milliondollarmaybe - the blog

I’ve just come across the best Adwords video tutuorials I’ve ever seen and they’re FREE! How cool is that? 

I came across them after I signed up for yet another newsletter…Jeremy Palmer’s ‘QuitYourDayjob‘. Although I was reluctant to add to my endless inbox of junk emails this sounded OK, so I thought ‘another one won’t hurt!’

Anyway, the long and short of it is, I think Jeremy Palmer is the real deal and he genuinely gives so much good info away for free!

Included in his free stuff is a fantastic ebook called  High Performance Affiliate Marketing. You must read it - it’s better than most paid for stuff (in fact I believe he used to charge for it).

But it was the free Adwords video tutorials that really got me. Everything was included from setting up a campaign through to optimizing your keywords…all explained in really simple terms. I thought I knew enough about Adwords but how wrong I was!

I could go on about these videos all day but the best thing to do is to check them out for yourself at :-

http://www.searchmarketingvideos.com

Oh and by the way I’m not an affiliate of that site so I’m not on commssion or anything. No I just think that everyone should see them.

Also there are free video tutorials on Yahoo and Microsoft PPC but I haven’t had time to look at them yet - I bet they’re just as good.

It really makes a change when a successful marketer gives truly useful information away for free so the beginner can actually start earning before shelling out for this course or that. Most will offer a teaser and then you have to buy the product to get to the juicy stuff but with the free Adwords tutorials you really get the meat. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I’m on literally hundreds of ‘lists’ and to be honest the only reason is because I’m too lazy to unsubscribe from most of them. Having said that there are a few marketers whose emails I do open and every now and then I check out what they’ve got to offer.

Well one such email came to me the other day recommending the latest offering from Anik Singal and Rosalind Gardner - Blog Classroom and for anyone wanting to set up a blog whose a little unsure how to do it, they’ve put up some first class videos.

http://www.blogclassroom.com/blog/

I was skeptical at first but decided to watch them anyway and to my amazement I found out a couple of things I didn’t know already (checkout the immediate traffic videos).

It’s great to see at last someone giving away genuinely useful information for free which although they’re after your name and email address for selling a course later, I think this is a fair trade. The videos are genuinely good and many will find them really useful, especially if you are not particularly technical.

Apart from eating loads of chocolate over the Easter weekend, I’ve also been getting into this datafeed malarky!

It seems that it’s the buzz word nowadays if you’re into affiliate marketing and while there seems to be several programs out there which do the donkey work when it comes to providing datafeed content to your website, I thought I’d have a go myself.

After all we all want plenty of fresh new content for our websites for those greedy little search engine spiders!

Well the problem seems to be that many of the software products out there give a line of javascript code or an Iframe for your datafeed info. Unfortunately Google and the like can’t see this sort of stuff so they ignore it. No, if it’s fresh content for SEO then the goodies have got to be able to be seen by those spiders and that means good old mark-up pages.

Well about five days later and many wasted hours I think I’ve cracked how to do it. Putting aside the fact that datafeeds don’t only come in one format, I have found out with my basic PHP skills how to put the datafeed into a database and then out again on to a good old html page. Now I’ve just got to make the page look nice.

Before I embarked on this however I downloaded a free program from www.affilistore.com, a program where you can set up an affiliate based store for nothing. Although I found it excellent in principle I was too lazy to get the instructions and learn how to use it properly. However I came across a great instructional video over at a guy called Stephen Pratley’s blog, in which he explains all in detail. Check it out here,  http://www.stephenpratley.com/building-an-affilistore-travel-site-4-building-the-site.  It’s really good.

As for me I probably won’t be using affilistore partly because I’m too tight to pay out for the license to have the copyright message removed (which is optional), but mainly because I like to do these things myself.

But for anyone else who doesn’t want the hours of frustration and self inflicted head pain in doing this, I think affilistore is great.

Yesterday I wrote about a great blog interview with Kirsty McCubbin of the www.affiliatestuff.co.uk. It was like a breath of fresh air to see how someone is actually doing their affiliate sales rather than trying to sell ‘how to do it’.

If you want to see what she’s doing you can see her latest baby here at www.lingeriebrands.co.uk.

I think the site looks really good and decided to look into it further. It turns out that she bought a template from www.revolutiontheme.com and then adapted it. These themes are based aroung Wordpress which makes them highly user and search engine friendly.

For anyone who wants to have a really professional looking website without the huge bill then you’ve gotta check out www.revolutiontheme.com. The templates are lovely and really profesional looking so if your web design skills aren’t up to scratch then this could well be your way forward.

I’ve just read an interview with Kirst McCubbin, an affiliate marketer who makes her full time living even while she is backpacking round the world. To my mind this is the whole ethos behind the internet marketing game, making good money even when you’re not working.

If you need inspiration or have failed to make any money yet as an affiliate you can read the interview here.

She even gives a real example of one of her sites and it doesn’t cost anything to look.  Not often you get some good info for nothing.

Read the interview and learn from it, that’s what I say!

