Wierd Stuff

It is like someone turned a spigot off. Since about December 16 I have had almost no visitors and no sales. I am hoping that it is because of Christmas. I mean, who wants to buy anything but presents before Christmas. Since my product is mainly health related I hope the spigot will turn back on after the holidays.

This affiliate marketing business is weird. Anyway, like I have said before, I am going to succeed because I am not ever going to quit and I believe that short of death or disability that is the main key to success.

Merry Christmas!

$2000 mark and onward!

Things are beginning to go pretty well for me.  I have found some hot keywords to write about and I am getting this landing page creation down pretty well.  Excuse me but I am going to try something here just to see if it works.  If it does you should see a form for my free people search engine.





Cool, it actually worked. This is one of the projects I am working on to promote my free search engine. I figure if it works here it will work on my landing pages. Go ahead and give it a try!

Reached the $1000 plus mark!

Well things have finally gotten off the ground.  I still have a long way to go yet, but my first goals have been met.

1. Make My First Sale
2. Make My First $100
3. Make My First $100 Plus Day

I have learned how to get web pages listed in the natural search engines and now I am learning how to get them to stay there or rise higher.  Once you have a money making page that lists on the first page of Google for the key word you are focusing on you need to give it a little Google glue to get it to stick.

I write other articles that are more informative about the subject of my money making article.  I do not worry so much about key words and such with these articles.  I worry more about the quality of the content.  Then I submit these articles to as many high ranking article directories as I can.  I do not worry about changing any of the content since I am not really worried about whether these articles get listed or not.  These articles are written to get quality back links to my money making articles to keep them at the top of the search engine and maybe even boost them higher.

So there is my recipie for Google Glue.

Until Next Time!

More Sales!

Well, I have finally made multiple sales in one week.  I hope this is the future.  It is now Tuesday and I have made $116.00 since Sunday.  The one single change I have made to my money funnel is picking and writing about late cycle keywords.  This has jarred lose the funnel so it is starting to produce.

It turns out that there are keywords for each part of the buying cycle.  For instance when some one is first considering buying something he or she will probably be in the research part of the cycle.  If you write your articles with research type key words then you may get plenty of clicks but no sales.  Once I was made aware of this I switched to late cycle keywords, keywords that people search with when they are ready to buy.  So I will let you know how it goes.

Learn more at Wealthy Affiliate University.

Until next time,

CW

Fishing For Words

Just like my last entry stated about fishing for the right product, you also need to fish for the right  keywords.  This can be a pain, but each time you throw an article in to the pond so to speak you will have to watch to see if it gets nibbles or bites on its keywords.

Sometimes you can have brilliant copy but your keywords are words that no one is researching in search engines.  As you monitor your articles in places like http://www.articlesbase.com/ you should take note of those articles that start getting hits like crazy.  Check out the stats on such articles and see what keywords are getting the bites.  Once you have done that you now have those keywords to use in many different articles promoting your product.  All of this may seem confusing, but if you go to Wealthy Affiliate University and spend a measly $39 to check it out for a month you will be surprised at how much better you will understand it.  If you do, give me a shout.

Fishing

You know fishing isn't that hard to learn, especially bate fishing.  You put the bate on the hook, drop it in the water and wait.  You will catch fish if you do this where there are fish.  I am finding this to be true with affiliate marketing.  You can learn all of the techniques and execute them perfectly but if you have the wrong product you'll get nothing.

Part of the trick is trying different products with your techniques until you get a bite.  Remember not too many at once, just two or at most three.  Also if you do article marketing your testing only costs time.

Until next time

The Clicks Rise

I have been concentrating on writing articles for a select landing page and the results are beginning to pour in.  This graph is showing me that my articles are successful at getting people to click over to the sales page that the products maker has constructed.  Even though this is good news, it is not the final part of the money funnel.  These people still need to decide to buy or not to buy the product.  All of this is now out of my hands.  It is like hitting a golf shot.  Once the club contacts the ball you have no more control over it--sigh! The only thing that no sales from an increased click through rate can suggest is that your articles lack relevancy to the final product, or the product's sales page is no good.

