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The Myth Of Paying It Forward

You’ll see a lot of offers on the traffic exchanges lately with headlines like, “I’ll pay your way”.

The whole “pay it forward” fad is designed to lure people into systems that they aren’t sure about. The idea is that your sponsor pays for your to get into the system, placed people under you, and at some point you take over payments. That might be at the second month, or at some other time.

This sort of scheme typically doesn’t work, but it’s worth looking at why.

Think about the sort of person who is going to be attracted by a pay it forward scheme. Someone who doesn’t know how to market, because if they knew how to market they wouldn’t need their sponsor to place people under them. Someone who has a low amount of disposable income, because otherwise they could afford the $10 or $20 a month for membership. Someone who is either gullible enough or desperate enough to believe the hype of the system.

In short, your recruits are not being qualified based on their willingness to stick with a system, their need for the product the system offers, or their ability to recruit others, which are all valuable qualities in referrals.

The money doesn’t work out, either. The sponsor will always come out behind in a legitimate pay it forward system. Say they pay $10 for you to be a member. They’ll get some portion of that $10 back, but it’ll typically be a small portion. Most of the pay it forward systems seem to use GDI, which pays the sponsor a whole $1 per referral. So the sponsor loses $9 per month on you.

Normally the sponsor offers to pay for your first month, as a trial. The idea for them is to immediately put one or two people under you. That gets you hooked, because you’re making a couple bucks a month from those referrals. Then, when the second month comes and it’s time for you to pay your $10, you stay in because you think your sponsor will continue putting people under you.

But they’ll have moved on to the next new person, trying to hook them. You’ll be mostly on your own, although you’ll probably get another referral now and then to show you that they’re still working on your behalf. They want you to stay in long enough to pay them back what they paid for your first month’s membership. But it takes a full ten months for that to happen. How many of you will pay $10 a month to earn $2 or $3 a month for nearly a year?

The reason that MLM payment schemes such as GDI work at all is that each person is expected to do recruiting. As your downline grows, so does the number of prospects being shown the sign up page. If the entire downline waits for their sponsor to get referrals, though, the number of prospects the sponsor can get remains the same as the downline grows. They simply cannot keep up in the long term.

Now, if you were looking to get into one of these programs, and you knew how to market and intended to do your own work, joining through a pay it forward scheme would make sense. Just don’t rely on your sponsor to do all the work to get you into profit, because it probably won’t happen.

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E-junkie Free Trial

I’d posted earlier a review about E-junkie.

Recently, the folks over at E-junkie offered a coupon code for my readers that will extend the normal one-week free trial to a full month. A one-week trial barely gives you enough time to play with the system, let alone start generating sales. But a full month is plenty of time to get everything set up and generate enough sales to cover your second month’s membership fee (which is $5 for the lowest level, selling 10 products).

To get the extended free trial, sign up at E-junkie and use the coupon code E-JUNKIEOPP. Enjoy!

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When Planning Fails

Recently, my three year old daughter decided she wanted to go visit her grandparents.

That was fine, we’d recently moved and were only about half an hour away from them. So my wife packed up a few things, and away they went, planning on being home that evening. I get a call that evening from my wife, and my daughter decided to stay the night. Still no problem, that would give me time to get a few things done at home, and they’d have a longer visit.

Fast forward another five days, and they’re still not home. My daughter is having the time of her life, and simply refuses to leave. I managed to get a ride there with someone, and have been back and forth for the last few days, spending some time there and taking care of things at home.

So what’s the point of this personal digression?

No matter how good your plans, something can always come along and send you in a completely different direction. Planning is important, because it enables you to make progress toward goals, to track your progress, and to decide what is and isn’t working. But don’t be so invested in a plan that you can’t adapt to unexpected events.

In blogging, many of these unexpected events come from changes to Google’s algorithm, which make nearly everything you were previously doing useless, or worse. You have to be ready to adapt to the changing rules, and keep your focus on providing value to your readers.

Will my family ever come home? I’m hoping, but I’m not planning on it.

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To Write or Not to Write

There are a lot of people who want to earn online without actually creating content.

Maybe they think they can’t write well, or that they don’t know enough to write, or whatever. But they use traffic exchanges and safelists to send people to their affiliate links, and try to build email lists using list building programs, etc. Anything that doesn’t actually require creating content.

Creating content is one of the skills needed to do Internet Marketing properly. That’s important to understand, custom content is absolutely necessary. Sending junk traffic to an affiliate link isn’t going to make you much. Custom content provides value and builds trust, and is part of the whole process.

Now, you don’t have to create that content yourself. You can get fairly decent content created inexpensively online by checking places the freelancers hang out. People tend to avoid outsourcing content creation because of the cost. On a per article basis, content creation is pretty reasonable. But the sheer amount of content needed for even a reasonable sized mini-site makes the entire package expensive.

As a beginner, you have two options.

One is to learn to create the content yourself. Just start writing, and keep at it. You don’t have to post any of it, but you won’t build skill unless you start practicing.

The other option is to partner with someone who can create content, who needs the skills you do have. To find these people you have to network, and put yourself out there approaching bloggers who also seem to be in the beginning of their career. Ideally you’d pick bloggers in the niche you want content created for, not bloggers who are in the “make money online” niche.

How about you? Do you create content, or try to get by without it?

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Free Online Shopping Cart

This seems to be the summer for me to look at ways to take payments on your web site.

FatFreeCart is an absolutely free shopping cart you can use on your web site. You don’t even need to register with anyone to use it. The shopping cart supports both PayPal and Google Checkout, and will support item variations (e.g. sizes, colors, etc). This is basically a way to take payments only…no delivery of downloadable products is supported. So you process all the orders that come in.

But then it’s free, so you won’t get everything.

