Luckily, although I knew nothing about making money online, I knew enough about the Internet to dig deeper than that. I started reading blogs, sifting out splogs of course, read a few forum discussions and basically got the feeling of this niche.

Like any of you probably did, I followed the gurus and opted-in to all kinds of mailing lists to receive free ebooks and how-to’s. I was swamped with information and the many money-making techniques. I was dreaming of multiple income streams and was ecstatic…

…during exactly one month.

After that moth, I started to suspect that with all those offers, methods, techniques, and way to make money online, it is probably a big bubble to get beginners to pay for info products.

Obviously enough, I ended up doing exactly nothing of what I’ve read as ways to make money online. I made a pledge not to buy another ebook ever again and, as a general rule, not to pay for anything again.

It’s human nature to choose the easiest path and stay in the comfort zone and, so I did. I was blogging and hoping to monetize the blog at some point. The “wonderful” and very promising ways to make money online I discovered in my initial research were long forgotten.

This is the point where most people would just forget about making money online and Internet Marketing altogether.

Make Money With Affiliate Programs: A Year Later

The comfort zone for me was not to spend too much money, and not to go where I was new. I had WordPress skills naturally I chose to go the blog way. A full year has past before I realized I needed to change my strategy, making minimal sales that wouldn’t even pay for my grocery bill. A full year!

Fortunately, I had the brains to realize that a huge change is needed, and enough persistence to make myself go into new online ventures.

I have chosen to pay for PPC coaching, and bought a really outstanding Internet Marketing ebook: One Week Marketing.

It’s been a few months since, and those two have provided me with the needed insights to dominate niches using both SEO and Pay Per Click, and for the first time in a long time I started to see sales coming in.

Summary and Insights

So what did I learn from all that?
Let me give the beginners a piece of advice:

1. Try to join a community of like minded people. That way you will have a way to easily find out what works and what doesn’t. What program is a scam and which is a true money maker. Find a paid forum or a paid coaching program, this automatically weeds out spammers and freeloaders.
2. Keep in mind that work is required to achieve results online. Nothing is easy, and your initial efforts will be tough.
3. If you feel that you “need” or “must” pay for another ebook or tool, refer to Advice No.1 above. Consult others. It is very probable that someone has already bought that and has a solid opinion, which is not biased like the opinions you’d find on a blog or a sales page.
4. This one could possibly be the best advice. Go at it.
   If you just read about a wonderful way to make money, and don’t give it a go, you might as well forget about Internet Marketing and watch Youtube videos all day. You can’t possibly expect to catch fish without throwing in the line, can you?

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Make Money With Affiliate Programs – Why 90% Fail Miserably When Doing Affiliate Marketing?

The thing about PPC is that you have to pay money upfront, and usually will have to throw anything between $100 and $600+, depending on the niche and your experience, on testing an offer before you decide whether it is a keeper. Imagine testing several offers and you would clearly see what I’m talking about.

Now, the big question is what you do on these breaks?

• If you’re doing affiliate marketing full time and find yourself in this situation, you’re obviously out of luck. Look for ways to get money! lol.
• If you have a day job, you can just relax and wait for your next paycheck to come in to fund you with a few coins.

But if you want to become a serious affiliate marketer, and eventually quit you day job, you can’t afford to sit back and relax. You got to go out there and find ways to make money online without paying anything,

There are a lot of ways for that, and one of them is bum marketing a.k.a. article marketing. This post is not article marketing in particular, so I won’t explain you the whole theory. Besides, it is so basic and elemental that you’ve probably heard about it numerous times since your being online.

This is not just about Article Marketing…

Article marketing has seen many critics and since it works exceptionally well for some and can extraordinarily suck for others.

What many marketers (the ones that it sucks for them) don’t understand is that article marketing is a very large division of Internet Marketing. It can be done this way or that way or the third way. Or the fourth way, really, there are many different and creative ways to implement article marketing.

What is this About?

One of those ways was One Week Marketing, a cool guide that I reviewed a few posts back. One Week Marketing gives you a one week long plan for launching an elaborate marketing campaign for an offer, without spending a dime.

The thing is that not only had I reviewed it, I also started using it to supplement my PPC efforts.

I already had sales coming in for a few offers I launched, and the beauty of that is: you get to keep the commission as net profit!

No more subtracting ppc costs… Everything you make is yours – sweet.

So, I want to take this chance to offer you a $20 rebate for One Week Marketing. You can find the details in my members’ area, after you opt in and receive your password.