Write like your life depends on it.

If you can get a good landing page--there are some products that provide good landing pages for you, and if you find the right keywords then you are ready for writing.  There is a guy at wealthy affiliates that has written over 700 articles in 3 months, but he has made $13000.00 in the process.

I have not written that many articles yet, but using the tools at wealthy affiliates I am able to track the clicks I am recieveing and they are definantly rising.  My sales are rising also.  What I need to do now is write, write, write.  This is the way to go unless you are loaded then you could spend, spend, spend your money on PPC.

Until Next Time
CW

Don't Offer Too Much

Well the lesson I learned today was, do not offer too much on your web page. I have been lamenting the fact that I get a lot of hits, but very little sales. Kyle, one of the founders of Wealthy Affiliates, reviewed my web page and told me that I was offering to many options on my web page which only made potential customers go back to research mode. Hmmm? It makes sense. I am cruising to buy a new gigmobile and when I get to the page I find that there are three models of gigmobiles and they are offered by several different companies. Instead of buying my gigmobile I will scratch my head and go back to researching.

Until Next Time,
CW

Sales pick up!

Interestingly enough, it is PPC marketing that has begun to show promise. If you have been following this thread—who knows if I am just publishing this into a virtual black hole—you know I blew some money on PPC marketing. Well, when Wealthy Affiliates decided to offer a $1 trial membership, I remembered how I had agonized whether to join or not when I first heard of them. I was very leery of all of the "Get Rich Quick Schemes" on the Internet. And even though WA didn't use that claim It was associated with Internet Marketing and thus suspect. I would have loved to have a $1 trial to check out Wealthy Affiliate University.

So I thought why not promote WA's $1 trial directly to those who are in the position I was in? In other words, market to people who had already done the research and wanted to try WA, but were afraid of being ripped off. When I picked the keywords that were very specific to those people the clicks I was getting almost stopped. They went from the maximum number of clicks to 2 to 3 per day, but out of those I begin to get a sale about every 4 clicks whereas before I'd had 70 + clicks with no sales. So I will stick with this for the time being.

Until Next Time,
CW

Writing For Money: The Funnel

When you set out to do affiliate marketing by writing articles you are really trying to earn money through a chain of events or as some put it, you are creating a money funnel. If you make a website and do a great job of it, what are you going to do next? You can put all of the best advertising on it that you want, but who will see it. It is like getting a great deal on a store front except the store is on Unknown Street in Deserted Town USA.

You have to drive traffic to your website or else all the rest is a waste of time. So the wide mouth of the funnel is your articles which lead people down the cone of the funnel to your website with all of your affiliate advertising, landing pages, and squeeze pages. Once you have delivered the potential buyer to the affiliate pitch page the rest is up to them. Creating articles that presell rather than articles that are sales pitches is the key to sucessful article marketing. That and quantity of course. So get out your pencil and paper and start writing.

Work, work, work

Don't be fooled, this Internet marketing is either going to require an investment in time or money or both.  You will have to work smart and hard to succeed.  Getting the rudimentary principals down is relatively easy, but applying them is the heard part.  If you are going my rout, primarily article marketing, you have to write, write, write!  Even then you can never tell exactly how an article is going to perform. And then there is the funnel.  If you don't have all of the parts to your money funnel working correctly it will clog and you will get nothing out of your hard work.

In my next post I'll go over the money funnel,

CW

The Daily Grind

Now I am not talking coffee here.  I have been writing articles for a month now.  I wanted to write two a day, which turns out to be a bit aggressive for me.  I haven't really managed one a day, but I get two to three a week.  So far it has increased visits to my websites to 3 to 4 visitors a day up from zero per day and I have made a sale through them.

Just to remind everyone and to slip in a less than subtle plug, my web sites are http://www.thedietclearinghouse.com/ dedicated to finding great diets that work.  I am not interested in scams or unhealthy remedies.  Also I have http://www.healthjournal.biz/ which is more of a health blog.  I write articles there about weight-loss and fitness.  Last but not least there is this sight and http://www.holmes-people-search.ws/ a people search sight.  I love this one because it creates 8 income streams for me.  You can check it out at Acme People Search .  If you know what your doing you can make some nice spare cash here.

