What is a problem is that on my short drive to work, I pass by maybe 20-30 people going about their seemingly care-free lives. I drive directly by a golf course and a bike path, so the people I do see are either playing a game I love or just taking a casual stroll. These things alone aren’t out of reach; I can do them on the weekend. The hard part to swallow is that they’re doing it while I have obligations I have to fulfill in order to maintain a certain standard of living. But hey, the grass is always greener on the other side.

That’s exactly why working at home seems like an amazing idea. It might even be the embodiment of the American Dream. Just imagine– you wake up, check your bank account and there’s automatically more money in there. You might do a few hours of actual work (how much are you actually doing at your job anyway?), then you might watch some TV, head out for a stroll or hell, why you’re at it, go play a round of golf. And that’s just ONE day!

Sure, there’s a lot of security that comes with a day job. You have benefits, cheap insurance, a steady paycheck, paid vacations/sick time and in most cases, job security (your job isn’t going to disappear over night). When you work from home, this isn’t always the case. Depending on your business, it could be very up and down or your living for the rest of the year might hinge on the holiday season. It’s definitely not for those with a weak stomach. But on the other hand, you can’t just get up and leave whenever you need to. With a regular job, you have to wait until you have enough time to get away, make sure it’s OK with your boss and plan around that. On top of that, you are never guaranteed a raise. Work for yourself and you control your own money; work for someone else and you’re hoping they will notice your work and compensate you for it.

That’s not to say that a home business is always the better way to go. Some home businesses are difficult to the point where you’d be better off working for someone else and getting that steady paycheck. Certainly, not all home based businesses are created equal.

If you were to quit your day job right now, what type of business would you start? Would it be a consulting company, marketing a shiny new product or idea or would you turn to something more along the lines of referral-based sales (affiliate marketing) and cost per click advertising?

Hundreds of people have already banked thousands doing just that — marketing. I know because I have several friends who have either started a decent second income or who never have to work at a dayjob again. If you take a second to think about what that really means, you’ll start to understand what a beautiful thing internet marketing really is. In fact, if you combine all the home based businesses I listed earlier (consulting, marketing a new product and affiliate marketing), you would make a killing working from home. That’s because you can take that product you want to sell and use internet advertising to do all the selling for you. Think about that– instead of a salesman that works 9 to 5 for you, you have a salesman who works 24×7 (24 hours, 7 days a week) for you and on demand. It never asks for sick days and never takes vacations. And even if you don’t have a product, other companies will pay you very well to market theirs.

I use the term “market” loosely, because you yourself don’t even need to ever see or speak to another person to complete sales. Advertising will do all the work for you. There’s another term to describe what I’m talking about– passive income. If it’s not required for you to be present in order for a sale to be completed, money is being made without you being there. Hell, you can be dead asleep and money will keep rolling your way.

So you can understand why I look longingly toward the golf course and the people walking their dogs and pushing their baby strollers along. I know I could be there, but two things stand in the way:

1. I just don’t make enough money overall to completely quit my job and frankly, I don’t think I would need to even if I did make enough money because the benefits are just so great.
2. I’m afraid to lose the security of having a steady paycheck and fear will hold me back until I’m making a decent sum of money.

But if you have the courage, I urge you to consider taking the reigns on your life and giving internet marketing a chance. Even if you don’t quit your job, you can definitely make a decent second income. That extra income comes in great on holidays, birthdays, etc. or if you just feel like taking a needed vacation. Personally, I just want to build my personal net worth and assets. Whatever your reason, you should definitely take advantage of such a convenient means to make the dough.

Just don’t forget those who helped you get there!

Additionally, if you’re looking for a good place to start, don’t hesitate to try out the resources below.

http://www.theonlinebusinessesystem.com

I recommend this one in particular because you’ll get set up with a mentor to help you get started and it’s helped me out tremendously.

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The reason this happens, I’ve found, is because your landing pages get indexed pretty well in Google, Yahoo, etc. for the keywords you bid on with PPC. After you turn your advertising faucet off, the organic hit sponge still has some traffic soaked up inside of it (search engines still have you indexed). You’ll notice that this will last for a while and then eventually your stream will turn into a trickle and then dry up. So what’s the solution?

Well, for one thing, you can continue bidding on those search terms that got you indexed in the first place but decrease the bids just enough for you to stay indexed but not generate too many clicks. This can be an issue when maintaining a campaign because PPC services generally like you to keep a relatively high CTR but if you can manage to keep your ads running, you should be OK.

Another great way of keeping your sites high in search results is to link to your landing pages from any other high traffic websites you may have, while keeping in mind good SEO practices and of course, search engine guidelines (don’t hide your links). A good way to utilize SEO for organic traffic is to put a ‘title’ and ‘alt’ property in your links that is related to your desired keyword search (read more about this here).

