It’s Not About Just Having A Cool Ad…

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What do these guys sell again?

Catching the user’s eye is the most commonly spoken about part of creating an effective ad campaign. A less-talked-about part, though, is actually telling the potential customer what it is you offer. If you make software, the user should come to your site interested in your software. If you sell tshirts, the user should come in wanting a tshirt.

The following is an email I just sent to New Relic, who apparently offers a web application profiling tool. It looks great, but their marketing left me wanting something that they don’t even sell.  The ad in question is above.

New Relic:

I had the most disappointing experience this morning.

There I was, browsing my Google Reader feed instead of working, munching on a day-old donut and waiting for my coffee to finish brewing, when an ad for some very stylish apparel caught my eye: I have even included of a screenshot of said ad in this email. That’s how awesome it was.

The ad said “cool tshirt.” Why yes, that is a cool tshit. “faster website.” Yeah, cool, I’d love to have a faster website. I have 40 of the things, and I hear Google likes that these days. “you want it. we got it.” Uh, ok. *click*.

Imagine my surprise when I get to the New Relic site. In fact, it appears that you guys sell a web application profiling tool – that’s cool and all, but I don’t have a custom web application to profile – I have websites, like the ad said.

That sucks; it looks like I won’t be able to use your product. Hey, there’s that cool tshirt again! *reads* free! Wait… you have to install the software – wtf? I don’t have a webapp, so I don’t have any way to install the software, and…

I can’t get the tshirt!?

Oh well. Back to work I suppose, in my wrinkled, boring plaid button-up. That really would have been a cool tshirt.

You should consider selling those, instead of web application profiling tools. Not only that, but you could use the same ad! Just remove the “faster website.” line and move “cool tshirt” down about 25 pixels, and you’re good to go!

I would be very interested to hear from the guys at New Relic on what the conversion rate was for this ad.  I suspect that it got lots and lots of clicks – and cost lots and lots of money – but that they got few if any actual leads in return.

Simple, Easy Portfolio Websites for Photographers

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Here it is, just after Christmas… and my “play money” fund is dangerously low.  To help refill it a bit, I’ve decided to offer my services as a webmaster.

If you’re a photographer or artist in need of a portfolio, have I got a deal for you! For $50, I can set you up with a complete website, and all you’ll have to worry about it taking great photos and writing great content. Here’s what you get:

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Niche Site Competition #1: Choosing a Niche

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In late November, I got an email out of the blue from Ramy K of Experiment Income, asking if I would like to join in a friendly competition. The rules were pretty simple: starting Dec 1, participants would build a new site from scratch in a new niche, ranking it to the first page of Google, and make $100 in income from the site. The first to reach these goals would be rewarded an additional $100 from Ramy himself. Ramy has set up a central page for tracking our performance (here), and I will be blogging about the steps I take during the competition.

This sounded like a great idea for me – my biggest problem with ventures like this is the persistence to stick with an idea long enough for it to begin to bear fruit. So, during the last week of November, I began doing keyword research for a new niche site.

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Get Around the “Main Street Fairness Act” – and Get Your Amazon Affiliate Account Back

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I received this rather frightening email from Amazon this week:

Hello,For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with a large number of Arkansas residents. Unfortunately, a new state tax law signed by Governor Beebe compels us to terminate this program for Arkansas-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by Arkansas-based affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It was supported by big-box retailers that seek to harm theaffiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action. The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on Arkansas residents like you were explained to the legislature, including Senate and House leadership, as well as to the Governor’s staff.

As a result of the new law, contracts with all Arkansas residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program will be terminated on July 24, 2011. Those Arkansas residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM orSmallParts.com. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned on or before July 24, 2011 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule.

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of Arkansas. If you are not currently a resident of Arkansas, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here. And if you relocate to another state after July 24, 2011, please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.

To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to continue to offer the Associates Program to Arkansas residents and will not affect their ability to purchase from www.amazon.com.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Arkansas-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to Arkansas residents.

Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

Wait, what?  When you think of states with anti-business climates, Arkansas doesn’t typically pop to the top of the list.  Nonetheless, it seems my state has passed a law that resulted in Amazon shutting down all affiliates in the state.

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The State of My Online Empire

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It occurred to me today that I have a lot of properties out there on the Web, in various states of development.  I wanted to make a list of them, and thought it would make an interesting insight into my though processes to date.