Until Next Time,
CW

Ok, PPC Restarted

I restarted my PPC campaign to promote Wealthy Affiliate's new 7 day trial for $1.  If you have wondered if this site is a scam or if it fits you, you should definitely go have a look.  It only will cost you a dollar and these guys are really good about cancellations.  No game or other garbage.  You can just cancel any time during the 7 days and only pay a buck.

So take advantage now!

PPC Marketing Shut Down

I shut down my PPC marketing campaign last night.  It was just bleeding money.  I jumped into that boat way too soon.  Of course that is my nature.  Leap then look.  I am now back to full time article marketing.  The one nice thing about article marketing is that it doesn't cost you money, only time.  My mentors inform me that when I get good at it it should bring an average of one sale per article per month.  So if you get enough quality articles out there you should be able to get a nice income going.

So far by reading the tea leaves of Google Analytics there is a growing interest in my websites http://www.thedietclearinghouse.com/ and http://www.healthjournal.biz/. (Shameless plug alert!)

By the way, starting on the 15th of September you can buy a trial membership to Wealthy Affiliate University for only $1. That way you can see what I am talking about and check it out for yourself!

Until next time,
CW

More Sales

Well, I have made another sale over this weekend.  Slowly I am beginning to make progress.  At this point I would say that relevance is the hardest thing to understand.  Most of the stuff I started with was far too general.  You literally have to find a niche in niche marketing.  Just advertising how to groom dogs will not get you anywhere.  You need to advertise, how to groom adult pugs etc.

Check out my money making links,
CW

PPC Marketing Scramble

So I ended up with $150 in my Yahoo PPC account.  I transferred it mistakenly from Pay Pal--oops.  And I didn't get the promised $50 from Yahoo. (Not their fault, it was a mix up with the guy that was promoting it.  There had been a $50 coupon, but the offer had expired and he hadn't updated his affiliate information.)  Any way I decided to go with it.  Wow, one thing it did was to spur me on to learning PPC marketing.  I really would be in trouble with out Wealthy Affiliates.  If you are going to try to do what I am doing, please find a reputable place to learn and be supported like WA.  They are in my money making links.  There is only two places I would trust.  Wealthy Affiliates and Bum Marketing.  Bum Marketing is run by a guy named Travis and he is HELPFUL.

Until next time,
CW

PPC Marketing

Ok, so I started too early.  I didn't intend to but I ran across a coupon that was suppose to give me $50 of free ads on Yahoo.  When I joined I was informed that the offer had expired.  Why me?  Anyway I had placed $150 in the account so I thought I'd give it a spin.  Well, nothing so far except watching Yahoo go Kaa-ching with my or what used to be my money.  I am learning though, learning all of the ways to lose money on PPC marketing.  I do know that it is possible to make money with PPC and I intend to find out.

So far I have found out that I am not converting, but I don't know whether it is my landing page or ads that are irrelevant.  I have changed up my landing page 3 times, if you care you can see the current one at www.thedietclearinghouse/stf.html.  By the way if you want a good diet buy this one while your there.
I am pretty psyched about the new up grades to Wealthy Affiliate that are going to be launched on September 15--stay tuned.  I will also update you on my PPC adventure.

Until Next Time,
CW

Making Conversions.

The chain of events from contact to conversion are wrought with peril.  Contact is when you first contact potential customers either with a paid ad or a free article.  Using your contact instrument (article or ad) you try to nudge them over to a landing page.  From their you hope they will go to the pitch page and finally buy the product.

The rub comes in tracking all of these components.  For instance I might write a dynamite article that attracts 100's of people, but if I get zero conversions I need to find out where in the links of events I have a break down.  When you are article marketing it is compounded by the number of articles you write, where you published them and how they are performing.

Paid ads are a bit easier to diagnose since you know when a customer has clicked on your ad and you can easily follow where he or she went from there.  It is a beautiful thing when you have a great chain operating for you, but it is a frustrating waste of time and/or money when there is a broken link somewhere.

