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Comment Contest Recap

Just a recap of the July contest for those who are just visiting for the first time.

You can find the complete rules here. The basic goal is to be the top commentator by the end of July, using comments that add value to the post. Comments such as “Great post” will either not be approved, or if it looks like they’ll be a factor in the results, will be deleted.

While Juggling Frogs has the early lead, there are over 100 posts on the blog and you’re welcome to comment on older posts, too. So really, anyone could win.

The prize is an original article posted on Ezine Articles, the subject to be tailored to two of your URLs with anchor text of your choice (subject, of course, to Ezine Articles editorial guidelines). I’ll work with the winner to come up with a subject that is suitable to the URLs.

Any blog that links to the original contest rules is also entered into a random drawing for a second article, with the same terms as the first. The same person can win both articles.

If you have any questions about the contest, feel free to leave a comment here or on the original post.

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The Super Gifts Review

I’ve talked in previous posts about giving away free products to build a list.

The problem with that is not getting the free products, but getting people to find your offer. The typical approach is to send messages to safelists and to put splash pages on traffic exchanges. Anything to get your opt-in page in front of people who may want to signup to get the free products.

The Super Gifts is a web site that does just that.

You upload the product you want to give away, and provide details of your list. Other people looking for free products signup for your list if they want the product you’re giving away. You can download products from the site to give away, or provide your own product (such as any of the ebooks I’ve linked to in previous list building posts).

The Super Gifts uses a point based system. You spend points to both download products and get subscribers to your list. You gain points by referring others to the site.

You can also buy more points if you run through the initial 200 you get for signing up. The initial 200 points is 20 subscribers to your list, which is quite nice for a new list.

This is about as automated as I’ve seen list building sites get. It’s interesting that you lose points by signing up for lists, but that keeps this from simply being a list exchange, and ensures that people who download your product and signup to your list do so because they want to, not just to get points.

I haven’t setup a list and product yet, but will do so before too long. This is a good excuse to start the list I’ve been meaning to start.

The Super Gifts is free to join and you can list up to five products/lists.

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Backlinks to Online Opportunity

Well, Google has finally decided to admit that there are links to Online Opportunity, at least inside of their Webmaster Tools area.

I’d been annoyed at Google’s insistence that there were no links, when I knew very well that my link building efforts were moving steadily forward. Apparently Google doesn’t want to provide anyone with any reliable information on the number of backlinks a site has, just in case you can use that to reverse engineer their algorithm.

I’ve been building links through a variety of ways.

Directory submissions have been ongoing, half a dozen every couple of weeks. I add these slowly, because a quick jump in directory submissions tends to lower your search engine rankings rather than raise it. You can see my Directory Maximizer review for details of the service I use to make directory submissions. Since they have a 35 submission minimum, I submit to a range of sites I own, half a dozen directories for each site.

I’ve bought a few links here and there, for PR purposes, but those only early on and none lately. I’ve been meaning to find a few likely sites to purchase a link on to improve my search engine rankings, but haven’t done so yet. Suitable sites would be closely related to the topic of the blog, and have a page in place already with suitable anchor text. And, of course, be willing to sell a link in the body of the article.

A few Ezine articles have provided some backlinks to the main page of the blog, and some deep links to specific posts. I want to do more of this, and get articles distributed farther than just Ezine Articles.

I’ve also posted links in forums that use follow links, using my signature to get links to the main page of the blog. And of course various posts have been linked to from other blogs.

And, of course, every contest generally has a reward in it for linking to the site and the contest page. Every little bit helps.

As a result of the link building efforts, I rank in the top 3 for the keyword “online opportunity” without the quotes (with the quotes I’m #1, which is to be expected). The two other contenders are older sites, one a .gov and one a directory that requires backlinks to it. The exact position of the top 3 shifts over time as Google weights one or the other more highly.

For a three month old blog, I’m pretty happy with that. The blog doesn’t even rate for “make money online” yet, but I haven’t put much effort into link building for that keyword yet. Any sort of review scheme on that keyword will have to wait until the next PR update, since most blogs don’t value backlinks from blogs with lower PR than themselves (which I think is a mistake, but that’s a topic for another post).

Do you have any favorite link building schemes I’ve missed?

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Zlio Review

Zlio is a site that allows you to build your own online store.