One Week Marketing is not expensive as is, and with my $20 rebate it is really a no-brainer. Don’t miss this opportunity.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

What Do You Do When You Run Out of Money For PPC?

Ok, so I’ve been checking the stats on one of my campaigns and one thing threw me off the chair… I wonder why I wasn’t noticing this before: I had 8 sales coming from SE traffic!!

And here is the insight: Don’t ditch SEO.

When I went to do PPC I said good riddance to SEO. No more wasting time on social bookmarking, backlinks, etc. to build your traffic, since with PPC I get as much traffic as I possibly need as long as I pay for it.

But after having seen these sales I’m going to SEO everything from now on. These were 100% net profit sales since I didn’t spend a cent to drive that traffic to those pages.

So to make this post useful to all of you, I want to mention that my friend Mark from MasonWorld.com is having a nice little pomo where he gives you 21 free one-way backlinks (do-follow), from different sources. (he has a way…)

In light of my insight I’m certainly giving this a go… And so should you.

Enjoy!

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Quick Update: Just Had a PPC Insight

So, yesterday was bad. Minimal impressions in Adwords and only two sales early in the morning. That’s it.

Nothing happened during all yesterday. Could you believe that? I was amazed.
Me ego was smudged in dirt, but what can you do but to dust yourself off and move on? So I did.

But then, after building a different campaign, I thought to myself: What if I raised the bids a bit? Maybe someone is bullying me?

Of course, in order to bully me to such extent for me to have zero traffic, someone should have known the whole keyword list I was using, which is almost impossible. Nevertheless, the morning after, I raised my bids and voila – impressions were mounting and clicks were abundant!!

So, what’s going on here? I simply don’t know.

My experience is to little to have anything to say to that. Chances of someone bullying my whole campaign are similar to chances of being struck by lightning.

So what do I have to say about today’s traffic?

Although it had a great CTR, and clicks were many, the conversion rate was smaller than the day before yesterday.

First of all, I didn’t have a chance to optimize my campaign because of being smudged in dirt. And there’s a lesson to learn here – when they do that to you, don’t cooperate. Instead of that I should have sat down and thoroughly looked through the data to find duds and misfires.

In addition, today is Christmas!!! Happy time, right? Not if you’re trying to earn money as an affiliate marketer.

Basically they say that November-December is the worst time of the year for affiliate marketing. But the day before Christmas, Christmas eve, the day after… you’d be better off eating that turkey, or whatever.

So I hope that in a day or two, after a sift through the campaign and people feel the urge to buy again, my story would turn the right way.

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

A Quick Update and Merry Christmas to Everyone

Whoaa, my first PPC campaign is in the air. And yes, it is a big deal.

Notice how much time has passed since I’ve posted about changing track to affiliate marketing. It’s been almost a month. It’s a lot of time, and I used it to overcome a flaw everyone has: the need to make everything perfect before actually going live with anything.

You see, in PPC marketing it is virtually impossible for a beginner to set up everything perfect and think everything through in advance. You are bound to make mistakes and the sooner you get campaigns up and running the better.

This realization took me a month. People at PPC-Coach were shouting at me to launch asap, and I knew they are right. But, I think it is embedded somewhere so deep in the subconscious, it is very hard to reset.

But, thank heavens, my campaign is up and I’m off to my second launch. This time it will go a lot faster (I hope), with the added oil to the mechanism.

Importance of a social safety Network

With PPC marketing, and with anything else for that matter, you can buy ebooks, sign up to online courses and whatnot. You can jump in and try it alone, if you want. With any of the above what you have is yourself and the net. And it can get really cold out there sometimes.

While getting ready to launch my first campaign, at least 4 different questions were hanging out there with each step I took. Each of them could tilt the result of your effort from great success through a mere breakeven towards a total stinker.

Enter PPC-Coach. It is not an ebook. It is not an online course. It is a community.

People that only a month ago were in your position – sitting ducks, yellow-mouthed hatchlings – are now more experienced and ready to answer the stupidest of your questions.

Why? Because they know that feeling of staring at the screen, trying to decide whether it’s your ad that sucks or is it the bid that’s too low. Use 600 keywords with ‘phrase’ match or 2,000 keywords with ‘broad’? Is 500,000 impressions with only 10 clicks normal for the Content network?

You see, a strong community on which you can rely to answer you questions is so much help it’s better than your next bestseller PPC ebook tenfold.

So, I’m off down the PPC rabbit hole. Till next time…

- Alex

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Baby Steps in PPC