Writing Content Can Be Like Pulling Teeth

One of the biggest challenges for me in internet marketing has been working in niches that I'm not personally interested in. What do I care about convection microwaves or stainless steel frying pans or whatever? Creating content for niches I'm not interested in is a quick way to get bored and harm your momentum, and harm your quality of life.

One way to get around this is to write about topics that you have a real interest in. I'm interested in fitness and working out, so I can shoot off articles and blog posts in that niche very quickly and easily. I'm very well-travelled, so I can spit out short travel destination guides in just a few minutes. Life is so much easier when you can write content about a topic that you love.

But is it always practical to write about things you love? No, of course not. The main objective of your business is to make money, and your passions are not always profitable. So choose niches that are profitable. But rather than torture yourself by writing all the dull content, outsource it. You can commission articles from writers through the marketplace sections of Warrior Forum, Digital Point, Wickedfire and other internet marketing forums. You can also try outsourcing sites like Elance.com. You can order however many articles you need through freelancers on those sites, or if you need an ongoing stream of content you can even hire your own regular part time or full time employee. If you do this, the key is to hire somebody in a country such as India or the Philippines where the average salary is low compared to your own country. That way you can pay someone a good living wage even if your business is still small. Outsourcing is the way to scale your business. Get others to do the work you can't or don't want to do, and focus on other things to build your business.

Life is too short to torture yourself by writing about topics you find boring. It's a surefire way to put you in a bad mood and turn you off of internet marketing. Keep yourself engaged so you can work most efficiently.

Back To Basics

Over the past year or so I've tried a lot of different methods of internet marketing, and put in more effort than ever before. I've had some success with most of those methods, but even so, my rate of progress has still failed to be as mindblowing as my rate of progress at the beginning when I first began internet marketing. I think this is because of a few reasons.

In the beginning I didn't know much about the IM world, and had very little knowledge of different methods and kinds of income streams. So I picked one method and just kept doing it until I figured out how to make money with it. Later on, I started to crave more information about IM, learning about different affiliate programs, types of projects, ways to promote, etc. Because I was now learning about all of these different areas of IM, I now lacked the focus that I had in the beginning and could never concentrate on one method or one project for long enough to make it reach its potential. So the basic lesson here is focus and persistence. Pick a method and stick with it until you can make it work. Don't bounce around from method to method.

Realated to that is my personal desire to make the process more "professional" or complex, because I will take some kind of satisfaction out of learning new techniques and having some kind of expertise or breadth of knowledge. So I was trying to complicate things by adding too many new ideas. I really had to stop that and just go back to the simple procedures I used in the beginning. They worked for a reason. Your business is primarily your source of income, and secondarily it can be a source of self-actualization. If a procedure works, stick to it. Don't try to spice it up. You can enhance the process, but only if it adds to your profits.

I also noticed that I started building sites to look more professional, or to look prettier for people I show them too. It worked, when I showed my newer sites to friends they would be impressed by how they looked and how professional of a job I had done. But they weren't making money! On certain types of sites, particularly Adsense sites, simplicity is key. Beauty distracts visitors from the ads or offers. I went back and simplified the designs of a lot of my projects, and now they are generating much higher revenue. The lesson: build sites for money, not for beauty and not for pride. If you need a site to show off to your friends, ok, build one beautiful site that makes no money. But just one!

Those are a few of the tendencies that developed in me after reaching an intermediate level of internet marketing. Watch out for those tendencies because they can creep up on you without you even realizing it. If it happens, think back to how you used to do things and get things back to basics.

RSS Feed Directories

RSS feed directories are basically websites that function as an online catalog of RSS feeds from various blogs and sites around the web. You can submit your blog or site's RSS feeds to the directories, and it essentially republished all of your content on their site. And every time you publish new content to your blog or site, the RSS feed in the directory will automatically update, publishing your new content.

Until recently I had just submitted my websites' RSS feeds to one or two RSS feed directories. But recently I have been using SENuke, which has an RSS module that currently features 18 RSS directories. There are also other lists online like this one (it's a little outdated, but a lot of the directories still work). At first with SENuke I was only submitting the RSS feeds of the new Web 2.0 properties I created for promotion, but then I decided to submit the feeds from some of my main money sites. I also submitted them to some directories on the list above. The result? I got a pretty sharp increase in search engine traffic that brought my income up by about 50%. This lasted about a week, and then the effects went away. But when I posted new content to those money sites, some of the effect came back (but not all of it).

