Kicking Butt

Happy New Year’s to all my readers!!

I know again its been awhile since I posted. My apologies for all of that.  Its my goal this year to keep this blog updated and to let you guys in on many of the things I’m planning and working on this year.  I have the feeling that this is going to be a breakout year for me.  Last year was the best year I’ve had with my Internet Marketing business, however, given what I’ve learned and my new focus this year, I have no qualms in saying that I’m poised to make 2012 the best year ever.

But before we go into my plans for 2012, let’s take a moment to remember many of the successes and accomplishments I’ve had in 2011.

I can remember that back in 2010, I set a goal to setup a cost per action business and have it product over 1,000.00 profit daily for me by the end of that year.  Needless to say I never reached that goal in 2010, however, on Feb 24, 2011, I was able to achieve that milestone.  This was one of my proudest accomplishments of 2011 and the year had just begun.  This thrend continued into March and April of the year.  However, a hard lesson was learned this year. Never put all your eggs in the same basket and never get complacient.  After managing a successful campaign for a few months, everything came to a halt when many of my main offers just went away.  Instead of continously building on my business in good times, I got lazy and figured I didn’t need to do anything to grow my business.  BIG MISTAKE.  In this business if you are not continually innovating and discovering new product niches, its only a matter of time before you put your income into jeopardy.

Aside from this accomplishment.  I also set a goal to get a my free business card site SEO’d to the 1st page of Google.  With the help of various SEO firms that I outsourced to, I was able to get my site to the 1st page of Google within a time frame of 6 months for a set of very competitive keywords:  ”free business cards” and “free printable business cards“.  My site took up residence there for about a month. However, I was later dropped from the listings because of some aggressive tactics I was employing to try to push my site to the number 1 position in Google.  FAIL!

2011 was also the year I entered my 1st affiliate marketing contest sponsored by the affiliate network YeahCPA.com.  The contest included various prizes ranging from an Amazon Kindle on the low end to a 10,000 in cash on the high end.  I opted for attempting to win an Apple Ipad 2.  To win the Ipad 2, I had to push more than 3,000.00 in affiliate commissions within 30 days.  With the help of my SEO’d business card site and various other pay per click campaigns, I was able to win the prize! A prize that both my wife and daughter LOVE!

All and all, 2011 was a great year.  I learned many new things about this industry both good and bad.  Things that have really opened my eyes to how one can really open up an online business and have it thrive in an economy where brick and mortar businesses are stagnant and/or failing.  I did have my own set of failures that I talked about in a previous blog post.  But everything is a learning experience and I’ve learned from those failures to make me a better person in 2012.

So what am I planning for 2012?
Well I don’t want to go into all of that in this blog post.  However, I’ll leave you this tidbit.  2012 will be about being “MOBILE“.

Going Mobile Peeps

Failure is Not an Option

It’s been awhile since my last blog post and you may have been wondering where I’ve been?   Did I give up CPA/Affiliate marketing?  Did I retire and move off to some exotic country?   No no, nothing like that.  What I have been doing is grinding out (when I can find time after working full time and hanging out with family and friends) CPA campaigns and testing out new traffic sources.  I wish I can say that I’ve been successful in all my endeavors, the honest truth right now is I’ve experienced quite a few failures over the past few weeks.  Most internet marketers like to talk about the successes.  They like to talk about their magic system that prints them money daily while all on auto-pilot.  Although there may be some truth to their tales, one thing I will tell that for every 1 major success story, there are at least 10 or so failures.  Those failures are not something they always share with the public.   Well today I felt led to buck that trend and talk about my failures while at the same time letting you all in on how those failures are shaping my mindset.  In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight a list of campaigns and idea’s I’ve been focusing on these past few weeks and the results of each “brilliant idea”.

