Wham or Scam

Its been a while since I last updated, sorry about that, time just slips by…

So What’s been happening?

Well, I had an insane Amazon conversion rate of 250%, 2 click throughs and 5 sales, and they weren’t even related to the product I was promoting :-S Just goes to show that once to get someone to Amazon, Amazon does the rest. Picture below…

I had my first ever payment from AdSense. It took 4 1/2 years, but better late than never. During this period I also had a record for the highest AdSense click at £1.26! The current pay run is coming along nicely as well.

Oh yeah, in my last post I mentioned ranking for one of my websites. I did another check, and not much has changed. To be fair, I haven’t done much promoting of this site in a while. I hope to change this once I have updated another one of my sites.

Other than that there is not much else to report. I am hoping not to leave it too long for another update in future.

After listing one of my developed sites on Flippa.com yesterday, and see how easy it was to do; I have several more websites that I can sell in this way. Two I have no problem creating content and promoting, the other I have ethical issues with.

Back in 2007 I was so desperate to make a little money that I was prepared to promote anything in order to do it. I bought a gambling domain – onlinecasinoriches.co.uk- that I wanted to develop. I never got around to it, and I have been paying hosting and domain renewal for the best part of three years at a cost of well over £100.

My problem is this. I don’t like promoting websites which glamorise gambling, loans, credit cards and generally anything that puts or has the potential to put people in financial difficulty. So what to do?

• I can just let the domain expire.
• I can sell the domain
• I can swallow my pride, create some content (via unique content generation such as ArticleRanks.com), monetize, promote and then sell on; washing my hands of any immoral activity beyond that.

On the one hand I feel like I should stand by my principles, but on the other hand I have to think of this as a business. That domain cost me a lot of money and I need to try and at least break even.

I am going to ponder it for a little while. In the meantime, if any of you have any suggestions or opinions please comment below.

OK, just a couple of hours into my outsourcing project and it has turned into an epic fail. Those freelancers are a tough crowd to please, one even reported my post, without giving me a change to amend the errors. Gees, nothing like giving someone a second chance eh?

In all fairness I can see their point. 8 articles for $6, not much money for the work, but then i’m not the only employer to offer crappy compensation. It was only to test the waters and I made an honest mistake (the minimum fixed price bid is apparently $50), but again, i have seen projects that fall far short of that sum. If they didn’t want the job then just move on…

Anyhow, back to post another job. It cost me $10 to post that job, so this time i’ll try and do it right. If I am going to pay $50 for some articles they are going to bloody work for it, especially if I don’t know them and the quality of their work. It works both ways, prove to me that you can do what I want you to do, and i’ll pay you more for the next project.

I have been meaning to outsoruce some of my work for a while now. I have the means to do it (the money), but I got worried about how to go about it. Would it work? How easy would it be to set up a posting? Will the work be good enought quality?

I finally posted a job on a freelance website today. It is early days, but hopefully this will allay some of my fears. Article writing is not one of my strong points. I did it because it was necessary to get where I am today, and this would never have happened if I had outsourced my work from the start. You cannot tell someone how to write articles and get them to rank in the search engines if you don’t know the mechanics and techniques behind it. You only get that experience by doing it yourself; starting from the ground up!

Now my priority is to make the best use of my time. I am forever getting distracted (another of my not-so-strong points) and I procrastinate far too long about what makes a good article, when in reality the articles I wrote without thinking about it is pulling in far greater traffic that the ones that took be 2 hours. Now, with the resources behind me I can let somebody else take the burden and let me concentrate on the things I do well.

The bad points…

I have not come across any bad points to outsourcing yet, but the loss of control is a little unsettling. Still, if it really doesn’t work then I can always go back to writing my own articles.

It will also mean that that ticker at the top will be decreasing a little (until I start seeing more commissions that is). Not a bad thing, this is an investment in time and money.

Just one more thing…

I mentioned in my last post that the monthly price for Wealthy Affiliate will increase on June 7. The new monthly price, being introduced on 7th june 2010, is $97 per month, a BIG hike from the $37 per monthly currently charges. Whilst this is an incredible financial commitment, the resources available at Wealthy Affiliate University justifies the price.

If you want to grab the $37 per month price tag then you need to sign up BEFORE June 7th. It may well be the best $37 per month you ever spend

CLICK HERE to join Wealthy Affiliate University.

I pulled the experiment. I got too nervous as the adsense was running on a website that was pulling in some nice commissions and I just can’t help thinking that I was diverting the potential sales away.