Until next time,
CW

Wow, It Worked!

I got $125 in commissions today as promised.  I have been looking over the opportunities that I have signed up for.  In principal they are all sound opportunities.  I just need to figure out how to take this http://www.holmes-people-search.ws/ to the next level--that's code for getting it to make more money for me.

In all of what I am doing here, I truly want to provide a service and that is finding really good opportunities for money making and in the process make some money myself.  What I do not want is to make money with false promises, or scams.  The thing with http://www.holmes-people-search.ws/ is that you need to know about affiliate marketing or else you'll sign up but not know where to start.

You really should sign up with Wealthy Affiliates and People Search to get the most from this.  Then you should expect start slowly as you learn, but if you don't give up you will be successful.

Could This Be A Mistake.

I signed up for an affiliate program promoting people search engines.  I did it because it provides multiple income streams, but I am beginning to think I may have made a mistake, because I am still new at this and I can't imagine how I am going to article market this.  I think a pay per click approach would work better, but I have promised myself not to do that until this article thing starts making money.  By the way I have made $165.37 in profits so far.

Anyway, I now have a people search engine site and a promise that I will make $125 in commissions in two days, we'll see.  After I signed up I was given this website http://www.holmes-people-search.ws/.  I had to pay for hosting.  I'll let you know if I get $125 in two days or more.  I don't know exactly what the .ws is, but I do know that these domains are much cheaper than .com ones.

Make Your First Commission of $125 With In Two Days Guaranteed!

Be Patient.

Well, I have found out that it pays to be patient.  Once I joined Wealthy Affiliates I rushed too fast and made several mistakes.  My advice is to follow the 8 week action plan.  As I read it I could instantly see where I had made some mistakes--sigh.  I am a "learn by doing" kind of person so it is no wonder that I rushed things a bit.

Another thing I am discovering is that Ezine and Goarticles.com seem to get your articles more attention.  So far I have no sales, but I am getting click throughs.  Make sure you go to Google analytics and hook as many of you web pages to it as you can it is an unbelieveable resource.

Where To Start

Today I am going to submit my first articles.  I am not sure I have the keyword ideas down yet, but I learn best by doing. So here goes.  From my research I have found that EzineArticles.com and Goarticles.com are the place to start.  We'll see.

One thing I have found is that when you start to research affiliate marketing everyone and I mean everyone seems to want to sell you something.  So if you join Wealthy Affiliates are some other legit marketing school, beware.  Even in these places greenhorns will be hit up for every imaginable marketing scheme by other members of that site.

Some offers are good, but you need to be the judge of what works for you and what doesn't.

Until Next Time,

CW

A Little More About Keywords.

I just want to explain a little more about keywords. These can be anything from a single word to a complete sentence and they are what search engines use to find your article or place your ad. If a person types in a search term like "Yellow Bananas" and you have "yellow bananas" as one of your keywords then your page could be referenced by the search engine.

Factors
There are other factors to consider. If 15,000,000 other people have "yellow Bananas" as a keyword on their web page then your page may be buried under a mountain load of search results. So the trick is to find a search term people are using that is relatively high. You can use Google's Keyword tool for this. Then you can check that key word out by typing it into google using quotation marks and in the upper right hand corner of the search page you should see how many pages have that key word. The lower that number is the better.

An Example
Let's say I go to Google Keyword search too and type in "yellow bananas"; it shows that there is an average monthly search volume of 1900 searches. That is pretty good. Now I type the same term in quotes into Google; it shows that there are 32,800 unique pages with this keyword. That is a lot of competition. I really want my competition to be in the 4 digit range. If it had been then I would have written an article on "Yellow Bananas" and would have stood a good chance of it being listed high in the search results.

Until next time,
CW

Links:
Wealthy Affiliate University
Strip That Fat

Niche Marketing.