1.)  Kindle E-Book Authoring

Kindle Ebook Publishing

So I was listening to a webinar a few months ago that talked about a guy making over 20k per month selling e-books on Amazon’s Kindle Publishing platform.  The host of the webinar was Ty Cohen and he was selling a product called “Kindle Cash Flow” for $997.00.  Before you gasp at the price, I will just say that I did NOT purchase this course as it was, IMHO, TOO EXPENSIVE.   However, I was able to acquire this program through some friends online.  After watching all the video’s, I was pumped and was ready to start publishing e-books.  I got an idea of a niche I wanted to go into and hired both American and Filipino writers to write short stories that I would combine and sell on Amazon.   I hired American writers from Guru.com on a per project basis, while I hired Filipino writers from www.onlinejobs.ph on a salaried basis.  What I found was that although the American writers produced better sounding “content”, the Filipino writers could produce way more content for a cheaper price.

SO what happened?  After about 6 weeks of working with my writers, my team produced a total of 14 shorts, 4 of which I uploaded to Amazon.  The books were priced at $3.97 of which I got 70% royalties.  It took a few weeks before I started to get sales, however, over time my sales dropped off dramatically.   All and all, the project has been a failure.

So why did I fail?

Cash Spent:    $1211.93  =  (writer’s salaries)
Book Revenue:    $  80.19
Total Loss     ($1131.74)

After doing some analysis, I can definitely tell you where I went wrong.  First, I had 14 books written, but only uploaded 4.  Well I did not have the time to really proofread the rest of the books.  Over time I got busy with work, family, and other projects that I let this go to the wayside.  So the additional 10 books were not uploaded.   Plus, I was getting really frustrated and discouraged by the small sales volume of the 4 books I’d uploaded.  Also, after some time I realized that I was not utilizing my workers as efficient as I could have been.  There were days where I did not assign them any work but they were still collecting a paycheck.  This was poor planning on my part.

How will I remedy this situation?

• - Proper Planning of the scope of the project.  Don’t hire more than 1 worker if you can’t fill his/her workload.

• – Don’t expect things to happen rapidly.  Just because person in a course makes 20k a month on Amazon does not mean you’ll do it overnight.

• – Follow through.  Just because I did not see sales on the 1st 4 books does not mean the other 10 books would not sale.  Strength in numbers.

2.)  Ringtones.com Marketing

Slinging Ringtones

I know you may be thinking, who downloads ringtones these days.   Well truth be told there is still a viable market out there for ringtones.  The problem is its very very saturated and its hard to make a buck.  I figured, however, I could still go into this market if I’m smart about it and make some money.  I struck a deal with a broker that represented www.ringtones.com.  The deal was that I would buy traffic from this domain and redirect it to my personal affiliate link.  This sounded like a really good plan.  The problem is the broker representing the owner of www.ringtones.com would not sell me traffic (clicks) for no lower than $0.42 a click.  Although cheaper than most places for targeted ringtone traffic, I quickly found that I was not able to make a profit on my ringtones campaigns.

Cash Spent:         $200.00
Ringtone Revenue:    $158.00
Total Loss:           ($ 42.00)

How will I get this campaign profitable?

• - Open up negotiations with the domain owner directly.  If I’m able to get him/her to lower the price of my clicks, I’ll definitely have a campaign that a winner.   I found that if I can get my costs down to at least $.030 a click are less, I’ll be in profit.   Don’t you people go out and still this campaign now .

• - Ask for an increase in my payout for the campaign I was running.

3.)  Free Business Cards Domain SEO Failure

Got a Business Card?

All of you may know I used to owe a business card domain that was on the 1st page of Google (position 7 to 9)  This domain was bringing in some sales for me on the SEO side and I was attempting to really skyrocket my sales by pushing my site to within the top 3 listings of Google.

The problem with wanting to do this “quickly” is that you have to rely on “blackhat” tactics that if not used correctly, can get you website deranked or delisted from Google.   This is exactly what happened to me.  I used a technique that would point lots of backlinks to my site in a huge burst.

Hindsight being 20/20, I know that this was not the best thing to do.  Google quickly caught on and dropped my site from Page 1 to Page 20+.  I lost a site that was bringing in a steady $100.00 a month in SEO traffic to a site that brought in $0.00.

What did I learn from this?

• - Patience!!!  Don’t try to trick Google.

• – Google will always catch you and punish you with a vengeance.