This is certainly nothing new, there are lots of sites where you can get free online stores. But Zlio has some bells and whistles that are quite nice.

The basic idea is a bit like Squidoo, you create an online store inside Zlio , and it gets indexed by search engines so that when people search for what your store sells, they’ll find you. You create small, focused, stores selling niche products, rather than one large mega store. Similar to creating Squidoo lenses.

One of the nice bits is that Zlio fully supports Google and Yahoo sitemaps, and provides a spot for you to type in the verification code for each. For those of you who haven’t used Google’s webmaster tools, the verification code establishes your ownership of the site in Google’s eyes, and gives you access to diagnostics and insight into your site’s search engine rankings.

There are also spots where you can type in meta keywords and a meta description for your store, and another spot where you put the code for whatever analytics program you’re using (such as Google Analytics). Most of what would need you to edit HTML on a normal website is available in configuration edit boxes in the control panel.

As far as the store itself goes, the interface for picking products is nice, and you can add reviews of products, associate products with keywords, etc. You have complete control over the categories of products in your stores, and can assign each product to any category you want.

For the looks of the store, Zlio has templates available and you can hand edit the CSS for the site (also available in a configuration edit box). There’s also a quite nice drag and drop screen for moving visual elements around on the page of your template.

I can’t report yet on how well a store ranks in search engines, and you do need to do some basic off-page SEO yourself, such as getting backlinks to your store. But the on-page SEO is nicely handled by the store itself and the product keywords you enter.

I knocked together a store about puzzles for kids in about five minutes, so you can see what a very simple store is like. The use of subdomains for the web address is quite nice for SEO purposes, too.

Zlio is quite nice for non-technical people, and saves quite a bit of time for techies, too. If stores rank as well in search engines as Squidoo pages, this is going to become my new favorite recommendation for beginners.

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Why Editing Old Posts is a Good Idea

Many bloggers think of older posts as being over and done with, and are eager to move on to new posts.

As far as search engines are concerned, older posts are fair game. They’ll show up in search results the same as new posts, and continue to attract traffic. In fact, that’s one of the benefits of daily blogging, building up such a huge amount of content on your site that the traffic you attract from search engines continues to grow.

To get the maximum benefit from all this old content, you do need to give it a bit of care now and then.

Updating an old post makes search engines happy. Updated content, from a search engine perspective, is more relevant than content that wasn’t updated recently. As you continue to blog, you’ll gain in skill and knowledge, and it’s worth your time to rework some of your new insights into older posts now and then.

For example, after I’d written my How to Make Your Own Website For Free series, I found an easy way to embed graphics in posts. Since that series had, at the time, been a major source of traffic for the blog, I went and updated every post in the series with screenshots. I added value to the readers of the series, while at the same time keeping the content fresh for search engines.

Comments also count as updating the content of a post, so your visitors can help you to keep old posts fresh by commenting on them. I’ve heard some bloggers complain about getting comments on old posts, but that’s one of the ways of keeping those posts high in search engine rankings.

When you see in your traffic stats visitors hitting your site for a keyword but not getting to the post that is the best fit for that keyword, you can go back and edit the old post to be a better fit for the keyword. In that way you provide value to those visitors, ensuring they’ll arrive on the post that best answers the question they typed into the search engine.

It’s easy as a blogger to be focused on the new content and the next post you plan to write, but don’t forget to give the old posts some love now and then. Search engines will throw extra traffic your way as a result.

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Five Cent Money Maker Review

Regular readers will remember that I downloaded a huge amount of ebooks as part of a special offer from a Home Income Team membership.

I’d been trying to figure out some way to get that information into the hands of my readers. The main problem is that most of these sorts of ebooks do not come with give-away rights. You can resell them, but not give them away for nothing. You can, generally, use them as part of a promotion for a paid site membership, or as incentive to get people into your list.

I’d about decided that what made the most sense was to turn part of the Network into a paid membership site, charging a $1 one-time fee for access to all the ebooks I’ve downloaded.

Imagine my surprise when I ran across a site called Five Cent Money Maker that took the same idea and underbid me by 95 cents. For 5 cents, you can download a collection of ebooks. These ebooks are especially useful as practical introductions to Adsense, Adwords, and related topics.

