My Blog Readers have Earned Over ONE MILLION with Neverblue

Over the past decade I've had the task of working with many different affiliate networks. Some thrived, died, went out of business and a few also went on to be acquired and become parts of larger companies. One of the few successful and very … Read More

Breakdown of a Profitable Facebook Ads Campaign

With the latest backlash of articles coming up on TechCrunch about deceptive and scammy ways to make money on Facebook, I wanted to provide you with a full breakdown on how to create a successful CPA Facebook ads campaign. Step and step details on a … Read More

Create Killer Landing Pages – Free Template

I get questions all the time about landing pages and what are the best ways to create them. Instead of writing a post on what you should focus on, I will simply take an existing ad campaign from MarketLeverage, and made a real landing page out of. I … Read More

Insider Secrets to a Making a Million Dollar Web Site!

A few days ago I released my first post on "How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!", along with the picture of my $306,373.24 check. Due to the massive exposure and questions generated from the post, I thought I'd bring you the second … Read More

How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!

First off, I would like to make it clear that this post is NOT to impress you, but to impress upon you what's possible! This is a quick review on how I went from one of my worst years of making money online to my best year, and all it took was one … Read More

Analyzing TShirt Advertising and Keywords on Google Search

Long tail advertising and keywords is one of my favorite things to write about and study. The more detailed the keyword you get, the more targeted your audience and likely you are to find success with an ad campaign. What’s important to know is that you don’t even have to add multiple keywords to get more targeted and direct, sometimes it only takes one extra keyword.

In this example we are going to compare the differences between “tshirts” and “funny tshirts“. It may not seem like a huge difference, but for online search marketers it means the world.

Before looking at the search results, lets first take a look at the comparison in search stats between the two phrases.

funny shirts keywords compared

Right away you will have noticed that “tshirts” has over 50 times the amount of search volume and almost double the advertiser cost. It’s also important to note that the competition is HIGH for both keywords.

Now lets take a look at how they compare in the search results.

tshirts google

Tshirts” is an extremely generic keyword to go after, but you will notice that the page is completely filled with advertisers. More importantly, the advertisers in the yellow section are paying the most money to have this premium placement. It’s no wonder that these are mega huge companies will millions of dollars to spend on their branding and bringing in new customers. (Look at how generic the CustomInk and Amazon ads are… really no call to action)

Now let’s switch things up a little bit and look at “funny tshirts”.

In the screen capture below you will notice that everything has changed in terms of advertisers and ad spend.

funny tshirts google

Nearly all of the advertisers for “funny tshirts” are in the business of selling entertainment related tshirts and are much smaller in size compared to the advertisers for “tshirts”. Also notice how the top ad does an excellent job in providing a discount related call to action. You also have a wide selection of advertisers like badideashirts and 6dollarshirts being able to target their audience and compete on the right side bar of ads as well.

It’s not brain surgery, but it’s definitely cool and useful to break down the process of keyword bidding and advertisers.

So what can we learn from this?

  • Just the addition of one keyword can make a huge difference in targeting your audience and changing your ad costs and advertiser competition.
  • You don’t need to have a massive budget to compete in a high competition niche. (.60-80 cpc isn’t horrible)
  • Know what your audience is looking for… “tshirts” vs. “funny tshirts” is a huge difference.

Though it might seem like a lot of online marketers and affiliates are focusing their efforts on social marketing and mobile advertising, pay per click marketing is still one of the strongest and most effective ways to drive a lot of volume and quality leads.

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How Bloggers Are Earning $100,000 with PostJoint

Right now the world of online marketing and the way we all do business online is rapidly changing. More and more companies are focusing their efforts on content marketing to get exposure on well known web sites and blogs while also building incoming links to their site in the process. As businesses continue to spend money on this type of advertising, bloggers are on the sidelines anxiously waiting to monetize the content on their web sites. Not only to increase the value of the content and experience on their site, but also to make some nice pocket change in the process.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing around with a new service called PostJoint, which is an all in one solution for bloggers to get original and quality content for their sites, while also making money in the process. But wait… what about advertisers who are looking to build incoming links to their site? Of course, they also have a full platform solution for advertisers to.

Here’s how it works:

  • Advertisers – Discover the fastest way to get content published on targeted blogs.
  • Bloggers – Find great content for your blog. Monetize your blog in new ways.

Right now the system is setup that you will have to sign up for either an advertiser or a blogger, but you can also sign up for an account as each. This is what I did.

Before walking through the process of how to use the system, let’s quickly cover some features and points I’ve noticed while using the site.

The Benefits of Using PostJoint

  • As a blogger on their site there are a lot of opportunities available. Some are free, but it’s quickly moving towards the all paid platform.
  • On the advertiser side, when you place a new “paid” opportunity on the network, it gets accepted by other bloggers fast.
  • Right now there is no service fee from PostJoint, which means you only have to pay bloggers what they want.
  • Advertisers decide how much they want to pay for each content piece and if they will accept the offers they get.

PostJoint recently announced that bloggers on their network have already earned over $100,000 in just a short amount of time!