As I type this post, I realize that I’m getting a little long winded.  There are actually quite a few more failures I wanted to tell you guys about, but then I remembered that I didn’t want this post to be just about my failures but more so about my mindset after the failure.  The way I look at it is we are all going to fail at some things.  Some people will fail more so than others.  But in the grand scheme of things, you have to get over your fear of failing, because if you don’t then you’ll never take action.  If you never take any action, you are doomed to be stuck in your current state of affairs.

The reason that I keep testing and moving forward in my endeavors is because I see (I know) the light at the end of the tunnel and that light shows me that I have a bright future up ahead.  So, I tell you this.   DON’T GIVE UP.

- Ollie James Hales.

YeahCPA Contest Giveaway!! This is true!

Do not hesitate,

Just rock offers you like!

Time is limited.
This contest lasts from 5th July to 5th Aug. Here it goes!

If you hit 1k in total affiliate commission than we will give you a brand new Kindle!!

If you hit 3k in total affiliate commission than we will give you $300 in cash that you can spend anyway you like to!

If you hit 5k in total affiliate commission than we will send you a FREE Apple iPad!!

If you hit 10k in total affiliate commission than we will send you 2 FREE Apple iPads or $1000 in cash that you can spend anyway that you would like to!!

If you hit 20k in total affiliate commission than we will send you $2000 in cash so you can go on a shopping spree or whatever you like!!

If you hit 50k in total affiliate commission than we will send you a $5000 bonus on top of your commissions and also a special China Jade!!

If you hit 100k in total affiliate commission than we will send you $10000 in cold cash that you can spend anyway that you desire and we will also send you a special gift from the YeahCPA team.

YeahCPA!!
Since I had a few very profitable campaigns on that network already, I figured hey let me enter the contest to see what I could win. Needless to say after about a month of promoting various offers, I was able to cross the $5,000+ commission threshold to win an Ipad 2.  I have to admit, the Ipad 2 is pretty cool.  I’m still in the process of downloading various apps for it, but my preliminary assessment of it tells me its a keeper.
On top of receiving a free Ipad, I decided to treat myself to something I’ve wanted for over a year now.  An AR Drone.  Basically its a wi-fi control quadricopter that have forward and downward facing cameras which stream realtime video back to your Ipad!  How cool is that?!?! You fly it by tilting your Ipad forward, backwards, left, and right.   An awesome toy!

Just thought I’ll keep you guys updated on not just my affiliate camapaigns, but some of the prizes you can win by just promoting on various networks.  I believe YeahCPA is running another contest.  Let’s see what I can win this time around as well.

So How Do You Find These People To Buy A Product?

So have you ever did a search online using Google, Yahoo, or Bing and saw that their were ad listings on the very top and right hand sides of the page.  Those listings are are paid advertisements.  Advertisers like me will purchase those ad placements based on keywords that you may type into a search engine.  For example, say you were looking for “video game rentals” in the Google search engine. You will be presented with search results along with a set of ads at the top and right of the regular search listings.  I am an affiliate for Gamefly, a game rental service.  So what I would do (note this is not my ad) would create an advertisement for Gamefly.com as seen in the illustration.  If someone clicks on my ad and purchases a Gamefly subscription, I would be awarded $20.00 for that sale. The main thing you have to worry about when buying ads is your conversion ratio and the amount you pay per click.

Say in the above example, your cost per click is say $0.10.  Then you would have to convert someone to a sale in ($20.00 / $0.10) clicks to be profitable or risk losing money.

Here are a few questions I get when people ask me about what I’m doing online.

1. How would you recommend getting started on your first one?

Here is a course I found online search Google that does an “okay” job of introducing you to CPA marketing.

http://www.alpha-affiliates.com/backend/

Modules 1 – 5 are pretty good to get the background.
Modules 6 – 19 are the more advance stuff…..you’ll need to know it…but focus on 1 – 5 first.