Shooters’ Journal

These properties are not owned by me, but by Shooters’ Journal, LLC – of which, I am one of the co-founders.  My official title there is “Director, Marketing Technology”, and as part of that, I’m responsible for keeping track of our virtual real estate.  This includes:

ShootersJournal.net – this is our main site, and consists entirely of firearms reviews and commentary, aimed at a very general audience. This is the largest traffic site I work with at the moment.

Forum.ShootesrJournal.net – an adjunct to the above, this serves as the first pieces of a community that we plan to build around the Shooters’ Journal brand.  There are a lot of other pieces to this, but I am not at liberty to discuss future plans.

GunsWallpapers.com - I started this site on my own, as an experiment to see if I could quickly generate a niche-specific site and use it to feed traffic and SEO juice to a larger site.  It has been a success, and generates some residual income from Google Adsense.  It is not really a money-maker, though, and has been somewhat neglected.  If and when I get more time to devote to Shooters’ Journal, then this site will be further developed.  I think it has potential, but I’ve not decided to pursue it – it has served its purpose as a testbed, and remains only because it helps our ranking for the main site, and is slightly revenue positive.

LegalMachineguns.com – This site was started in response to a video from the Library of Congress, showing that the Hughes Amendment to the FOPA of 1986 was improperly passed.  In short – we should be able to buy new machine guns.  No further action has happened on this topic, so the site languishes.  It is interested to note, though, that the site made almost $30 in Adsense in the first week of its launch.   Since then, traffic and earnings have been near zero. It proved to me that there is money to be made in traffic in the shooting community, though.  I intend to leave this site as-is for the foreseeable future, on the hope that the Hughes Amendment is eventually challenged in court.  If that happens, I’ll have an aged, pre-positioned domain to cover the news.

NFACentral.com – This site is my first foray into the concept of a “niche site”, a’la Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel.  I’ve got a lot of content to get out there, but Google traffic is dribbling in as the domain ages.  There is a market for this – but the monetization is key.  Adsense won’t cut it here.

Affiliate Sites

MyBusinessTollFreeNumber.com – My first affiliate site, this page is all about Toktumi, which I’ve heard referred to as “Skype for grown-ups”.  I use Toktumi myself, and love it, so it was a natural choice.  I highly recommend it.  This site has been profitable, averaging about $30 / month since I launched it.

FastBackgroundChecks.org – This one is targeted to small businesses looking for background checks prior to hiring.  It has recently begun to receive some hits from Google, but I don’t expect to be a very strong candidate for organic SEO with a single-page site.  It has produced no income.

Miscellaneous

In addition to the above, I own about 20 other domains that are either inactive or are owned on behalf of a local website client.  These include a dress shop, a real estate office, and a dance studio.

Why I Wish I’d Never Heard of “Internet Marketing”

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My name is Lyndsy, and I am addicted to information.

There, that feels better :)

Lately, I’ve been having a real issue taking action.  Yes, it sounds like a cliche, as all you hear on the blogs of all the big names is “TAKE ACTION!”  Well, that sounds well and good until you try to actually do it.

I’m sitting here today trying to figure out exactly how to grow and monetize the Shooters’ Journal network.  I have a hundred ideas running through my head – nearly all of them have spawned from my reading of WarriorForum and keeping up with my growing list of blogs on Google Reader.  The problem with that is, I’m having real trouble stopping on a single idea long enough to really figure out how to implement it.

I’ve faced this problem before, and overcome it.  At one point, I knew most everything necessary to build and launch a WordPress site, but couldn’t quite connect the dots in terms of content.  By just going out and doing it, I finally figured out how to just sit down and write.

Now, I have to learn how to sit down and monetize. I know the fundamentals – build a list, build a product, market the product on the site, draw the audience back to the site through the list for a soft sell…   but being able to talk about it and teach it isn’t the same thing as being able to execute it as a business strategy.

This whole “Internet Marketing” thing would be a lot easier if I could just sit down and think something through without the advice of a thousand faceless forum posters running through my head and pushing me to second-guess every single decision I make.

I wish I’d never heard of IM.  Then, maybe I would have some clarity of thought, and the confidence to follow through immediately.

Balance Sheet – February/March 2011

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Life has been busy lately – which isn’t an excuse for falling behind, but I’m sure you can all relate.