What has worked for me and I’m sure many others is paying for links on other related websites. I say related because search engines (especially Google) like to see related content linking to related content. Trust me, it will improve your rankings in the search engines. Additionally, this practice can be used for any type of traffic building but might not pay off as well as the affiliate marketing combination. In general, contacting the webmaster and working out a reasonable price is completely up to you but all I can say is — never settle for the first price they give you. Remember, you’re here to make money!

And finally, if you don’t want to fork out any money at all, you can always offer up a link exchange with a website with related content (you link to them and they link to you, respectively). Just a word to the wise with this practice- The problem here is that the search engines see this as a weaker link than one site linking to another with no back-links. This means you might not get as high a ranking for a particular keyword, especially since the site linking to you gets more traffic.

Good luck,

Scott

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Now that this goal has been met, my next goal is maintaining the $1k/day status and then, obviously, pushing on up to $2000-days with the same profit margins. I doubt this will be a problem though with the new campaigns I’m rolling out. Only time will tell!

A buddy and I have been trying out a new trimming method for our campaigns and it’s been working like a charm. Not only is it helping to maintain our current levels of incoming traffic but it also cuts spending! I love it!

The system is finally starting to make sense to me and I know for a fact I could start with nothing at this point and start generating the same kinds of numbers you see in the above picture. That’s a comforting feeling and there’s definitely no looking back.

My current goals are to expand in to several other markets as well as seeking out new methods for bringing in tons of targeted traffic. The best part is, now I can afford to pay for all this stuff.

More later. I better sleep.

Scott

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It was supposed to be an anniversary gift from my wife but apparently, it had come really early and she hadn’t gotten to it in time to shield it from view. Hey– not my fault.

I didn’t have more than 15 minutes alone with my new little package when we had to rush off to pick up a baby crib, but as soon as we were back I was all over it. iTunes updates, music syncing, address book filling, ringtone setting, you name it.

Although I realize the initial glow of the iPhone will fade after a spell, I do see the beauty that is the iPhone. So much so that I forgive Apple for omitting basic staples of such an awesome phone (like cut and paste, video with the camera, flash support, bluetooth syncing). Also, I realize that most of these things will be covered in future releases and that their plan is to probably keep people interested while they release the already-created “features” along with bug fixes as they come up.

All annoyances aside, the machine is glorious. If you don’t have one, get one. I went from a Blackberry Pearl to the iPhone and the iPhone rocks the world of the Pearl.

Next comes my real love– my baby girl. Set for release on November 10th of this year!

Stay tuned.

-Scott

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Sitdiary.net is back and registration is open! Please let your friends know!

Last night, I was attempting to activate the registration function for Sitdiary. In the midst of furious coding, I noticed my FTP server stopped responding and the upload didn’t complete. I restarted Dreamweaver (the html editor) and logged back on to find that the file had been deleted and I’d overwritten it on my side. I was thoroughly frustrated and angry with myself, but for every dark cloud there is a silver lining.

As I was looking through the Sitdiary code directory, I noticed the old code files just sitting around, so I decided to activate them just for the hell of it. A few bug fixes and code updates later, Sitdiary is running just like it used to!

Seeing it back in action is, for lack of a better term, beautiful.

Scott

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We plan to teach the web and we believe the best way to learn is by doing, and that exactly what the idea is– you can follow along as the video plays, so there’s no more confusion about doing something incorrectly on a normal web page based tutorial.

So far, I’ve churned out a few different tutorials on simple Photoshop effects and a couple basic HTML tutorials, but there will be many more! Stay tuned.

- Scott

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Essentially, what you do is break lots of general keywords that match your particular destination page and break them up into very targeted keyword groups that match specific pages on the destination link.

So that’s great and it’s a beautiful concept, except for a novice to advertising, this can be more difficult than it seems. This last week was my trial in segmentation, and to be honest with you, I failed miserably. For three of the seven days, I spent $150/day with next to no returns. This was because I paused my successful campaigns to segment them into several smaller groups, and in doing so I got a ton more clicks and for some reason, way less sales. I will say this — most of the money was going to an industry that is heavily saturated and gets tons of traffic, but that doesn’t account for the other campaigns which were usually more successful.

In fact, if I showed you my current ClickBank screen shot, you would be depressed for me because I lost my momentum I had going before. Luckily, I saved my campaigns that were bringing me success and I enabled those again a couple of hours ago. I have a new strategy now that won’t cost so much, and it might save you a ton as well. In short, it’s:

DON’T BE LAZY.