Today I learned about niche marketing. In essence you find a niche that relatively no one has filled and you pitch your product to that niche. I have chosen dieting since I have some expert knowledge of that area. Now to find a niche, I am supposed to use a keyword search and find a keyword that has a fairly high search rate on google. Next I check to see how many people out there are using that key word in their articles. If the ratio is a relatively high search rate to a low use rate then I am to write an article around that keyword. This is suppose to boost my article near the top of the search page for anyone using it to search the Internet. So far it all makes since to me on paper. But will it work when I try it?

One thing good that has come out of this is the discovery of great new diets to try. I can go through the offerings and weed out the bad and ugly ones and promote only the good ones. Strip That Fat is a great one. I am trying this one right away and if it is as good as it sounds then I will market it. I chose this one because it lets you create the diet out of foods you already like to eat. How cool is that?

Next time I'll let you know how article writing is going.
CW

Links:
Wealthy Affiliate University
Strip That Fat

Well, I have spent two days now studying at Wealthy Affiliates University and I have figured out that affiliate marketing in a nutshell is driving people to Internet businesses for a commission and that there are basically three ways.

1. Buy advertising.
2. Write informational articles and submit them to article web sites.
3. Search engine optimization—that is making a website and getting search engines to list it near the top.

I can't afford buying anything right now so I am going to opt for number 2
—no this is not an attempt at bathroom humor. I like writing so I figure I will go for this option and start writing.

Until next time, CW



>>Check it out for yourself - Wealthy Affiliates University<<

My Money Experiment

Well I know I said I wouldn't post on the weekend, but after paying my fee and opening Wealthy Affiliates I was shocked and overwhelmed. This place is NO scam, but it is also overwhelming to me at the moment. There is so much information and tools I can't begin to absorb it all. If you don't believe me fork out $40 and check it out yourself.

I will begin to digest some of this info and share it here. Keep reading, I will tell it exactly as I see it.

Until next time, CW

My money making experiment.

This blog is about my health and wealth journeys and so far I have written mostly about my health. Today I am starting out on an experiment to try to earn some money on the Internet. I invite you to tag along and see how it works out. Except for the weekends and holidays I will give you a daily update here. For some time I have been interested in working from my computer to make some money. Lately I have become earnest and have begun researching the best way to do it. Affiliate marketing seems to be the best way for me since I do not have a product to sell or a warehouse to hold a product.

The basics of affiliate marketing are that you sell other peoples products and they pay you a commission. It is a simple model for making money and it has been around a lot longer than the Internet, but I was wondering how I could apply this to the Internet. You have to be able to reach a lot of people and unless you have an extremely popular website how are you going to do that. I ruled out spamming right off the bat, I hate it! I could spend my money advertising, but if I didn't know how to write the correct advertisements I would go down the crapper in a hurry while making google rich. By the way, do not run after any quick money schemes or easy Internet marketing schemes. I did and I shouldn't have. I wasted my money.

I also needed to focus on a specific product. Trying to sell everything would either waste my time or my money or both.

Today I am ready to take the plunge. After much research I am going to join Wealthy Affiliates University. I have looked every where on the web and this seems to be the best site to learn Internet marketing. I am only going to join for one month because I am still skeptical. I will post here how things go.

Until next time, CW

Health & Wealth

Wow, what a day. My wife and I had the two grand babies over--enough said. It turns out that diet cookies don't work. Who would have believed that. Anyway if you are planning on a diet based on diet cookies, don't. Check out the story here.

It turns out that the best diets are really based on sound nutrition and as the old saying goes: If it sounds to good to be true it probably is.

Lose 2 - 3 pounds of body fat per week (Healthy).

Science Daily says studies show that weight loss improves mood in depressed people. I wonder what that really means--I mean, if I were depressed because I was overweight, well then of course it would improve my mood. Maybe depression can lead to obesity in some individuals. Who knows what these things mean, but I thought I'd pass it on.

I'm still making some spending money using holmes-people-search I can't call it wealth but as my dad use to say, "It's better than a kick in the teeth."

If you want to know more details visit here.

Until next time, CW

Exercise won't make you thin.