On the other hand I did learn something. It is a LOT easier to convert someone with AdSense. All they have to do is click, and ching, the money is yours. No trying to convince them the product is worth buying. AdSense has come a LONG way since I first started Internet Marketing, the ads are a lot more targeted to the specific visitors to your site; and depending on where you place the ads you are likely to get clicks.

Having said that, the principles of SEO apply. Get your website to the top of google and you will get more visitors. The more visitors, the more likely your ads will get clicked, the more money you may make.

The earnings from the clicks I did generate were a little surprising. I mentioned in my previous post that I was aiming for around £0.25 per day. Without going into specifics (because it’s against the AdSense TOS) the average £ per day was higher than that, so the potential for some not-so-insignificant income really is there.

My future plans include building some websites especially for AdSense. I don’t want to abandon the idea altogether. AdSense, once the SEO on the sites has kicked in, will generate (hopefully) a steady income, while my affiliate sites will give my IM a monetary boost. I also plan to draw up a step-by-step guide on how to set up and promote both affiliate and AdSense sites. However, this is for the future so stay tuned.

Well, this is probably going to be the last post until mid-May as I am on holiday(vacation) from the 3rd. I love my internet marketing, but it is great to ‘switch off’ sometimes

http://www.whamorscam.com

P.S. If you are wondering why I am putting my web address in this post (and every post from now on) it is because I have found clones of my site in different languages all over the net. I am not entirely sure whether this is a good thing, it seems to be as the backlink checks that I have carried out on this site shows the scraper sites are Do Follow. Plus, all my affiliate links seem to be intact, as far as I know anyway. So, if anybody picks this post up, plops it in their site – a free backlink for me and my site. BONUS!

It’s been two years since I joined Wealthy Affiliate University. What an amazing two years they have been. I was the biggest skeptic there was when it came to making money online – just like the others who got burned again and again by money making programs that just didn’t live up to expectations.

Wealthy Affiliate University was the last ditch attempt to make things happen. I learnt and learnt and took action – not a lot of action – but enough to get me that first sale. That was the turning point for me – a sale of £93.65 changed everything – IT MADE ME BELIEVE.

That sale was followed by another a few days later, then another a month later, then some more over the course of the year until now, where January and February have seen close to £200 in commissions each. If you had asked me this time two years ago whether I thought all this was possible, I would have said no. Now I would gladly tell someone that it IS POSSIBLE to make money online; but it takes work and a lot of patience and determination!

Now, ask me whether I would rather work 10 hours on affiliate marketing or 7 hours in a regular job, I would say hands down the 10 hours. Once you have experienced that first sale your mind starts to change – in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr your mind can never go back to it’s old dimensions.

When things start happening you know that it is POSSIBLE to go well beyond the limits of a regular job and you are more than happy to plug away at the affiliate marketing machine. Your goals are ever expanding ‘can I make more sales this month than next’?’ In a regular job the  effort you put in does not directly correlate with the rewards you get back – the Law of Diminishing Returns. With affiliate marketing, the effort you put in will eventually be returned. There is no limit to what is possible and that is what is exciting.
Is it about the money? No, I love the money, but it’s not all I do affiliate marketing for. Affiliate marketing is a chance for me to build something of worth, something that I can call my own and nobody can take away. The business I have built over the past two years is MY baby and I ACHIEVED those results and IT FEELS GREAT!

So how did Wealthy Affiliate University help me? It bought me down to earth. The first thing that the site and people who are a part of it say is that it is NOT a get rich quick scheme and it DOES take a lot of effort and hard work. If you are prepared to put in the hard work all the tools and resources are there to help you succeed, and is you stick with it you WILL get that first sale.

Who knows what the next year will bring.  I can guarantee you I will still be working online, i’m, addicted. I have a number of projects I have in  the pipeline, including Project 2011. It is just a question of keeping up the momentum and see where we land.

Happy Times

Wealthy Affiliate Unviversity Review

Well, my first campaign for Project 2011 is taking a lot longer than first thought. It is one of those things that once you start you discover that there are so many things that link to it. It just means that it will take a little longer to set up.

I have also had the ‘do or die’ moment with this business. I won’t go into detail, but work/employment/wage slavery is really getting me down. So I have said to myself that now is the time to make things happen. I had to redo one of my travel sites, and it’s not fully complete yet, but the results are that January has been the best month so far in terms of commissions. I still have a long way to go, but it’s the getting started that’s the hardest part.

The site I am currently working on is in it’s VERY early stages and is nowhere near complete. However if you want to take a look at beginners-affiliate-marketing then feel free.

I’ll keep you all updated on the progress.