Yeah, that’s right– I said it. On my previously successful campaigns, I was so lazy upon finding something that worked that I didn’t want to actually research into the success, magical as it seemed. Now, knowing I was so close to my goal before and knowing how easily it was removed from grasp, I have done several things to ensure future success:

1. I have reduced campaigns down to the way they were when success was happening
2. I am now using software I am developing for public release to make affiliate landing pages easier to manage
3. I am using that same software to track keywords from click to payment, thus maximizing keyword efficiency
4. Each time I start a new campaign, it will be reasonably capped as to avoid loss on ROI
5. I will avoid saturated markets as much as possible and focus on niches

This starts … now! I will keep you updated on my progress as I go along, as I know a few people are keeping track.

Wish me luck!

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Good things are happening in the world of ClickBank!

First off, if you’ll take the time to click on my ClickBank earnings as of 2/14/2007 @ 10:00pm (thumbnail to the left), you will notice I had my biggest sales day yesterday at $148.34! Woohoo! Not only did I break $100 for a couple days in a row there, I also technically broke $150 because I also had a nice $5.00 with AdSense (totaling $153.34). So double woot to that!

You’ll notice a few zero days (days where I made $0 on ClickBank) and these are days when either A.) the market was fluctuating (out of my control) or B.) I was messing with my bid prices on keywords. So don’t lose hope if you’re just starting out with ClickBank. There is steady money to be made in this, despite actual low days (like today - a market fluctuation).

Now as I’ve been talking about my ‘Experiment’ a lot on DigitalPoint forums in the ClickBank area (I’ll talk about that in a minute), I’ve been asked a lot of excellent questions. One question everyone probably wants to know when you have a good day like $153 is - how much did you spend to make that much? My advertising budget came out to about $73, which might depress you until you think- that’s a profit of $80 for something that runs essentially on auto pilot while you’re gone.

Also, that advertising budget is covering all of my advertising expenses as I am also testing additional campaigns that might turn out to be profitable. When they aren’t profitable, and they aren’t most of the time, then they eat up the profit! But, in the end, it’s more than worth it because you’ll have paid to find 100 working products out of 1,000 that generate you income on a daily basis.

This is also known as passive income, and it’s a beautiful thing. I can be at school or another job and be making the same or more money while I’m away. Oh yeah, and what happens when I’m on vacation? Money keeps rolling in. What happens when I’m in the hospital? The checks keep coming. As long as someone is there to deposit your checks into the bank, your income is going to be generated like interest in a bank account — 24×7.

Anyway, there has been much buzz about my experiment on DigitalPoint. Just check out this thread I started when I was trying to make my first sale with ClickBank. The thread doesn’t only contain my testimony, but also the advice from some experts in the field. You’ll notice that a nice chap that goes by Telmari contributes a lot on there. If you’re starting out on ClickBank, or even if you want some new pointers, I definitely recommend checking this thread out.

As I’ve reached one of my main goals (breaking $100), as well as a sub goal to that end (breaking $150), my next goal is obviously to break $200 in a day. So when that happens, you should be expecting another post. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.

That’s it for now. Thanks!

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Previously, I’d set a goal to reach $100/day by the end of this month but I felt like taking a few risks yesterday, and I managed to accomplish it over night. My next goal, after I test the $100/day goal for a few days is to get to $200/day. In fact, here are my adjusted goals in sequence:

• Reach $100/day by 02/05/2007
• Reach $200/day by 02/15/2007
• Reach $400/day by 03/01/2007

Oh yeah, baby.

As you can see, I’m no longer being moderate with my campaigns. I’m moving into aggressive mode, because I’ve developed a crazy method with a friend of mine to optimize the campaigns for the products we sell. We have definitely found a formula for success. As with any business, the goal is to maximize profit while minimizing cost and we’ve figured out an awesome way of doing that.Unfortunately, I can’t give out this information but I will say it has to do with keyword optimization. In fact, the information we’ve learned is so priceless that we will begin marketing it in the not-too-distant future after we’ve done plenty of testing and make sure the system works like a formula should.

I don’t know whether it’s been luck that I’ve been so successful or if it’s the fact that I had related knowledge entering into the business, but I do know that I am unbelievably thankful that all of this work is finally paying off and by the end of this year, I could very well be on my way to being a very rich kid. I won’t tempt fate too much, but I will say that the future is looking bright ahead.

Aside from all the sunshine and butterflies gobbledegook, I have been working tirelessly in my spare time to optimize and narrow down the right keywords for each campaign. I’ve been doing tons of research on the topics I’ve chosen, and although I am finding loads and loads of information, it’s very draining.

Also, as of late I’ve been receiving a lot of requests for help and advice from newbies who want to know how they should enter into the ClickBank business. I would like to say to all those interested in receiving advice from me that I am very aware of the fact that I am new in the business! I haven’t even been doing this stuff for a month yet, so I haven’t quite settled into any position of “expert” or even “moderate.” I would still call myself a novice. Perhaps when I get to the “moderate” level, I will start dolling out advice but for now, all I can do is help people by giving them simple advice and tools I’ve found to be useful along the way.