Wow, I just read in the LA Times a story on a controversy about whether exercising helps you lose weight. It is true that you would have to do a lot of exercise to burn just the calories from one piece of pizza. You'd have to walk for an hour. It turns out that the body is pretty efficient.

I guess the upshot is:

• exercise
• diet correctly
• drink plenty of water

Good eating principles are:

1. Eat complex carbs instead of simple carbs.
2. Eat food as close to its live state as possible. (eg. fresh fruits and veggies.)
3. Drink Plenty of Water--is there an echo in here.
4. Get planty of sleep--not too sure if this is an eating princaple, but ut works.

Until next time, CW

How I Make Extra Spending Money
Click Here to lose weight now!

Easy Fast Weight Loss Diets

I just compiled my top three picks for easy fast weight loss. The first two of these are free and I have tried all of these diets and they work.

#1 The Cabbage Soup Diet

#2 The Fruit Flush Diet

# 3 Strip That Fat

You can read my full compilation at My Top 3 Easy Fast Weight Loss Diets

Other than that I am heading out today to try and create a french drain--sigh. I also have all of my nieces and nephews over tonight for a fun carnival--heaven help me!


How I Make Extra Spending Money

Web Dreams

I've been thinking about a website lately, so I went ahead and began creating one. Since I have spent so much time on health topics in my life I decided to try different diets and then make an online dieting guide, a sort of what has worked for me and what has not.

Don't know how long I'll do it, but it is a creative outlet for now. I decided to call it The Diet Clearing House. Visit it anytime to see my progress.

>>Visit the diet clearing house.com<<

Hopefully this link will take you there, I always have a hard time getting all of the correct stuff when I type a link. Any way there are some pretty good diets out there and some pretty bad ones. Sometimes it is all a metter of perspective, what is good for one person is absolutely terrible for the next guy. It is this way it is with my wife and me. If I like a diet she hates it, and if she loves it then I'll probably hate it--sigh.

I have restless leg syndrome like you wouldn't believe so I spent a lot of last night doing people searches Ye gads, I found more old friends, a few enemies and a lot of people who share my name. I wrote a hub about it. If you want you can read it here. In order to get my complete search results free I had to sign up for some free genealogy accounts , but they ended up being fun also. Ah well, it passed the night. I though I might start a Christian Walker convention with all the CW's I found in the US. I even was able to see some of the people's houses.

As fun as it was, hopeful tonight I'll just sleep.

CW

thedietclearinghouse.com
holmes-people-search.ws

Dag, I just finished a week of the Cabbage Soup Diet . Suprisingly it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and I lost 10 lbs. This week end I gained back 3.5 of those lbs at a wedding--sigh.

I have always promised myself that if I exceed 205 lbs I will go on a protien diet until I am back to 205, but I am rethinking that at this point. I think I will try eating only live food--no I will not go rutting after grubs in the yard! I will just eat raw veggies, fruit, and nuts until my weight is back at its set point. Boy was that wedding good!

CW
thedietclearinghouse.com

Well another day and I am still holding. I find that if I weigh myself every day I do better. I also am on the track of some satisfying foods that do not destroy the scales. As I discover them I will put them on this page. So far I have found some sugar free candies that are pretty good except it is hard to remain polite after eating more than two pieces. (sigh)

Christian Walker's Weight

Man the season for weight losing is here (sigh). I guess no one wants to hit the beach with to much cargo. Over the years I have become good at losing and gaining weight. I once lost 48 pounds in 6 weeks, unfortunately it was the same two pounds over and over again. Admittedly better at the gaining part than the losing. What I really stink at is the maintaining part. The momentary joy of eating often outweighs the stress and drudgery of everyday living--no pun intended.

I have used the hCG diet to peel off the pounds quickly--you can read about my journey at http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Skinny-on-The-hCG-Diet . I don't even try explaining this diet to my co-workers since it involves self-injecting and pregnancy hormones, but hey it works.

Now I am trying modified emergency Atkins to keep it off. Every time I surpass my target weight I go on a six-egg day which as the name implies I eat only 6 eggs that day. It usually brings the weight right down. I think I'll be OK at the beach for a married guy my age.