BransonInfo.org

My Branson info site has still not been updated since January. There is money to be made here, but I’ve come to the conclusion that to do it effectively, I’m going to have to spend a great deal more time on it – both in front of the screen, and out in person in Branson going to shows, taking photos, and building relationships in the tourism industry. For the time being, I’m leaving this site dormant, letting it age, and planning for the future.  If the time comes that I have the ability to do it right, I’ll pick it back up – otherwise, I’ll probably attempt  to flip it in a few months.

Shooters’ Journal

Shooters’ Journal has maintained it’s incremental growth, with 1,837 visits in February and 2,846 in March.  March’s large increase is attributable to my discovering Reddit as a traffic source, which gained us about 600 hits over three days following the launch of a new article.  Surprisingly, Reddit traffic seems to convert very well to ad revenue and click-through to Amazon, likely due to its opt-in, interest-based nature.  I definitely intend to get more involved in the Reddit community.

Affiliate Sites

Over these two months, I’ve thrown one more dart against the dartboard of Internet Marketing, and come up with a much better score – at least for now.  In mid-February, I launched an affiliate site (link: flat rate toll free) dedicated to Toktumi, a VOIP service catering to small business. Since then, it has earned me $70 in affiliate income – very promising!  Though I’ve thrown some Adwords and Facebook ad dollars at it, none of that traffic has converted into income – all of this has come from forum marketing. Seeing the success of the first site, I launched a second affiliate site targeted at small business during the last week of March, this time focused on background checks (link: cheap background checks).  I’ve also been throwing some Facebook dollars here – mainly to see if I can learn how the system works.  No sales to report yet. I seem to be developing a network of affiliate sites around the “small business” niche.  This wasn’t planned, but fits in well with my experience, and opens the door for other marketing methods – such as list building, which I’ve not yet done with any gusto. And now, on to the numbers:

Income

Source Income
Vinyl $532.57
Websites $325.00
Google Adsense $10.91
Affilaite: Toktumi $70.00

Expenses

Category Expense
Postage $14.28
Hosting $19.00
Toktumi $29.90
Vinyl Supplies $104.35

Total

$770.95 (Two-month total)

While this number looks great, much of it isn’t passive.  Both my vinyl profits and my websites are very much “trading time for money” – though less so with websites, which may have at least a recurring yearly hosting charge with a margin for me after paying my host.

I have lots of plans for the next few weeks, and will do better in the future to keep you in the loop :)

11 Reasons Internet Marketing is Not a “Get Rich Quick” Scheme

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This post is in response to and inspired by “Eleven Reasons Not To Start Your Own Business“, by Mike of Mike’s Life.

As a newbie in the Internet Marketing arena, I often find myself stuck between two worlds – one of late-night programming and writing sessions with my laptop in my lap, my butt in a chair, and a bottle of wine on my end table – and one of early mornings, cubicles, rushed deadlines, and (seemingly) impossible expectations.

So, here are eleven things to watch out for while trying to make the transition from corporate America to the life of an Internet entrepreneur:

  1. After staying up until two in the morning cranking out articles for one of your dozens of blogs, you get a call at 5:30am and have to go in to work.
  2. You begin to take family trips with a laptop in tow, in the hopes that you might be able to get some writing done in the car.
  3. One morning, you wake up and realize that not only have you not read a book lately, but can’t even remember the last time you read a magazine.  In fact, that blog written by the English-as-a-second-language guy in rural India suddenly makes perfect sense.
  4. You forgot to transfer money from PayPal so many times you just got a PayPal debit card, and had to replace it due to over-use at least once.
  5. You go to the restroom at work, check your email on the phone, and go back to your desk; forgetting to actually use the restroom in the process.
  6. You’ve long since given up saying “just one more thing” when working online.
  7. You start telling people that you’re building websites on the side, just to avoid having to explain the concept of affiliate marketing, and having to explain that it isn’t in fact a pyramid scheme.
  8. You install firewall rules preventing you from visiting WarriorForum during certain hours, just so you can get work done without distraction,
  9. You are indeed a pale, bespectacled geek.
  10. You talk to your real-life friends about “Pat”, “Chris”, and “Darren” as if they were mutual friends – and they understand who you’re talking about
  11. You awake with a start in the middle of the night and have to go get your laptop and put together a quick mindmap, before you forget the great new idea that you saw on a website in a dream.  Oh yeah, and you dream about visiting websites.