Advice

My advice to anyone who wants to start out is to do research and LOTS of it.

• Forums - Search the forums (like DigitalPoint and Webmaster World) for hints on what other people are campaigning for and how they’re optimizing their campaigns for more sales per click.
• Ads - There is a ton of information I’m finding online for how to phrase ads to get more clicks. Be careful though, don’t focus entirely on getting more clicks in general. Instead, focus on getting more “interested” clicks, therefore increasing sales.
• Keywords - Also, I won’t go into too much detail here, but think outside the box when it comes to keywords. Don’t gun for the ones everyone else is using unless they bring you a high ROI. I recommend going with the fishing net theory on this one– use a ton of related keywords and figure out which ads work best for you.
• Math - Use math to your advantage. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about people losing money because they don’t do the right math when making ad campaigns. If your product brings you $25 per sale and it takes you 100 clicks to make a sale, do NOT spend more than $0.25 per click. If you bid $0.31/click and you make a sale on your 100th click, you may have gained a sale but you lost $6 in the process. However, if you haven’t had ANY sales, you may want to increase your cost per click to increase your click through ratio as well as figure out how many clicks it takes to make a sale in the first place. Only then can you accurately gauge how many clicks it takes to make a sale.

Tools

What would we be without tools? Monkeys!

• Google AdWords Keywold Tool - Use this to generate tons of relevant keywords for your ads. If you haven’t found this one yet, you aren’t in the loop and it’s a good sign you need to do more research. In addition to generating keywords, you can also use this tool to accurately predict how much you will have to pay per click for a keyword. Priceless, really.
• Google AdWords Editor - Software for Windows or Mac that allows you to manage your AdWords campaigns/ads from a program that runs on your desktop. This is excellent if you don’t want to go through the trouble of logging in or dealing with a web browser.
• Overture Keyword Selector Tool - Use this tool to get a good idea of which keywords will bring you more hits than others and in parallel, figure out which ones will cost you more!

But of course, don’t stop there. There are tons of tools available to you if you just SEARCH for them. Google is at your service!

For now, I am off to go work on making more money. Good luck on your own business, and wish me luck as well!

Thanks,
Scott

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For instance, I was reading this post in John Chow’s blog and got inspired to post my not-amazing-but-not-shabby-either Agloco Referral status (left image, click to enlarge). Using the Referral Earnings calculator, I determined that if each of the 41 referrals browses at least an hour using the Agloco toolbar when it comes out, I should receive a nice $7,000 check each month. I’m betting it will be more like $7, if anything but only because I don’t trust marketing gimmicks.

By the way, if you want to jump on the Agloco boat before it sets sail, click here!

Aside from that, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time building my ClickBank stats. This doesn’t qualify as a post for the ClickBank experiment, but I would like to give a nice little update on my stats thus far in order to catalog my journey.

So here is a screen shot of my earnings over the last 15 days. As you can see, it’s starting to become much more consistent. And the best part is that as I’ve started to increase spending, I’m getting better returns on the average.

This whole thing is a learning experience, because as I see more and more success with online marketing, the more I want to do it. I mean, I’m 18 days into this thing and I’m already doing reasonably well. When I say “learning experience” I’m referring to the education that I am paying for in advertising dollars.

Unfortunately, all of the ClickBank money I’m accruing on a daily basis isn’t 100% profit. To be honest, it’s around 40% profit on the average.

That’s not horrible though. In fact, I’ve learned it’s an excellent average! So excellent, in fact, that it has no where to go but down. I’ve accounted for this though, because I am starting new advertising campaigns every day and chances are, most of them will only eat up my profits and send me into the red for a while. I have my reasons for allowing this.

Oh, and I just took advantage of a nice $95 in free advertising money from Microsoft adCenter by using this ad (valid until 2/15/2007). Now I can get a few free purchases to increase my profit margin.

In other news, I spent all last night redesigning my file sharing website to have a fresh, clean look. If you want to take a look at it, just click the image (left) and it should take you there.

Not to mention, if you want fantastic free file hosting, you should definitely check it out.

The coolest part about the newest design is that I’ve incorporated a random ad display. Ads randomly switch between Azoogle ads and AdSense ads of the 300×250 flavor. This helps to eliminate the effect that static content seems to have on the eye, as my Azoogle Affiliate Manager was telling me earlier today.

As soon as I have another breakthrough in ClickBank earnings, I will write another ClickBank Experiment post. Until then, I am going to work my ass off to increase sales!

Here’s to not being bored!

- Scott

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