Now let’s give you some visuals to better understand how the site works.

We will walk through the process as if we were a blogger and looking to get paid to place content on our sites.

PostJoint Blogger Dashboard

The first thing we are going to look at is the blogger dashboard when you first login. You will see that in this example there are 2 opportunities available (there are usually 25+ when I’ve been logging in). You will also see the “Offers You’ve Made” and “Opportunities” section. These are the two important areas. Now let’s click over to see what opportunities might be available.

PostJoint Blogger Screenshot

Post Opportunities

When you create your blogger account you will need to list your site and choose some categories. The more you pick the better, as this will determine what offers you see. Once you find an offer you like, you can click on it and contact the advertiser. Each offer already has a price next it, which will be “free”, “paid” ($25-$500) and “all considered” which means you can make an offer.

 

PostJoint Blogger Opps

Below you will see the screenshot of the area where you can fill out your offer information. You also have the option to include a tweet, which is a big benefit for the advertiser. You can also leave your requested fee and a note to the advertiser. Each opportunity will get 5 offers before the advertiser makes their decision on who to award to post to.

PostJoint Make an Offer

Lastly, after your content has been awarded to you and posted to your site you can see a recap of everything in your OFFERS area. This is where you can grab the full article to post on your site, check payment stats and provide feedback to the advertiser.

PostJoint Blogger Offers

If you are interested in seeing how the advertiser side works, you can sign up on their site for free and check it out. You can imagine it’s pretty much the opposite of what was just explained above.

The payment process at PostJoint is quite interested. As mentioned earlier, right now there are no transaction fees at all, but I’m sure this will change once they come out of beta. Through the system, the advertiser makes payments directly through PayPal to the blogger. All transactions and messages are tracked through the PostJoint system.

I’ve seen a lot of guest blogging and content generation systems out there and PostJoint is way ahead of the competition in terms of quality and performance. I highly recommend all advertisers and bloggers check them out.

http://postjoint.com

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How to Better Manage Your Business Costs and Spending

One of the biggest aspects to running a successful business on the internet is being able to manage your incoming and outgoing money. This can be especially hard if you are a sole proprietor or the only person in your company. With so many ad campaigns, web sites, incoming and outgoing payments… how are you supposed to manage it all? This is something I have been doing on my own for over 15 years now and while it’s not the fun side of the business, it definitely needs to be taken care of.

In this article I’m going to provide a few tips on how you can better manage your money and ad campaigns over various types of online marketing.

Know How to Budget Ad Campaigns

Budgeting Your Ad CampaignsAn easy way to blow through a lot of money is to create an ad campaign and not be patient. By this I mean you want to have as much information and stats as soon as possible. This is the wrong way to run ad campaigns. Instead, you need to focus on scaling out your campaigns at a very slow pace in the beginning and allow your campaign to grow and the data to trickle in. If you have a $500 budget, don’t run the campaign until the funds run out… instead, you need to set a lot daily limit, such as $10 or $25 a day. This way you can look at the data (traffic and leads) that have come in and see if you are anywhere near profitable. This allows you to tweak and split test your ad campaign for the best numbers so you can get profitable fast without spending too much money on data testing.

Keep Track of Your Monthly Spending

Planning Out Your SpendingIn the world of online marketing it’s easy to build up costs fast. From annual domain renewals, monthly hosting, software and tracking subscriptions and media buys… you can be spending money all over the place. It’s very important to make sure that you keep track of all of your spending and how much money is going where each month. It’s easy to start the month a few hundred or thousand dollars in debt just from these built in costs.

I like to use a credit card to pay for as much of my online billing as possible. This way I can log into my Visa credit card accounts and everything is already in there. I can scan through the list to make sure my charges are accounted for, and it allows me to break down my monthly and annual spending for tax time. Business credit cards are also great to have because many of them provide you with discounts and reward points, which can quickly build up if you are spending a lot of money online on advertising and business costs. On another side note, I also use business credit cards because they are almost always on your side when dealing with online buying problems and companies that don’t provide the necessary services. The benefits to using a credit card are much better than using direct payments from your bank account.

Plan Out Your Business Costs Ahead of Time

Business Credit CardsIn the previous point I talked about keeping track of your monthly costs. It’s not only important to look at the monthly spending habits of your business, but also plan for the months and years ahead. We can use domains and hosting for example. Many of us like to buy domain names right when we think we have a good idea… then these domains end up sitting in our accounts and we waste a ton of money over the years. I have several hundred domains in my accounts, and with a $10 a year renewal fee, this adds up to several thousands of dollars a year in costs. This is a perfect example of knowing your costs before they come into place.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to better manage the income, costs and overall financial situation for your business. As exciting as running your online business can be, it can be quite scary at the end of the year when you are filing taxes and haven’t looked at your income and spending reports for the year… only to find out that you actually made a lot less than you think you did!

Learn to manage your finances and your business will do the much better!

I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit http://visa.com/business.

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Tracking Web Site Analytics with HeatSync

If you are like me or any of the majority of web site owners and bloggers out there, then you definitely are addicted to checking web site stats and rankings. I’ll admit, I’m not the addict I used to be years ago, but it’s definitely fun to watch you site move up in Alexa rankings and see where you rank in the search results and check on the demographics of your audience.