I have another course that is a little dated, but also gives a good overview written by the same guy that I sent that pdf to you about earlier:

PDF = http://www.unlimited-trials.com/cpamarketing.pdf

2. Do you use the company’s landing page or always create your own?

I usually test out the company’s landing page 1st.   This is called direct linking.  Many times I can tell whether and offer will be profitable by doing this.  However, there are some offers that require me to create my own landing page instead.  Its basically one of those things you just have to test to see which one performs better.

3. What do you do that requires you to always be out there tinkering with stuff? Do you not just advertise a promotion and see what happens? Do you spend most of your time trying to climb the google search list? What?

Most of the “tinkering” i’m doing is adjusting bid prices, adding new keywords to my bidding list, checking conversions, and trying new traffic sources.   I don’t spend most of my time trying to climb the google search list (that’s organic traffic) as most of the traffic I get is paid traffic.

4. How much should I put into this while we’re trying to learn how to do it?

This is a relative question.  I would not put more into this that you can not easily afford to lose. (say if you were going to Vegas….its the same concept).
You should be able to get some good data if you were spending say 100 or 200 a month on this..

5. How do you loose money doing this? And how can I avoid losing money right off?

You basically lose money by spending more money on traffic (clicks on your ads) then what you are earning in conversions on the back end.   Say you are running an Eharmony offer and you spend 20.00 in clicks and only get say 3 conversions / sign ups (each conversion is worth say 4.00).   You’ve lost 20.00 – 12.00 = (8.00)

It’s inevitable that you’ll lose money up front as you are learning how things work (but over time with tracking your keywords and conversions) you’ll be able to get rid of the keywords that are not converting for you and focus on the ones that are.

In upcoming blog posts, I will discuss the topic of looking up an offer and putting it on an search network and test profitability.

Ollie James Hales signing out.

So why did I title this post, “Never Bid On Facebook“.   This is because I ignored everything I just mentioned in the above paragraph and decided to bid on the keyword “facebook” in an Microsoft Adcenter PPC campaign.  I had an offer that was basically a Best Buy zip submit offer that I wanted to test against the same people that visit facebook.   I created a page that would mimic the color scheme of Facebook.  Hired a spokesmodel and dressed her in Facebook colors. (Although note to self, white pantyhose do not look well on African American legs.) Then I setup a PPC campaign with only 1 keyword in the adgroup (“facebook”).

I then setup a budget of $100.00 per day and $500.00 per month.  Bid for 1st position in Adcenter , ignored that the cost per click for 1st position was over 1.00 (figured it was a glitch in the system or something) and let her rip.   I watched my prosper202.com tracking page and noticed the traffic was flowing in at a crazy pace.  In the 1st 30 minutes i’d received over 500 clicks to my landing page.  I figured…I’m in the money now!!

Then I waited for my Adcenter stats to update..(I hate that it takes 3 hours to update).  Low and behold I was shocked!!!!   I’d spent a total of 647.11!! In the course of 30 freakin minutes!!

“Wait a minute!!….I set a $100.00 per day daily budget and a $500.00 per month budget!!”  I could not understand why I was being charged so much.  SO I contacted Microsoft Adcenter for an explanation.  After talking with 3 different reps (1 hour each a piece!), I learned that on very high volume keywords, they can not guarantee they would not go over your daily budget. “What the heck?”  A multi-million dollar company can’t ensure they don’t go over budget!?!?  I was upset!.   On top of that, the campaign flopped and I didn’t earn no more than about 30 bucks or so.  After some positioning and complaining on my part, they refunded me $500 bucks to my account.   They explained that I should not bid on a high volume keyword like this again if I was not sure it would convert for me.

Once caveat is that if you setup your campaign and set ONLY a monthly budget and set it up till “spend until depleted“, then you won’t run into this problem.   So basically you are by passing the daily spend and setting a “monthly maximum spend”.  Their system is designed to stop spending once it hits that spend limit….but only if you use this combination.    The draw back from doing this is that you don’t have control over how much gets spent each day.

Lesson learned….

