Emphasis on forget, and it literally means forget. Fire up that campaign, make sure it works, all links go where they are supposed to, and then forget about it completely.

Set up that splog farm, make sure all crons fire, all rewrites work etc etc.  Then forget about it completely.

Buy that domain for the great new project you have in mind, set up a slow splog with relevant keywords on it to let it mature, and forget about it completely.

Why do I keep telling you this? Because you have to train yourself to fire and forget. Remember, fire and forget does not mean neglect, it means set everything right, make sure it works, then work on something else without refreshing the stats every 2 minutes. If the visitors come, they will come. If the product sells, it will sell. Keeping an eye on it makes no difference at all.

That is the big trap for newbies with Adsense. Adsense is a great and easy way for noobs to monetize their site, and they sit there and refresh the stats page instead of working on the site to make it more profitable. But, ok, the noobs are noobs, they have a reason for getting excited for making money online. What reason do you have? Is it your first check? Is it your 100$ milestone? Your 1000$?

Oh it is? Then why not spend your time working on the next milestone, instead of watch the first one come towards you slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly.

Here is what being an expert means:

  • You know the lay of the land.
  • You have the techniques mastered.
  • Your experience tells you what works and what doesn’t in different situations.
  • Your guts show you the opportunity.
  • You research the idea.
  • You make the investment.
  • You set up everything the right way.
  • You make sure everything works as it should.
  • You forget about the whole deal.
  • You go to your next project, while casually keeping an eye on the first.

Of course you are not an expert, because then you wouldn’t need to read this. Read the above steps, and fill up whatever aspect of them you are lacking in. Yes, it’s that simple. You don’t know the playground? Learn it. You don’t have the techniques mastered yet? Practice more. No money to invest? Make more! You d… etc etc.
Someone might ask here: “But I can’t leave the first project alone, it needs constant tweaking and monitoring!“

Why oh why my dear friend have I been yelling all this time about the 80/20 rule? Make the project NOT need constant tweaking and monitoring. How? FIGURE IT OUT!
Keywords are: outsourcing, automation, cron scripts, moderators, user contributed, useful tools, viral growth.

Keep on generating assets. As soon as something becomes stable and profitable, let it work and focus on your next project. Don’t try to squeeze out the first project for a few extra cents. Yes, optimize, but learn to recognize when it is time to stop and focus on the next one.

Only if you are an expert on anything will you understand what I am about to say below.

Experts see, evaluate, adjust, squeeze the trigger and walk away before the bullet hits the target. Why? Because they have already seen the bullet hitting the target in their mind. A veteran basketball player turns his back before the ball starts coming down. He knows if he will score or not. The actual physical event of the ball hitting the net is just a confirmation of what he already knows.

An expert plays all scenarios in his mind, the possibilities rush through his thoughts. The techniques are already mastered, it’s the strategy that matters now. He even invents new techniques all the time, his understanding of his craft makes him a pioneer.

An expert is never lucky, he sees that opportunity coming from a mile away and when it approaches in his trap he grabs it hard and rapes it till its dry.

An expert teaches, because through teaching you force your mind to sort through the endless amount of data on your craft, and categorize, analyze, prioritize in order to feed it to the student in manageable chunks. Through the act of teaching he goes through the basics again, and sees them with a wholly different eye, resulting in more skill and experience.

If you really want to become an expert on something, go read the above list again. It is the only guideline you really need.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Nov 02

Why you always need a splog

Blogs, Can of SPAM, Feed the Spiders, Fire and Forget, Mind over Pixels, Noobs, Techniques, WebWriMo challenge 4 Comments

What is a splog?

A spam blog, an auto updating blog, setup to scrape feeds at regular intervals and post them.

Why do you need one?

Because if you don’t have one, you are an idiot.

Even for completely whitehat sites, you cannot possibly expect to cover every product in your niche, and every keyword, and every misstype, and every new small thingie that pops up.

Having a splog, that slowly updates, lets say 2 feeds every 1.5 or 2.5 days, makes a secondary site relevant to your niche, filling up with content, linking to you with your preferred anchor text.