Balance Sheet: January 2011

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January was a month for rebuilding, and not a very good month for making money.

BransonInfo.org

My Branson info site has seen nary an update in January. I’ve got an outline of a restaurant review ready to post, but haven’t had the motivation to work on it. I remain convinced that this site had great potential, and I should really get on it – I just seem to be lacking passion for it. This is something that I must correct, but letting the site sit and age isn’t going to hurt it.

Shooters’ Journal

Shooters’ Journal continues to gain traffic from Google, and is finished out the month just over 1,700 unique visitors. My partners and I have been trying various monetization methods, and seem to have settled on Amazon in the last week of the month. Earnings here were minimal, but promising based on the small number of hits we tested it on. I anticipate using Amazon for other projects in the future.

And now, for the main course:

Income

Source Income
Vinyl $84.88
Google Adsense $13.97

Expenses

Category Expense
Postage $6.54
Hosting $9.50
Toktumi $14.95

Total

$67.86

Another lackluster month in the grand scheme of things, but I still consider myself in the learning phase of internet entrepreneurship.  While my profit isn’t something that will let me quit my day job, I can confidently state that the knowledge I’ve obtained, both through research and trail-and-error, is worth much more than a paltry $67.86,  and will be the foundation upon which I build my future wealth.

Balance Sheet: December 2010

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December was a big milestone month for me, if sad in some respects.  In it, I accomplished something that I’ve never managed before in my professional life – I successfully wound down a business venture and moved on to other things.  That venture was, of course, eBay.

After almost a year, I crunched all the numbers and found that eBay is not nearly as profitable as it seems.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that eBay can be profitable, it just wasn’t for me.  After accounting for all of my income, expenses, and time, I’ve calculated that I’ve averaged about $8.75 per hour of work on eBay.  That’s extra income into my budget, yes, but I refuse to build a job for myself that doesn’t even pay as much as a second job working at McDonalds’.

I shut down eBay very early in the month, and used that time to develop a couple of websites. One of those sites was for a brick-and-mortar client of mine, which resulted in a $300 sale (and yearly contract) for hosting.  This figures up to just over $75 / hour, with is acceptable.  I intend to build a few more sites in the near future, as yearly hosting contracts are a nice form of semi-passive income.  The site I built in November was a quite simple WordPress site, so it was just less than half my going rate.  I have three more potential clients in queue for more complex sites, though I’m not pursuing those as aggressively as I could be.  While I know that I can make money with websites, and the time involved is reasonable, it just isn’t something that I want to do full time.  I’ve already gotten myself addicted to working for an employer for a regular paycheck, I don’t want yet another dependency that will require substantial ongoing effort to maintain.

BransonInfo.org

My Branson info site has had little activity this month.  The biggest thing to have happened there is a local news story – the running aground of the Showboat Branson Belle – that I managed to cover on a somewhat live basis, and got some (in my opinion) great photos.  To my knowledge, I was the only site liveblogging the story, and I provided updates throughout the night from a contact on board the boat. The next morning I got up early and drove to the scene, braved the icy shore of the lake, got my photos, and got chased off by the police.  My photos were featured on several local news sites, and I released them to the public domain for use on Wikipedia’s page on the Branson Belle.

In addition, I’ve begun doing restaurant reviews on the blog portion of the site.  My dining out has been subsidized by buying restaurant.com gift certificates on eBay, and has been great fun even aside from the articles.  I’ve made no money directly from this yet, but it adds to the unique content on the site, which I hope to eventually build into one with authority.

Shooters’ Journal

Shooters’ Journal has been a great success story for me so far.  As you may recall, the site is a joint effort between myself and two of my colleagues, so I can’t take all the credit – but I am solely responsible for SEO efforts, and my work is showing results.

We’ve dominated our first keyword with our original Remington 870 review article – my first ever #1 Google rank.  Market Samurai shows its competition to be less than 7,000, so I’m not shouting my magnificent success from the rooftops, but it shows that what I’m doing works.

And now, for the main course:

Income

Source Income
Vinyl $67.87
Gadsden Graphics $300.00
Google Adsense $2.82

Expenses

Category Expense
Postage $34.72
Facebook Ads $34.53
eBay Fees $69.08
Hosting $9.50
Toktumi $14.95

Total

$207.91