Profit for March =  27.19% increase over February Profits

Some quick highlights of March:

1.)  Affiliate offers have been pretty stable all month.
2.)  Cost Per Click (CPC) costs are down.
3.)  SEO Site is dropping in rankings (Google Update dropped me from 1st page)…
4.)  Joined Adbeat.com (advertising network spytool)

Of the quick highlights of the month, the major thing I’d like to talk about is the fact that I joined a private website called www.adbeat.com.  This site has a treasure troll of information relating to information gathered while spying on advertisers of over 10 major advertising networks.  The site is very similar to a spy tool that I created a few months ago.  Where as my tool only spys on the AOL/Adsonar network, Adbeat.com spys on the following ad networks: 

• Google,
  
• Yahoo,
  
• MSN,
• Doubleclick,
  
• Adsonar,
• Pulse360,
  
• BuySellAds,
  
• Chitka,
  
• AdBrite,
  
• ValueClick,
  
• Adhere,
  
• TribalFusion
• Technorati

It also has a forum that is really active were people share knowledge and tips about how to best advertise and outdo the competition. My prayer is that I’m able to use my 1-year subscription to help further my online goals.

Going Forward:

So now that March has come and gone its time to focus on what I plan on doing for April.  At the time of this posting, its April 11th.  So almost 1/2 way through the month what have I been working on and what do I plan to do for the rest of the month?  Well to be honest, I think I was trying to do so many things at once that I got a little overwhelmed and have not done much of anything (other than my stable PPC campaigns).  Sometimes I have have so many grandiose ideas in my head and on paper, but be paralyzed in my execution of those ideas.  Well this past weekend I took it up on myself to start working focusing on ONE new campaign.   Notice the word ONE!   The reason is that I would really like to get some traction on a n established evergreen market I’m planning on going into and at the same time, create a mailing list that I can continously market too.  Something I’ve been neglecting for quite some time.  So with the help of an outsourced worker from www.scriptlance.com and a close internet marketing friend, I’m in the process of developing a website that’ll capitalize off a very general market with the express goal of providing a value added service while also monetizing the traffic on the backend.  If all goes well, I can report about it in upcoming posts.

Well, that’s all I have to say right now.   Please stay tuned to the blog for continued updates.  Also, I still plan on doing a set of blog posts that are the “Back 2 Basics” on affiliate marketing.

Signing off:  Ollie James Hales

Eharmony:

Starting with the Eharmony offer, Azoogle.com pays $4.40 for every person that signs up for a profile on Eharmony.  I setup a campaign via Adcenter and bid on a few dating related terms.  After optimizing my PPC costs, I was able to become profitable on the offer relatively quickly.  Overall, I was spending about $0.14 per click.  However, my ECPC (earnings cost per click) was equal to $0.46.  So if you take my spend at $0.14 per click and subtract it from my average ECPC of $0.46 I ended up earning  $0.32 per every click to my Eharmony link.

FTD Flowers:

This campaign could not get off the ground for me.  I don’t know if I just didn’t set the offer up correctly or if the offer was not tracking or what.  I could not get this offer to convert.  I bid on keywords such as flowers, valentine gifts, flower delivery, and valentine flowers.  Keywords that got me lots and lots of clicks, but 0 conversions.  After a few days of running this campaign, I gave up and decided to focus on the Eharmony campaign and 1 over secret campaign I wont reveal here just yet.

Febuary Revenue:
This month has been my best month in all of my internet marketing efforts. Not only did I surpass my goal of $8,000.00 by earning a total of $13,689.40 (surpassing my goal by $5,689.40), but I also learned alot of new lessons that I will be implementing in the month of March and beyond.  One of the things I’m planning on implementing is something called CPA pathways.  It’s basically a concept where you create your own CPA offer, but your offer is basically an opt-in form with other CPA offers on the backend.  To illustrate:  User lands on your CPA Offer Page —> submits their information (usually an opt-in form) —> forwarded to multiple backend CPA offers which someone else owns.  The theory is you get to build a list and at the same time you get paid for forwarding people to other CPA offers in your pathway.  This concept has been out there for awhile, but people are just now starting to talk about it…and I think that is where the next major push will be.  I’m in the process of brainstorming ideas that I can use for my own CPA offer.  I will blog about this in detail in the near future as I set up my own offer and pick a set of CPA networks to put the offer on.

