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.

Diving Head First Into Pay Per Click

It's been a few weeks since I've updated Internet Marketing Mind, because I've been busy immersing myself in new ways of making money online. Until April, most of my internet marketing experience was in creating content for Google Adsense, and in SEO optimization to bring natural search traffic to mini-sites that sell affiliate products (such as ebooks from Clickbank).

But since I quit my day job in April I decided to immerse myself in Pay Per Click advertising, and using PPC to drive traffic to affiliate offers. First I used a program called Google Cash, and I quite liked it and found it informative so I placed a link to it up on this blog. But after using Google Cash I tried to run some PPC campaigns and I flopped, fumbled, and failed and had no idea how to get back on my feet. A friend of mine recommended I try PPC Coach, which is a program run by an expert PPC marketer Will Haimerl. PPC Coach is exactly what it sounds like -- a coaching program that helps you learn how to tackle and master PPC advertising. Members have access to a private forum full of experienced PPC marketers, tutorials on how to run effective PPC campaigns, tools to aid your marketing business, and the presence of the Coach himself answering your questions along with his assistants and moderators who are also PPC monsters. I have been learning a ton, and I see huge potential in PPC.

To learn more about the program check out the PPC-Coach website.



The reason I decided to branch out from Adsense and SEO is because those bring in small money. Some people make a lot of money with them, but it takes so long to build up your sites and get them ranked in the search engines. It took me around 6 months of constant, focused work to get my Adsense earnings up to $50 a day. But with PPC you can drive instant traffic to your affiliate offers. And the more traffic you send, the more you can make. With SEO you are at the mercy of the Google Gods, and any change in the Google algorithms can send your site spiralling down to the bottom of the search results. I like the nice autopilot income that Adsense brings me, but I'm ready to start making some real money. And that doesn't come from Adsense.

So you will notice that I removed the Google Cash banner from this blog and have replaced it with a PPC-Coach banner. That is because Google Cash provides you with only a small fraction of what you need to know in order to succeed in PPC affiliate marketing. PPC-Coach goes much further in depth and brings you right inside the PPC lair.

I'll try to keep this blog more updated and let you know about my progress in PPC. But so far it looks very promising and I'm really excited about it.

PPC-Coach is not for everyone, and you really have to be ready to move onto serious stuff before you join. But if you're curious you can check out the PPC-Coach website here.