Many people tend to think that internet marketing is all about selling information on the internet. In fact the internet should be considered as nothing more than a tool to provide information and if this information enables you to sell stuff…great.

GENUINE WHOLESALE ONLY!

The thing is though it can and also should be used to sell stuff in the real world rather than just the virtual one.

Whether you sell on eBay or from your online store, physical products are still very much in demand and many of us wannabe internet market forget this.

Well I’ve just been listening to a couple of CD’s featuring Chris Malta of Worldwide Brands fame, with a view to start dropshipping. I was actually quite surprised at how many scams there were out there on the subject, particularly on eBay. In fact it is really difficult to find genuine wholesalers at all.  Most are purely middle men claiming to be wholesalers, who obviously take a cut before you  get the goods. This of course drastically reduces your profits.

Looking into it further it seems that genuine wholesalers do not advertise their services online because they don’t want to attract the small time business opportunity seeker. They of course want the big boys who buy thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of products at a time.

However back in 2004 Chris Malta set up the Dropship Source Directory at www.worldwidebrands.com which enabled the smaller trader to find genuine wholesale suppliers and dropshippers, even for those who only do small volumes in sales.

It was obviously a godsend for many marketers and the directory has gone from strength to strength.

As it took off it has now evolved into the Onesource Directory and is now widely considered to be the largest and most genuine list of true wholesalers available. And it’s updated daily.

For a one time fee there are over 3,000,000 million products and over 9,000 suppliers to choose from plus you get access to product research tools that are second to none (see my review here for more detailed information).

It seems that anyone who wants to seriously consider dropshipping then as usual should be advised to do proper research and not just go to eBay. It seems that there is no better tool than the Onesource directory for this. You can take a free tour here:-

TAKE A FREE TOUR

Anyone in the biz-opps scene can’t fail to have seen the new offering from Neil Shearing, the’10 Day Cash Secret’.

I have to say, with his latest roll out the stats look really impressive as he seems to have made a fair few thousand dollars within a very short space of time. Momentarily I was tempted to get it (and still may do) but then after a little more thought, for now, I’ve decided not to.

His new program involves developing auto-generated websites to produce affiliate sales.

Now it should be said that I still have a few auto-generated sites that were produced by ‘Traffic Equaliser’ a few years ago, and they still bring me in a little income, although nothing like they used to.

Although Neil’s system is slightly different in as far as his sites will regularly auto-update with content that is continuously being fed by other sites, if I’m honest I feel these type of sites are polluting the inernet (sorry Neil)! How often do you do a search only to come up with a junk site that doesn’t give you the info you are looking for, but instead gives you a load of adsense or affiliate links to other websites. I’d rather have got to those in the first place.

You can see why Google and the like are getting more critical with their algorithms to hopefully make your searches more relevant, and therefore better for the user, rather than the opportunist internet marketer.

I feel the long term internet marketer really should be thinking more along the lines of quality, authority sites with valuable content for long term success.

The point is I have started to take my internet marketing strategies a bit more seriously and any website that gives a ’shortcut’ to cash generation, I can’t help feeling it’s days are numbered.

Having said that if the ‘The 10 Day Cash Secret’ program stands the test of time and people start reporting great results with it, then as long as I’m not fleecing anyone else, I will forget my morals, happily ‘pimp’ myself and invest in it later!!!

If the lazy way is your thing then you can get Neil’s program at www.10daycashsecret.com.
 

A few years ago I purchased the world famous ‘Google Cash’ program and although at the time I thought it was pretty good, I was never able to make any of the techniques work for me. I think this was because being a new marketer I didn’t take it seriously enough to follow the methods properly and was hoping for a quick ‘million dollars’ to fall into my account.

 When it didn’t happen I soon got bored and didn’t bother try using it any more.

However I was going through my hard disk last night, and was amazed at the amount of PDF’s I’ve got filed away ready to be read ‘later!’  My intention was going to clear a load of it out when I came across the ‘updated’ Google Cash 3rd Edition (It was obviously sent to me as a previous purchaser and I must have just put it aside). I decided to have a quick look.

Well I was blown away because it is really good! Two hours later I was still reading it so needless to say I didn’t get far with the old harddisk!

However for anyone who’s into affiliate marketing this book is a ‘must have’ and as soon as I’ve got the time I intend to give the new updated version another try. What I like about the Google Cash 3rd Edition is it takes into account the Google ‘Slap’ and other situations that weren’t there a few years ago.

So what’s in it? Well basically Chris Carpenter the author takes you through real life examples of actual campaigns that he has used from setting up accounts to writing Google Ads, researching keywords, to landing pages (when and when not to use them the proper way)! He also demonstrates everything with videos so it’s real easy to follow.

For me it was understanding the Google Slap that really made the Google Cash stand out and the fact that it discounted a few of the myths that are out there regarding Google, for example, apparently it is still OK for Adwords ads to go direct to an affiliate URL.

As for the ’slap’ I shall now be checking my adwords campaigns a lot more closely in future!