March Goals:

Profit = $10,000 (not sure if I can repeat Feb numbers as there is no major holiday in March)
Setup 2 CPA pathway websites and test.

Find another set of profitable campaigns.

Start testing out other traffic sources:

Adperium – A network specializing in bit-torrent traffic

Mochi Media – A network specializing in in-game advertising

Ad4game – Another network specializing in in-game advertising.

See you guys next post…..

Sales Report:

New Spokes Model Hired

In talking about the site, I also made some more tweaks to the site.  I hired another spokesmodel that helps keep people on my site and pre-sale people my business card offers.  The script I wrote engages the user to click through to my Vistaprint.com offer.  I attempted to make sure my model looked more business like this go around.  Blazer, shirt, skirt, pantyhose, and heels.  I think I did pretty good this time, although my wife says the girls skirt is too short..lol.  I’ll be mindful of that on my next video shoot.

As I stated before my it looks like I hit one of my major goals related to keyword ranking.  I will say that this past month has been pretty up and down as it relates to rankings.  One moment I’m on the 1st and 2nd pages of Google and the next moment, I’m on page 20+ of Google. If you look at my Google Analytics over the past month, you’ll see this illustrated pretty clearly.

Google Analytics Report

I stated before, that although your rankings will change over time, if you keep building consistent links to your site that your rankings will eventually improve.   This past month (Feb) I hired another link builder to go through and build me a set 100 Page Rank (PR) 3 and above links to my site.  I believe these links where the cause of the huge jump in rankings.   We’ll see and I’ll keep you guys posted.

Summary of Post

So in summary,  I HIT MY GOALS set 4 month ago!!!!

1.)  Get my keywords to the 1st page of Google (save 1 really really really competitive keyword).

2.)  Make sale of a product from my website.

Next Set of Goals:

1.)  Rank all your keywords within the top 3 positions of Google in 2 months:  (May 3rd, 2011)

I’m actively searching for new campaigns right now.   Since February is the month of “Love”, I have gathered up list of Valentine related CPA offers.

FTD Flowers
ProFlowers.com
Eharmony.com

Also, since this is tax season, TurboTax.com, is would also be a good offer to run.  Currently I don’t have a landing page designed for it, so I’ll need to create one in order to promote it.  If I find the time to do so, I’ll definitely be promoting this tax offer.

Also, one of my favorite offers has come back to a CPA network I belong too.  Gamefly.com, an offer that allows people to go and rent video games online (similar to Netflix), has resurfaced.  I will definitely be giving this offer another go round on Yahoo/Bing PPC.   I’m also, wondering if this offer will boad well on AOL/Adsonar.  Well it’s up to me to put it to the test.  I’ll report back next month on the progress of this offer.  Really excited to see if it works out as a contextual offer vs. just a regular PPC offer. To do this, I’ll need to track via various sub-id’s.  I’ll write a new blog post about testing and tracking offer traffic sources in my next blog post.

Finally, what you all have been waiting for.  Here’s my earnings report for the month of January.

Again,  February has to get better.

Wish me luck as always and leave comments.  Let me know what you would like me to blog about on a continuous basis.  This blog is not just for me, but for my readers as well.

Signing off:  Ollie James Hales

Okay, each year I create a new set of goals for both my personal and professional life.  This year and for the purposes of this blog, I thought I’d give you guys an inside track to what I’m thinking about what I want to accomplish this year.  In my office, I keep a standard white board where I display both my monthly and yearly goals. Each time I come into my office, I’m reminded of the commitments I’m made to myself each month.  This helps keep me accountable to my goals and recaptures that motivational spark that I was feeling at the exact moment I originally wrote down my goals.

High Level Yearly Goals:

So what’s on the agenda for this year?  At a high level, the normal things.

Lose weight: I’m trying to get down to 200 lbs by the summer ideally.  Currently I’m 242 lbs (down from 251 lbs 10 weeks ago…I know my weight lose has been relatively slow). To make this goal by the summer, I’m planning on either taking a self defense class (I used to be really good in Shotokan Karate) and/or practice exercising with my wife.

