“The site is subscription based, costing $3 per week for an entry into each week’s drawing. You can choose your own numbers or have them generated for you. To be eligible for the $1 million weekly drawing, your numbers must match at least two of the six jackpot winning numbers for the week, or any of your friends’ numbers match two of the winning numbers. That means the more people you bring in, the better your chances of gaining entry into the weekly million dollar drawing. It also means you double your odds by signing up through a referral link compared to going directly through the site — if anyone in your network’s ticket matches two of the drawn numbers, you’re both entered into the week’s million dollar drawing.”

Here’s my signup link if you want to get a chance at the 1,000,000 this week. According to their site, you increase your odds by signing up thru my referral link.

My method was to set up 10 content sites reviewing the products I wanted to sell. They all even had the content rewritten from the first version. Cost was $250 for my developer to create a template, and another $150 for content and rewrites of that content. Total cost for 10 sites? $400. Not bad considering they made me $2387.68 in commissions last month.

Here’s how you will dominate any small niche with great ROI:

1. Populate your site with content that targets longtail phrases. KeywordDiscovery is a good tool for finding them. If you can test with PPC, Hittail can help you gather some juicy longtail phrases to optimize for!
2. Build trust with the visitor by comparing multiple products and possibly giving most of them a bad rating. Avoid giving your favorite product a perfect rating as it makes it look biased. People like to see the word “votes” so take advantage of that. Think social sites.
3. Ping blog sites to get indexed fast. A good free tool for that is pingoat.
4. Add content every day for 3 days or so from the beginning of the site to help indexing speed.
1. Ideally you’ll have a dedicated server with a unique IP for each site, so they appear unrelated to eachother. If you don’t want to lay out the cash for a dedicated server, or you don’t believe in the unique c-class IP myth (my tests are inconclusive about whether you need it), my weapon of choice is hostgator’s cheapest option. I used to use lunarpages but I encountered too many stupid server config issues with them..
5. Build links the RIGHT way… naturally. (not really.. you just gotta be really good at making them look natural ). I’ll cover link building in my next post.

These are the steps I used to take up the first 15 or so spots in Google for nearly all of my target search terms. You can do it too.
NOW GO MAKE $$$$$$$$!

Until I get them back, I’m not using squidoo anymore. I’ll stick with my own sites, thanks.

It’s simple. Take away the market share from other affiliates in your niche. How? Build more sites. Don’t build shit sites that are practically MFA. Build quality sites that will grow on their own and become authority sites, offering some kind of link bait like a free tool, etc… BUT at the same time, your goal isn’t efficiency, it’s volume. So don’t get bogged down tweaking all day. Tackle your niche and develop your network so that you own the SERPS. This is how the pharma guys did it. mmmmmm

So get off your ass, stop whining, buckle down and become a quality-site assembly line. It pays off. mmmmmmm $$$

The Wall

I recently went through this. My first business has become quite successful, but I want to do something bigger. I want to have another business ADventure. I’ve always liked building stuff and thinking creatively, and I’m suffering from some withdrawal.

My New Plan

Start a new site in a new niche. Take my successful strategy for my first business, and wash, rinse, repeat. I’m into health/wellness, so it’s still going to be in that sector.

AdSense? CPA? What about affiliate products?

Here are 3 ways to increase your affiliate sales using some vbulletin mods.

Install Welcome Headers

Download the welcome headers mod and follow the installation instructions.

Edit the guest header to make it a table with two columns. The first column should contain your welcome message. This should entice the user to join. The second column will contain an ad for your affiliate product. Do this appropriately with other headers. I have multiple offers that I promote on the different headers.

Incentivize Your Affiliate Offers

Leverage your site’s value to incentivize the affiliate offers. For example, I’ve leveraged the value of my support groups and weight loss tools by giving away 1 year access for free to customers who buy the affiliate product. Most buyers don’t take advantage of this offer so I get a hefty commission without sacrificing many paid memberships.

AutoLink Keywords To Drive Affiliate Sales

Download and install Geek Auto Linker. I think there’s also a free version available, but I recommend the full $20 version because you can track impressions and clicks.

Have you ever seen sites with Kontera or Intellitxt ads? The keywords are highlighted and underlined, and when you roll over them, a little ad pops up. Annoying, right? Well, Geek Auto Linker allows you to do that with or without the pop up.

If someone mentions my affiliate product’s name in a post, it is automatically hyperlinked to my landing page for that product. It’s very elegant and allows me to keep the site clean without ads everywhere.

Submit Your Tips

Got something I didn’t cover here? Comment and see what I think…

Just like John Marshall said in this video, proper analytics can yield some startling surprises. I found that the majority of my subscription sales were generated by the last search phrase I’d expect. So, I am trying to get more backlinks for that phrase. Clicktracks also showed me flaws in my navigation, which I have since fixed and am testing the new version’s button  CTRs. I’ve also found that a page which, to be honest, I put almost no effort into, had generated a few sales. So I have since improved it and am testing the new version of that.

Clicktracks has enabled me to start a process of continuous refinement, instead of what I like to call the IWWSADTW, or “I wonder why sales are down this week.” (not really, but this was what I’ve asked myself for 2 years up to Jan 2007.).

Anyway, I’m just writing to let you know that if you’re not using web analytics software, start now. You’re missing out on a lot of revenue if you aren’t.

In October I launched my own paid-subscription product on my main site, and results have been small. The customers seem to come in waves and when I’m trying to test each change I make with a couple days of visitors, this gets really confusing. For a long time I’ve been sick and tired of asking, “why did sales go up this week?” and “why does this week yield NO sales?”

Recently I heard an interview with the wildly successful owner of a garden supply network online. He mentioned he used ClickTracks to see which parts or versions of his website yield the most revenue.

That’s exactly what I’ve needed, so I signed up for a free trial of ClickTracks Optimizer, and I am totally blown away. Not only can I see ALL the search phrases people use to get to my sites, but I can see which pages people come from when they visit my signup page; which signup button converts the best - I found out that 25% of my order form visitors click the money-back guarantee link, so I’ll make that page a little nicer and add some sales links to get the user back to my order form if they are confused by the pop up window.

My web development partners are working on an overhaul of the membership site and will be adding a ton of new features in time for the New Year. So, I’m buying ClickTracks Pro. Why get pro? Because it shows you exactly what searches, pages, buttons, demographics/usergroups, countries (or anything else) bring in the most revenue! That is AMAZING. Plus, you can use page A/B testing - just set it up and watch the click trough rates and sales figures for each version to see which one you want to keep. Then make another to test against that.

This is elegant, genius and beautiful - continuous and logical refinement of your marketing campaigns with NO guesswork. I dare say that you can’t afford NOT to try ClickTracks. I’ve learned so much and I’m only using the demo version of Optimizer so far!

Go get ‘em!

You have a unique offer and your target market needs you, but something just hasn’t clicked somewhere to allow your business to explode.

Read the blogs and listen to the interviews, and you’ll notice a common trend among successful web entrepreneurs like Doggles, FitDeck, and the Million Dollar Homepage. The press may push them as one-man shows, but the truth is that they all got a publicist to help get the word out and hype up their projects.

I learned this the hard way. For the past 1 and a half years I’ve been working hard to build my main project into something big. I make decent money but there is much more to be made. So this morning I attended a business networking session in Nashville. I met 2 potential investors who are very impressed with my knowledge, work and projects. That was my first time networking… ever.

So the lesson here is…… If you’re shy, get over it. Move on. Don’t be like me! Business is possible because of people, and if you’re shy, you’re in dire need of help connecting with your target market. No matter how much value you offer your market, you still need someone to hype it up and pique interest.