I have been using splogs everywhere for 2 years, and I have seen crappy 20 page 5 hours old splogs rank for great terms. Its not only the keyword itself that allows it to rank, its also the relevant keywords and news in the niche that get pulled with every feed.

If you want to keep it completely whitehat, name it NEWS and set it to scrape niche related news with permalinks pointed to the original articles, and keep it clean and similar to your site’s theme.

Or, you can buy a secondary keyword rich domain, and simply splog it, linking back to your main site. If you remove footprints and make it pass casual inspection, it will actually help your rankings and stay up there for a long time.

How to make that splog? It is so easy it hurts.

  • Download the feedwordpress plugin.
  • Install a new Wordpress engine.
  • Name it, remove the silly blogroll etc…
  • Put up a nice theme, do the permalinks hack.
  • Expand the pinglist.
  • Hand pick your feeds.
  • Set up feedwordpress to scrape every 1.5 days from 2 feeds max.
  • Put your links on the blogroll. 

And you are done. Another fire and forget method that works.

I usually add about 5 articles and 10 youtube’s as well. The broad keyword coverage from an aged splog can get you a lot of visitors, from untapped keywords.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Oct 27

Bum your marketing, you will stay a bum forever.

Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, Who? Me? 8 Comments

It’s all about the proper mindframe.

Did you know that 95% of the world’s wealth is handled by the 5% of the population? I firmly believe that if a global redistribution of wealth were to occur, in 2 years tops, the situation would be the same. Rich would be rich again, and poor would be poor.

To even strengthen my argument, take a look at all those lottery winners. It takes every single one of them, one year at maximum to spend all that money they earned and go back to their old lives.

Why is that? Why do some people know how to make (and keep, and invest) money, and most of the others do not?

Well, for one thing its education. I sincerely believe that the world education system is meant to produce spare parts for the existing generation of workers. Overspecialization makes people narrow minded, unable to think or seek out different avenues in their lives.

The system makes you a worker bee, a perfect piece of the larger picture, but not your picture.

Not everyone is a free soul, don’t worry, I am not that naive to believe that they were. I have talked about this issue with so many people, and I have reached to the conclusion that some people simply want to be used.

Some of them want to use you,

some of them want to get used by you,

some of them want to abuse you,

some of them want to be abused…
 

I have tried to explain the concept of passive income, of small constant investments and of cashflow to many people, and I have managed to break the mental handcuffs of only a handfull.

In the next few posts, I will try to explain these concepts. But for now, I will talk about the bigger picture, the proper mindframe.

People who think like workers will remain a worker their entire lives.

People who think like businessmen will ultimately become businessmen no matter how many failed projects they bury.

It is always about the way of thinking. You can always do a lot of work by the “brute force” method, but you are not a businessman if you think like that.

  • A worker will work his ass off and write 200 original well written articles.
  • A businessman will work his ass off and create a community of content writers to pump out original well written articles day in and day out.

Do you see the difference? Well, you fucking don’t. Everyone says that they understand the concept but the very next minute you see them do something stupid again.

To stick to the SEO issues, if you need 2 hours to get a link to your site you are a worker. If you need 100 hours to make a tool that will give you links at any quantity and anytime you request them, then you think like a businessman.

Sure, you can submit your site to every damn directory in the Internet, and outrank the businessman. But you will find out next month, that he has been spending his time writing one piece of linkbait that builds him 1000000 links overnight.

My point here, is that if you think like a bum, if you work one hour for 10$, then the next hour for the next 10$ etc, you will stay a worker forever.

Businessmen work one hour, to get 10 cents income. And the next hour, to get another 10 cents. Those cents build up, and they get to a point where you make money without doing anything. And stupid people call you lucky.