The complete list of material is:

  • Adsense Basics
  • Adwords 101
  • Affiliate Marketing 101
  • Super Affiliate Wizard
  • $1500 on Ebay
  • Habits of Successful Internet Entrepreneurs
  • List Building Overdrive
  • Millionaire Marketing Mindset
  • SEO Mistakes
  • The Five Successful Steps of Internet Marketing
  • Internet Marketing Video Tutorial Madness

That last item needs a bit of explanation. It’s a single EXE file that provides access to over 250 videos on 17 topics related to Internet Marketing. For example, there are 14 videos on creating a mini-website, and 58 videos on web design tips, along with 10 videos on maximizing your Adsense income, plus plenty more.

And you get all this for 5 cents.

The gimmick is that the first person to buy gets it for 5 cents. The second person gets it for 10 cents, and so on, with the price increasing by 5 cents for each purchase. And with your purchase, you become an affiliate of the site and can sell the same materials starting at 5 cents again.

The $1 token membership fee I’d been considering seemed quite a bargain, 5 cents is ridiculously low. Even when the price gets up to $1, it’s still a lot of good material for the money.

I may still turn part of the Network into a membership site some day to provide access to the increasingly huge collection of ebooks I have, but for now you can get a modest selection of it at Five Cent Money Maker.

I’m pleased to find sites like this that don’t follow the accepted model of Internet Marketing. While they may flop, it’s by trying something new that we find out what will work best in days to come. Oh, and if you’re the sort that enjoys getting into these sorts of things before the crowd, I was affiliate #18.

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Power of a Dollar Review

Update: the information below is out of date, since the Power of a Dollar changed how the program works. See my more recent Power of a Dollar Update for the most recent information.

Power of a Dollar is a strange mix of MLM program and traffic exchange. It was a toss up whether to use the Internet Marketing category or the Make Money Online category for the post.

It’s setup in a 3×15 forced matrix, which is almost impossibly hard to fill. The twist with PoaD is that you surf three sites per day as a member of the traffic exchange, providing a review of each site. In exchange, your site gets viewed and you get one additional position in the matrix. So as everyone in PoaD continues to surf their three sites a day, the matrix fills up far faster than it would relying smply on referrals.

Now, the MLM veterans among you are probably wondering where the money comes into it all. It’ll cost $11 a month to be a member of PoaD when it launches August 1st. You get paid 1 cent each time a new position is added into your 3×15 matrix (including your own positions). A completely full matrix would earn you 1 cent times the number of people in a 3×15 matrix (lots). That 1 cent is a one time payment, not residual.

Okay, I couldn’t just leave it at lots, so I wrote a Java program to see how many positions really are in a 3×15 matrix. The answer is 21,523,359. At 1 cent per position, that’s $215,233.59. Keep in mind this is paid over the course of a perhaps long period of time as new positions are put into the matrix.

Ongoing income also comes from the extra positions you earn through the trafffic exchange. Each of those positions earns the same way from its own 3×15 matrix, for a maximum amount of another $215,233.59.

While some of the details are a bit vague yet, the concept is certainly interesting. The traffic exchange portion of the program is quite nice, with visitors being forced to read your site to review it and answer questions about it to get credit. This is a better deal than the one or two seconds someone actually sees your site for on typical traffic exchanges.

Another of the nice touches they’ve done is that when you join the program, you get a series of missions to perform. These missions take you from becoming familiar with the program all the way through getting your own referrals into the program by surfing other traffic exchanges. If you’ve ever joined a program and then wondered, “What now?”, you won’t get that here. By the time you finish all the missions, you’ll have a system in place for getting more referrals. This is something that more programs should adopt.

The benefit of getting referrals into this system is that you earn what they earn. This is known as a 100% matching bonus in MLM circles, and is pretty common.

I have no idea if this program will succeed or not, but it’s a new concept in a market that hasn’t seen too many new concepts lately.

Click here to join Power of a Dollar for free. You won’t be asked for payment information until the August 1st launch, at which point you can decide if you think it’s worth paying into or not.

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Revisitors.com Case Study, Part 1

My tests of Revisitors.com consist of buying the 2,500 visitor package for the category Income Opportunties and sending it to a Marketing Pond splash page, and their “massive website exposure” package of 20,000 visitors and sending it to this blog.