Basically the benefits of using the RSS directories are that these high authority websites publish your content along with backlinks to your website/blog. Those high authority backlinks improve your site's search engine rankings. That's why I got that huge sudden jump in search traffic, because by submitting my sites to 50 or so directories, I automatically got hundreds of backlinks to each of the sites. The question is why did the effects fade? It could be that Google first notice all my backlinks and gave me credit for them, but then figured out that they were all essentially the same and that I had just submitted my site to a lot of directories, and then reduced the amount of link juice I was entitled to. Or I guess it could be that when you first submit your feed, it is at the top of the list on the directory, but the longer you leave your content not updated, the further your feed slips down on the directory's list and gets less attention. I am inclined to think that's the case because when I updated my money site's content, some of the original effects were restored. Maybe the feed hits the front page whenever you update, then slowly drops down. Honestly I'm speculating, and if anyone knows the definite answer I'd love to know it.

In any case, the benefits of submitting your feeds are obvious and it's a very simple process, so if you haven't done it yet then you should. You can also submit feeds for your accounts on Ezinearticles, Hubpages, your social bookmarking accounts, etc.

Removing Some Affiliate Banners From My Blog

If this isn't your first visit here then you may have noticed that some of the affiliate banners on my blog have disappeared. I used to have a PPC-Coach banner on here as well as a Hostgator banner, both of which had my affiliate link in them so if you signed up for either service I'd get a commission. Just simple affiliate marketing. So why'd I remove them? Well, in the case of Hostgator it's because I felt far too many people get screwed out of commissions they've rightfully earned with Hostgator. They say they pay you $50 per signup, which they do but if person who signed up quits after a couple months it seems they do a chargeback and remove your commission. Hey, it's not my fault if Hostgator can't retain their subscribers. My job as an affiliate is to send them a subscriber. It's their job to satisfy the subscriber. I dealt with a lot of this kind of thing when doing email and zip submit offers, but come on, Hostgator is a big company and should be above that kind of thing. If they want to cover their risks more, then they should offer affiliates a lower payout, saying $25 or whatever, and then pay them properly. I'm not going to promote things that I won't get paid for, because there are plenty of other affiliate programs that will pay me properly.

The other one was PPC-Coach. I don't want to talk bad about this program, because so many people say they get a lot out of it. But I can only feel good about promoting something in the IM niche if I personally have gotten a lot out of it, and in this case I haven't. I'm not the most clear-minded person, I can be a bit of a space cadet, but I can usually make up for that by being a hard worker. On PPC-Coach though, the approach is to basically give you a whole bunch of resources and leave it up to you to make sense out of them and apply them. As a PPC noob and as someone with very little knowledge of scripting languages and the technical side of things, I spent about 4 months being thoroughly confused. And I didn't feel that the staff were interested in dealing with someone who needed handholding. So I quit. Since then I have been using nothing but free traffic methods, but will get back into PPC once I've reached some of my goals for free traffic. But since I quit using PPC-Coach, I didn't feel I could promote it anymore.

In any case, I keep this blog as a kind of diary and way to share what I experience for anyone who gets anything out of it. I don't really see this blog as a source of income, so it was an easy decision to remove the banners.

Outsourcing The Grunt Work

If you look over to the right you'll see a caricature of me, flashing the peace sign (Hey, it's not cheesy here in Japan!) and holding a fistful of dollar bills. On a lot of websites and blogs people place their photo to build some familiarity with the visitor and personalize the experience a bit. I wanted to do that here, but I thought it would be cooler to represent myself as a character. Does it look like me? Here, you can compare. Cheesy peace sign and all.

So I wanted a caricature to use on this blog and maybe some other sites, but I'm not good at drawing. I fumbled around with Photoshop for a bit, and read some tutorial on how to make your own caricature, but I wasted an hour and failed miserably. So I decided to outsource the job. I went over to Elance.com and had a look around for freelance illustrators who could draw me. There were lots! Some are Americans who charge $35 per hour, and others are Filipinos or Romanians who charge $8 an hour or less.

I posted the details of the job I wanted so that freelancers could bid on the job and I could choose the best offer. In the end, I actually got a friend of mine to do the drawing and all I owe him is a beer, but Elance is a great resource for outsourcing jobs you don't know how to do. Because really, I could have spent all day on that illustration and it would have still been terrible and I would have lost a lot of opportunites to make money during that time. So spending a few bucks is the best decision when you're stuck. No successful business person has ever done everything by himself. These days with the internet it is incredibly easy to outsource, you don't even have to leave your desk.

Have a look at Elance and similar sites even if you don't need any work done at the moment. It will be valuable just to know what kind of resource it is and how it can help you when you need it.