SEO issues again. Ask yourself, be truthful, you answer only to yourself. Hopefully, they will get you thinking. Here they are:

  • Do you write and submit articles to article directories?
  • Do you markov and rss scrape for content?
  • Do you create content generating communities?
  • Do you outsource the grunt work?
  • Do you submit to social sites one by one?
  • Do you make the social sites link to you?
  • Do you fix every tech issue yourself?
  • Do you have a dedicated techie who is a wizard in computers?
  • Do you research keywords one by one manually?
  • Do you utilize keyword suggestion tools to create large lists of “Shotgun spread” targets?
  • Do you build a unique and sooooooooo damn cute template for every little stupid project you come up with?
  • Do you simply use a template from your inventory, and work on the project after it has shown potential?
  • Do you make tools that others are dying to use?
  • Do you promote unique products in unique ways?
  • Are you doing the same stupid things that everyone else does?

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Oct 26

3 ways to monetize your blog without banners

Blogs, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, Techniques, mAdsense 9 Comments

Every blogger reaches that dilemma at some point. Do I whore out my site for extra cash, or do I leave it pretty and bannerless and making a hole in my timeline with no benefits?

For affiliates I believe, the choice is much easier. Most of us are in it for the money, so it’s weird for us to see a site without at least an ad. 

Hobbie bloggers/webmasters though, the ones that actually made the internet what it is today, reach that intersection at some point, and hate the idea of flashy ads all over their pretty little snowflake.

Well, I am here today to suggest something radically different. 3 bannerless ways to monetize your blog, here it goes:

What are they? They are automatically selected keywords in your site’s content, which have a double green underline. When the visitor moves the mouse over the link, a banner pops up from it. The banner is discreet, and mostly relevant to the keyword. 

If the mouse is somewhere else, the ads are nowhere to be seen.

I have never seen this technique in any other site, I may even be the only one that uses it. Honestly, I have found this technique working so well, that I just drop the code in every site I make, be it normal or sploggy. A simple, clever, practical fire and forget method, just the way I like it!

How do you make it? Simple.

  1. Signup for AdBrite if you are not already.
  2. Create a new zone. 
  3. Put your site’s info.
  4. Uncheck the other boxes, leave only the inline ads checked.
  5. They give you a small piece of code, and you simply put it between the body tags of your template.
  6. Voila, you are done.

Practically, the links get clicked a lot despite them having small bids. The layout of your site remains untouched and pretty. And you still get some revenue. The inline ads I believe are much better than banners.

Amazon has a similar trick in their program, and I have tried that as well. My opinion is that Amazon’s script is much heavier, producing larger page load times. Also, it does not seem to convert that well, and with AdBrite you get paid per click.

What is that? It’s a very clever business model actually… Basically, SpeakToMe provides a service to you, through which you can give personal, one-on-one consultation, paid by the minute.

It really needs some explaining to understand it because it is so revolutionary. The idea itself is old, it is the same as those phone lines, where the caller is charged by the minute, and the receiver helps him, and gets paid his cut. 

Well, take that tried and tested business model, and put it online.

You have your online presence, your reputation, your audience, your writings etc. And people contact you all the time, asking for your advice and help. 

Well, now you can do the same, while getting paid as a consultant. If your advice is as good as you think it is, you will actually be doing your clients a favor, by giving them a cheap, easily accessible way to rent your time. And since you are getting paid for it, you will be more focused in actually giving them good advice so that you show you are worth their time and money.

On a more practical note, the SpeakToMe service basically gives you a widget that you can easily integrate to your website, for example a page named “Speak to me now”. The installation itself is a simple copy paste after you have signed up. Another benefit is that payment is accepted inside your website, so the visitor never leaves your site.

Do you want to see a demo? You can nag the creator of this service right now! SpeakToMe expert widget demo.

The service is free to signup, easy to use, and they even give a guarantee of 50$ for the first 1000 visitors. Now that is confidence.

SpeakToMe’s cut is 20%, leaving you the remaining 80%. I find it a rather logical percentage for a service. Not much to discuss on that issue.

To avoid any misconceptions on the charges of this service, here is the exact page from their signup page:

SpeakToMe’s service charge
Broadcasting on the Internet to an unlimited audience is expensive. Accordingly, SpeakToMe charges a service fee to experts of 1.5 pennies per minute. 10 hours broadcasting time, in other words, will cost you $9 in future fees generated.

Credit card processing fees of 6%
Client accounts are funded through credit cards, and we pay a 6% processing fee for this service. This 6% is charged to your gross revenues.