My metrics for the Marketing Pond campaign are signups, and for the blog are RSS subscribers.

I started receiving traffic within 24 hours, as promised. Initially, the traffic has been on the order of 100 visitors a day. According to the website, this should ramp up over time. All traffic shows in my logs as being referred from IP address 70.85.216.247.

For the Marketing Pond splash page, after about 170 visitors, there have been 0 click throughs on the splash page. I’m using the TEToolbox, a free service which tracks this for me. That splash page normally runs at a 5% click through rate in traffic exchanges. However, the amount of traffic is low enough yet that this may or may not be significant.

For the blog itself, after about 200 visitors, RSS subscribers increased by 4. This is also inconclusive, as the normal fluctuation of Feedburner stats can raise or lower the number that much as subscribers either check or don’t check the feed that particular day. As the number of visitors increases, I’d expect to see this number raise above the level of noise if the traffic is converting.

The bounce rate for the blog was running at about 50% before the campaign started, and jumped to 75% when traffic started to flow. It’s been dropping 10% per day while the traffic continues to arrive, and is back to normal levels now. Similarly the average time on the site dropped considerably, to about a minute and a half when the campaign started, and has now risen to about five and a half minutes. It would seem that the visitors are finding the blog interesting, despite the lack of an appreciable jump in RSS subscribers. This suggests the traffic is real people, and not automated hits.

So, it’s too early to say whether the traffic converts, but in all other respects the service works as advertised.

Signing up as an affiliate of Revisitors.com is free, and I see nothing in their terms of service that keep you from using your own affiliate link for your own orders. In addition, when you have a campaign running, you can add visitors to the campaign for a 20% discount. They’re basically giving you your affiliate commission as a discount rather than as cash back.

Update: you do not receive credit for your own sales through your referral link. The sale shows up, but has a value of $0. So you pay the full price for the initial traffic, and once your campaign is running get the 20% off for adding traffic.

And if anyone reading this arrived here through a link other than one to Online Opportunity, let us know. I’d love to hear from you, and you’re just in time to enter the July comment contest.

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Introducing the Network

I’ve started up a sister site to the blog, the Online Opportunity Network.

The purpose of the Network is to provide in-depth support for people who are working any of my recommended opportunities. Right now, the Network only has a detailed guide on Marketing Pond. In the weeks since I first posted about Marketing Pond, I’ve recruited nearly one hundred referrals, and felt the need to provide them with advice to help them succeed.

Eventually the Network will contain guides for other programs I recommend. Writing the guides is time consuming, though, so they’ll follow slowly. If you have requests for which programs should get guides next, let me know.

I also have plans for a newsletter or two that will be hosted on the Network, rather than the blog.

I’ll occasionally post here about new happenings on the Network.

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The Benefits and Dangers of Multiple Income Streams

Get advice from any Internet marketing guru these days and you’ll hear a lot about the benefits of multiple income streams.

The basic idea makes a lot of sense. If all your online income is from one source, then if that source is eliminated you’ll have no income. Say you have a blog and make $500 a month from Google Adsense. Then Google goes bankrupt and your Adsense income is gone, until you can scramble and replace it with another ad network. On the other hand, if your blog used several ad networks already, you could easily replace Adsense ads with one of your other network’s ads and have very little lost income.

The same idea applies if you’re doing network marketing, possibly even more so. Network marketing companies have a tendency to disappear after a few years, making it essential to work more than one program at the same time. That way when one fails, you still have income from the others.

What you don’t hear much is about the dangers of multiple income streams. Building any sort of online income requires a tremendous amount of work, and investments of time and/or money. If you try to build multiple income streams at the same time, you will dilute your efforts for all of them.

When you’re in the first stages of building an income with a program, I’d suggest only building that income. Focus your efforts on getting into profit with that single program before moving to another program. Then, use the profits from the first program to both continue advertising it and advertising a new program. The key is to not go into debt in multiple programs at the same time.

Be aware that getting into profit will take time, whether you’re blogging for dollars or doing network marketing or selling widgets online. Give whatever program you’re working time to succeed before deciding it isn’t going to work.

Unfortunately, I don’t follow this advice, since I feel the need to evaluate many programs so I can give you reviews on the blog. But this is definitely a case where it’s far better to do as I say, rather than as I do.