The problem with being addicted to web stats is that it can take a lot of time to check all of the different web sites and ranking reports. This problem is now no longer an issue thanks to a brand new service called HeatSync, which is an all in one tracking solution.

HeatSync takes data from major tracking and social sites like Alexa, Facebook, Twitter, SimilarWeb, SeoMoz, CrunchBase, Compete, Web of Trust and Klout then combines it all into one powerful platform for you to view at one time.

Their site is currently in beta and free to join and add as many web sites and blogs as you like. Let’s walk through the process so you can see what their site has to offer.

The first thing you are going to need to do when setting up your account is add in your web sites. I already have five different sites being tracked in my account. Once you add a site you will see the stats importing process begin. This only takes a few seconds.

HeadSync Importing

After your site is loaded within your account, you can then view the “overview” of your account as seen below. From here you will see your CrunchBase listing directory if you have one, along with your recent Alexa, Compete and SimilarWebRank movements.

HeatSync ZacJohnson

You will also be able to view more detailed stats if you use the different tracking options on the left side menu. You can see a break down the SEO rankings and demographics of users on your web site. More advanced stats like these will require your site to be live in the system for a few days for the system to track performance and traffic.

HeatSync Zac Johnson Demographics

Lastly, what good is a system if you continually have to login to different accounts to check multiple web sites? Even going to different pages for each site would be a pain. Thankfully HeatSync has a great solution, which is a full comparison chart on the login page. You will see each of the sites that are live within your account and you can check the latest updates for numbers in the Traffic, Social, Rank, SEO, Demographic, Reputation and Performance areas.

HeatSync Dashboard Mode

As mentioned, HeatSync is currently in beta and they are offering completely free memberships for anyone who would like to use the system. There is no free trial and no credit card information required. Sign up now and be sure to start tracking the performance of all your sites under one killer platform.

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Is There a Secret Formula for Making Money Online?

There two ways to make money online… the long way (building a real business), and the get rich quick way. Neither of them guarantee results, but the “get rick quick” methods usually don’t work as well and aren’t going to stand the test of time.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t make good and quick money every once in a while. A good example of this is through the rebill campaigns that flooded the internet a couple years ago. The payouts were extreme and they were all over the place. Customers were getting hammered with rebills and online marketers were raking in the crazy cash. Then the FTC got involved and made examples out of a few people and that was that…

Then there are legitimate businesses that have real products and services that people are more than willing to use. This can be anything from web hosting, tracking solutions, memberships services and so on… basically a real quality product and service that people enjoy and want to use.

One of the latest promotions that has been making it’s rounds across the internet lately is the Big Idea Mastermind from Vick Strizheus. Online marketing are pushing free videos and new product launches all the time. I’ll get hundreds of their emails in my box and it’s always interesting to see how they are pitching their products and getting people to sign up for their offers.

Vicks Secret Formula

In Vick’s free video courses he goes into some quick detail on his “secret formula” that helped him generate over $700,000 in less than a month, which really breaks down to the following.

  1. VEHICLE (offer)
  2. MOTOR (system)
  3. FUEL (traffic)

Whether you are looking to join the course that Vick is offering or looking to start your own business online, the formula and business model is still the same. Let’s use these three same formula components and break down the process of starting an online business or ad campaign.

Creating a Business Formula

In this example we will use a niche Amazon.com affiliate site for example.

VEHICLE

Just like a “car” is a vehicle, your overall business model acts in the same way. In this example the “vehicle” would be your niche web site and working with Amazon.com to promote the products and earn a commission on every referred sale. This is a great model for someone who doesn’t want to deal with any transactions, costs, product handling or customers.

MOTOR

Just like a car needs a motor, so does your business. The motor will act as the driving solution around your business, which would be the content on your site. Since you are going to be focusing your content around a specific niche product, you would create tight content such as reviews, customer feedback, coupons, videos and promotions around that specific topic. For example, if you were going to make a niche site on the best “cooking pots“, you should create a comparison list, compare prices, say why some are better than others and customer feedback… everything you can as long as it’s related to cooking pots.

FUEL

Lastly we have the fuel, which is the blood and life line of your business (niche site). In this case (and most times), the fuel is going to be the people who come to your site and take action and buy. You can only make money from your site if people are clicking on the links and then buying through Amazon. You can get more fuel and traffic to your site through guest posting, ranking in the search results, buying advertising and much more.

Is there a Secret Formula to Making Money Online?

There is no “secret” formula that will apply to every business, expect for working hard and putting in the necessary time and effort. While this post does provide you with a platform that can lead you to success, every business model different. The three basics of having a VEHICLE, MOTOR and FUEL can be broken down for nearly any business model. In the example of having a niche web site, it’s quite easy to understand. Before you create your next web site or business model, be sure to break it down into an easy to follow formula to make sure the business concept makes sense.

If you’d like to get more ideas on how Vick is using his formula to grow his own online business, you can sign up for his free video series here.

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