Grow My Relationship:  This includes taking vacations with my wife, joining prayer groups together, and get involved in various outright ministries with my wife.  Common interest and activities with my wife will definitely make us grow.

Grow Our Family Assets:   Basically store up a 12 month emergency fund (we’ve already stored up a 6 month fund so I need to adjust my goals).  To do this, I’ll definitely need to work a little harder in my internet business to grow.

I know I might have gotten a little off track in my description of goals as many of my readers are more concerned about how I’m planning to grow my business.  So to those readers, I’ve not forgotten about you.

Goal White Board

February Business Goals:

The month of January got off to a slow start.  However, I’ve been able to use my free time to brainstorm new ideas and areas I’d like my business to follow.  For the past few years I’ve been heavily invested in CPA marketing for a pay per click standpoint and  I don’t plan on giving any of that up.  However, I know the time is ripe to start expanding into other traffic areas.  This being said, I’ve identified 3 other traffic sources / businesses I’ll be focusing on in the coming month and year.  They are the following:  SEO (Search Engine Optimization – Free Organic Traffic), Mobile Phone Marketing (Iphone / Android Applications and Ads), Online Gaming Advertising (In Game Ads).

1.)  Search Engine Optimization:

I love free traffic.  You don’t have to pay for it!  This being said, I’m planning on creating more websites that will act as affiliate sites with the express purpose of naturally ranking high in Google / Yahoo / Bing.  This will be a year long endeavor as you know SEO rankings can take a lot of time.

2.)  Mobile Phone Marketing:

The mobile market is exploding right now.  One of my online mentors readily identified this sometime early last year and began creating IPhone applications and publishing them in the Itune Appstore.  Currently he’s making thousands a month in profit on his free and paid apps.  My plan for this year is to follow in his footsteps to do something similar.  I’m still brain storming my application ideas, but I’m sure I’ll have something to share with you guys in the upcoming weeks!

3.)  Online Gaming Advertising

Online gaming is a market that is ripe for the picking in terms of eyeballs and ad traffic.    What a lot of people don’t know is that you can actually place ads inside of games that people play online. Because most people again focus on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, I will have little competition coming in advertising on gaming apps. Yet another source of revenue for my products and CPA offers.  I just have to find the right offer to marry up with the right gaming ad network.

There are other misc goals for the month of February detailed in the picture that are pretty straight forward.  Trying to capitalize on Valentines day with various flower delivery offers and dating offers.   I’ll report back in a couple of weeks to let you know how that faired.

Till next update, see you all.   Don’t forget to post comments.

Ollie James Hales

So this blog topic will be an update to how my SEO website has been fairing over the past month.  I was able to hire another outsourced link builder to create more backlinks to my website.  I’m pleased to announce that I was able to reach my goal (albeit temporarily) of getting all my keywords to the 1st page of Google.   This happened on January 21, 2011, only about 3 months after starting this project!!  I logged into my Google Analytics console and noticed that I started to receive more traffic all a sudden and when I checked my ranking report, it showed that all my keywords were on the 1st page of Google.  Now, these keywords were in a lower position ranging from Position 6 to Position 10, but were on the front page nevertheless. Very exciting!!  As you can see on the analytics display, I started to receive about 40 visitors a day to my site…it may now sound like alot, but its alot given my main keyword was still at the bottom of the 1st page.

Then a couple of days later something disheartening happened.  My rankings dropped from 1st page to pages 13 through 43!! My site fell victim to the elusive Google Dance again.  I felt like I’d gotten so close to the top of a mountain only to be kicked back down to the base.   Oh well, I still have till March 3rd to accomplish my goal and stay at the top of Google.  I’ve noticed that my rankings are already starting to recover.  Check the charts below and you can see that I’m inching back up towards page 1.  I have no doubt that I’ll be able to make it back there very soon.

Stay tuned for more updates.  I’ve been brainstorming new online business ventures and I will be excited to share them with you very very soon.  I just have to get my thoughts together and figure out how I’m gonna approach everything.

Woo Hoo!

December SEO results.