Getting into CPA Networks

As I've written recently, these days I'm working hard at promoting CPA offers. CPA means Cost Per Action, so you get paid when the visitor performs a certain action, rather getting paid per click or per view of an advertisement. The kind of action depends on the offer, but rather than a sales commission you usually get paid when somebody signs up for a free trial offer, gives their email address or zip code to a market research company, fills out a survey, etc. So you normally get paid per lead, meaning that the visitor doesn't even have to buy anything and you still get paid for the lead. This is what makes CPA special.

But since you are not getting paid per sale but rather per lead, a lot of scammers and spammers have jumped on board to send fake leads, or useless leads not interested in buying -- in huge numbers. If it were pay per sale, the possibility of fraud would be lower. But it's easy to send fraudulent leads so CPA networks can be pretty careful about who they accept as affiliates.

The way to get into CPA networks is to apply to the network through their website, and then follow up on your application by phone. That part is very important, because you can build trust with them on the phone. They can tell from talking to you that you are not from Nigeria or some other blacklisted country, they can ask you questions about your experience and your plans, to see if they match your application and that you know what you're talking about, etc. They want to know who they're dealing with. If you are uncomfortable or shy about talking with strangers on the phone --- get over it, fast. It makes me uncomfortable too, because I'm a naturally shy person. But I do it anyway.

Don't b.s. them. If you are new, don't lie about your experience. Just tell the truth but give it a positive swing. Don't say "I have no experience" or "I don't know how to do it". Say "I'm excited to get more experience promoting a variety of CPA offers" or "I'm excited to learn as much as I can about this industry" etc. They'll understand you're new, but see that you're serious about promoting their offers.

If you live in a country where few affiliates live, you may have to jump through a few hoops to be accepted. I live in Japan, and some of the networks (particularly those that are not located on the west coast)
seem to think that Japan is part of China, so my application gets flagged as suspicious. Again, getting on the phone with them and building some trust helps, and so does getting a referral from one of their current affiliates.

Some networks have rejected me. It's frustrating, but you can't let it get you down. Just do your best with the networks that do accept you, and in the future you can reapply to the ones that previously denied you.

The networks I've dealt with have ranged from very professional to somewhat amateurish. So far my best impression has come from Ads4Dough network, whose affiliate managers are all reportedly great and are affiliates themselves so they understand the business well. I've just started with them, but my AM Arthur Lee has already given me some great tips and pointed me in the right direction.

Neverblue has also impressed me with their professional service and offers that convert. The AMs don't seem to know what it's like to be an affiliate, but they're helpful and friendly.

I'll keep you posted on my impressions as I do more business with a variety of networks.

An Update to the Keyword Empire Series

In the past couple of months I've been intensely immersed in internet marketing and I've learned a lot of new things. One of the things I've learned is something that I now know is pretty basic, but hey I didn't know it and I was having success without it so I didn't realize there was a problem. But I'd like to share that update with readers of the Google Keyword Empire Series.

In the Keyword Research installment, I outlined the method of checking how much competition there is for a keyword phrase by searching for the phrase in brackets in Google and counting how many results there are. The fewer the results, the lower the competition. That is true, but there is more to it than that. We also have to look at the quality of the results that are at the top of the Google results for that phrase.

To test how much quality competition there is, it's best to search for the keyword phrase without brackets, and look at the results on page 1, particularly the top 4 or 5 results. What do those sites look like? Are they authority sites? Authority sites are well-known and trusted sites within a particular niche that have a lot of content and have built up a lot of backlinks over time. If you were searching for something related to internet marketing, and Joel Comm's site was on page 1 -- that's an authority site and you would be up against serious competition -- you won't outrank that site. If you saw this blog, however, there would be a good chance you'd outrank it. That's because this blog is new, it doesn't have a lot of content yet, and it doesn't have a big readership yet. It's definitely not an authority site.

In addition to quality, look at how optimized the top results are for your keyword phrase of choice. If you are checking competition for the keyword phrase "Monkeys are the coolest animals" (totally random idea), but top results don't contain that exact phrase, or they aren't very optimized for it (like it only appears once in the text content), there's a good chance you can outrank them for that phrase. Often you can not outrank an authority site, even when you are optimized for that exact phrase but they aren't. But if the top results are not authority sites, or they're kind of second rate authority sites, you can probably outrank them for that phrase if they are not well optimized for it.

While my original keyword research method brought me a lot of success, there were times when I did the keyword research but I still didn't get any search traffic for my target keywords. Those cases were because I neglected to look at the quality of the competition, both the authority of the site and the degree of optimization. If you incorporate a quality check into your keyword research, you will have even more power in determining how much competition there is.