SpeakToMe takes a 10% cut of revenues
In addition to the credit card processing fee of 6% and the $0.015 per minute service charge, SpeakToMe takes a cut of 10% of gross revenues. The remainder (over 80% of gross) is paid to the expert. 

If you are an expert on a niche, and your audience would be glad to pay a small amount in exchange for your one-on-one consultation, it is worth at least considering this business plan. It does not fit all businesses, but it can work wonders on others, and remember that the offline version is tried and proven to work amazingly well.

The most discreet way to monetize a blog. TLA needs no introduction, you see their banners all over the blogosphere. I have mentioned this again, but it fits this “bannerless blog” issue as well.

Text link ads can pay as much and even more than banners. The added benefit is that the income is stable, even if you get a sudden traffic drop, the link is still there. Of course, if you do not provide a valuable link spot to the advertisers for a long time you will lose them as well, but there is a much larger time buffer than ppc banners for you to react.

TLA has recently opened their “secret” inlinks marketplace to the public, and in summary, they are now selling like hotcakes for 7$ a pop.

Inlinks are simply handpicked keywords from advertisers, like “texas holdem” or “seo services” for example, that are linked automatically from the TLA plugin to his site.

The links are normal, like any other link on your site, and they are as discreet as it gets.

Of course, you can still review the links and deny any dirty ones, though the ones I have are all quite clean up to now.

So, here they are, 3 ways to monetize your website without any banners whatsoever. Go. Create.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , , , ,

Oct 20

TLA vs TNX, Round 2: Fight!

Fire and Forget, Inorganic agriculture, Internet Marketing 2 Comments

This an addon post to my previous TLA vs TNX preview. Since people liked it so much, I thought I would give some more information on the matter.

Two things have changed since the time of the first review’s writing:

  • TLA has opened their previously “secret” inlinks marketplace to the public.

This move has significantly increased their marketplace, and also decreased the average link price. Buyers can now find the anchor text they want, on old, linked, PR posts, and pay a logical price like 7-9$, rather than the ridiculous 300$ older links.

For my sites, the old inlinks had not wielded a single sale, whereas now, they are selling like hotcakes. I have an average of 1 inlinks sale per week, and those are cumulative, meaning that I expect to reach 100$ passive income in 3 months from the inlinks alone. Not bad, for doing absolutely nothing.

  • TNX has perfomed beyond expectations, selling links steadily. Also, they increased their buyout price.

They have been selling links all this time, without falter, filling up close to 85% of my inventory. Also, they increased their point buyout price by 0.03$, to 0.93$ per 1000 points. It may not seem much, but it adds up. 

Honestly, when I read that they would increase their point buyout price over time, I thought they were lying. Guess I was wrong.

You can also sell points to other users, by checking the first option in “Sell tnx points” page. But I fail to see the use in that. If I wanted to barter all day for selling points, I would sell the links on digitalpoint in the first place. 

Also, a thing I did not mention in the last post, is that the TNX forum has plenty of information about tech issues in various CMSes etc. Personally I had no use for any of that, but it’s there, and it deserves to be noted.

Something that I am writing with caution, is that I am fairly certain TNX has sold 5 links on some of my pages. Their system claims the max is 4. Either this is true, or the code is messing up with my caching plugin. EDIT: I am an idiot. Ignore this.

A little hint if you are buying TNX links, is to ignore their advice to put text around your link. I have seen the high PR buyers put only 1-2 words, just the anchor text, so that may be a nudge in the right direction. Plus the text thingie really screws up the formatting, making it impossible for a publisher to make them look good. They should at least make it standardized, like an xml feed.

All the other points remain the same, TLA is still a pain in the ass to register all your sites, and their other links are still too expensive to ever actually sell. But their inlinks move has changed the scene, because it shows actual constant link sales. The move really put them back on the market.

So, now its a close match. Which one is better, remains to be seen in Round 3. I suggest that you use them both though, they are slightly different in the application.

And somebody tell that idiot who owns tnx.com that he could earn thousands by putting up a single referral link. The waste just tears my heart in two.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , ,

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