In my previous SEO related post, I detailed that I was recovering from the result of a Google dance and my rankings were starting to improve.  So what I did to combat this was to continuously build links to my website until my rankings came back.  Today, I”m happy to report that those rankings are holding and still improving.  On December 25th of this month, Google gave me a Christmas gift by ranking 2 of my keywords to the 1st page of Google.  My keywords are in position 9 and position 10 currently!! If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time you will know that I’ve given myself a goal to rank 6 different keywords to position 1 in Google by my birthday of March 3, 2010.  It looks like I’m well on my way to do so.  What I’ll be doing in the upcoming weeks is continuing the activity of outsourcing my link building.  I expect that next month should show a dramatic increase in my rankings.  Also, if you’ve been wondering if any of these activities have translated into an increase in traffic to my site, then I will have to say yes.  However, the increase in traffic is minimal at best right now.  Only a few clicks a day (3 to 6).   This may sound like a small amount (it is), however, I just recently reached the 1st page of Google, so I expect the traffic to my website to increase across the board really soon.

I’ve attached my spreadsheet below that details the progress of my keywords over the month of December for reference.

December SEO Chart:

You can also see that I’m still struggling with keywords 1 through 3.  I know its going to take some time to get those keywords pushed up further in the rankings.  The terms are just very competitive and Google does not give me rank for them as easily as keywords 4 through 6.  So, I’m going to try an experiment.  In the SEO realm, there are linking structures called Link Pyramids and Link Wheels.  What these structures are designed to do is funnel “link juice” or votes of confidence back to the website they are targeting.  There has been some debate on whether these structures still work or not as Google is beginning to discount the link strength of these structures, but in talking with friends on the web, they assure me that they continue to use these techniques and they do work.   So here’s what I’ve been pondering.  I met with an online SEO company recently who says they can create a link wheel structure pointing back to my website which would be optimized for the keywords I’m targeting.  I checked the company out by asking other people that use them and they seem legit.  I’m thinking I will use them to see if they can better improve my ranking situation.  Below is an image of the structure of links they will be creating for my website.

Pretty intensive huh?!?! I definitely don’t have the time to do this on my own.  I’ll update you all in about a month on the progress of this link structure.

December Pay Per Click Results

Moving on to the topic of pay per click.   Look’s like I fell short of my goal this month as well.  I was shooting for a total profit of $10,000 this month, but looks like I came up short again this month at $7,198.50 in profit.   Looking back over the month, this was because of a couple of things.

1.)  The Christmas Holiday: Not only did I not get the boost in sales that I originally planned, I was not fully focused on my campaigns as I should have been.  There were a few days where I did not run my campaign during the optimized times of day as I should have.   Also, since most people take a break from their computers and profession jobs during Christmas, I did not get the traffic from “corporate browsers” as I’d had in the past.

2.)  Offer went away: My offer went away on one of my main networks.  This hurt me as well because this network paid me weekly and I was able to reinvest my profits directly back into my ad spends each week.  Since I lost that weekly payout, I’ve been forced to depend on 2 other networks that pay every 2 weeks.  So I can’t recycle my monies as fast as I previously could.  To alleviate this issue, I’ve signed up to an additional 4 other networks that weekly once you start showing them lots of volume.  I don’t think this will be a problem for me so I’m optimistic that I can reach my $10,000 goal in January.

December PPC Chart

All and all this has been a great year in affiliate marketing.  Things got off to a rocky start at the beginning of the year when all my offers started to go away, but I’ve been able to rebound and find other products that sell well online.  I’m very excited about closing out this year and getting ready for the new year.  I pray and claim that 2011 will be an even better year for this business.  I have so many new ideas I want to put in play and I think with the renewed vigor I have right now nothing can stop my progress.   I will continue to blog about the things I have planned and will keep all you guys in the loop on my successes and failures.  I’m trying to be as transparent as I can.  This blog is my outlet and my motivation to keep going when things get tough.  I can alway’s look back and see the successes I’ve had in the past and keep pressing forward to even more future success.

Till next blog post,

James Hales (Ollie) signing off.

HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!