If you want something a bit more comprehensive, including digital delivery of products, you’d want the pro version of FatFreeCart, at E-junkie.com.

Unlike some of the other services I’ve reviewed lately, E-junkie supports both digital delivery and shipped goods. Digital products are stored securely, and for shipped goods they take care of calculating shipping costs and keeping track of how many items you have left in inventory.

E-junkie is a paid service, however they don’t charge you per transaction, but rather a flat fee per month based on how many products you’re selling. The least expensive option is $5 a month for 10 products. Presumably, if you have products that actually sell, you can easily earn back $5 a month in profit. You do get a 1 week free trial to make sure everything works for you. If you have existing traffic to your site, you might make enough sales that first week to pay for a few months’ subscription.

There’s also a way to get E-junkie for free if you take payments through TrialPay. TrialPay is an interesting way to give your products away for free and get cash for it. Basically, customers must complete an offer that will then pay you at least as much as you would sell the product for regularly. The customer then gets your product for nothing, and you get whatever the advertiser gives as a reward for the offer.

So how does E-junkie compare to Oronjo for selling digital content? If using affiliates is part of your business model, E-junkie has that built into the system. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Oronjo does not. Both securely store and delivery your digital products.

If you want to sell both digital and shipped products, or use affiliates to sell your products, E-junkie seems to be the best bet.

Update! The kind people at E-junkie have provided a coupon code for my readers that gives them a full month’s free trial. Use the coupon code E-JUNKIEOPP when you sign up, and you’ll get the extra trial time. That gives you even more time to play with the system and start generating sales.

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Designing An Effective Banner

There are plenty of places to put a banner advertising your blog these days, from Entrecard to Project Wonderful.

But what makes an effective banner? One school of thought seems to be that any banner that gets a click is best. This gives rise to the recent rash of banners featuring sexy young women, advertising blogs that have nothing to do with sexy young women. But isn’t that effective, if it gets someone to click through?

Not really. I’ve written before on this topic, such as the post “How Good Is Your Traffic?“, and “Qualifying Your Visitors“.

The basic concept is that traffic alone is useless (except in a certain situation I’ll discuss below). What’s useful is traffic that will convert (e.g. take some action that makes you money). You’ll make more profit with less traffic if that traffic is very likely to convert. Traffic also has a cost associated with it, in terms of server resources used, bandwidth, CPU allocation, etc.

So what you want is highly qualified traffic, not junk traffic.

An effective banner is one that gets clicks from people who are likely to convert, and convinces people who are not likely to convert to not click. That’s right, half the purpose of a banner is to convince people not to click on it. For example, if “converting” for your site means buying an ebook at $19.95, then put the price on your banner. That will convince people who think $19.95 is too expensive for an ebook to not click. The people who do click are more likely to buy, because they don’t see $19.95 as too expensive.

Effective banners are not misleading. They communicate exactly what the site is about, including using appropriate images. Using sexy young women (or men) on your banner is only effective if that’s what you’re selling (well, pictures at least…selling the real thing is illegal).

When you’re having a banner designed for your site, think in terms of both communicating what your site is about, and discouraging visitors who aren’t going to convert. You may have to do some work to think about what your typical customer is like. A survey of your existing customers, if you have some, might help.

As far as traffic goes, think Quality, not Quantity.

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Keyword Research – Traffic vs Competition

I’ve written a lot about keyword research before.

My post about How Good Is Your Traffic? and Qualifying Your Visitors both talk about why less traffic is sometimes better than more traffic. This goes against typical online wisdom, which holds that the more traffic you get the better off you are. This leads people to target the highest traffic keywords possible.

That’s a bad idea, for a couple of reasons.

High Traffic Means General

High traffic keywords are general keywords. They’re high traffic because they apply to a variety of search queries. For example, the keyword “shoe” gets more traffic than the keyword “red shoe”. But the more general keyword “shoe” includes people searching for “blue shoes”, “black shoes”, “dress shoes”, and even “free shoes”. The keyword “red shoe” is far more targeted, and likely to lead to a sale.

Targeting specific keywords is very important for increasing your conversion rate.

High Traffic Means More Competition

Usually, higher traffic keywords have more competition in search engine rankings. Lots of sites will be trying to rank well for those general keywords. Even the more specific high traffic keywords will have a lot of competition, as people try to monetize that traffic.

Competing in such an environment takes time, effort, and often money. Toss a web site up and do nothing else with it, and it will end up on page 20 of Google for competitive keywords. Do the same thing for a non-competitive keyword, and the site can end up on page 1.

Would you rather have a vanishingly small percentage of a large amount of general traffic, or a high percentage of a smaller amount of targeted traffic?

If you answered the high percentage of a smaller amount of targeted traffic, congratulations! You’re on your way to doing very good keyword research.

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Flogd Review

Flogd is a new service that provides you with a way to build an online store to sell your products.

This is one of many such services offered online, but each has it’s own spin. Flogd is intended to help you sell your own products on your own website, or on MySpace. You can specify the name and description of the product, and several varieties (e.g. different sizes, colors, etc), and how much each variety costs. Flogd will give you some code to paste into a website, or MySpace profile, and your visitors will be able to add items to a shopping cart and check out using PayPal. Flogd will collect sales tax for you. You’ll be responsible for reporting the tax to the appropriate parties, and getting it to them (e.g. the state you live in).

The store itself is a bit of Flash code that is displayed on any website you put it into. You don’t get a web page you can direct people to, as in Zlio or Bravisa. You must already have, or be willing to create, a website to place the store code on. This is most useful if you already have a website that gets traffic, and want to easily add your own products to the site. For example, you run a site with tutorials on making hand made jewelry, and want to start selling your own jewelry. Or you run a site about your band, and want to start selling CDs of your music.

You are responsible for ensuring delivery of the items. This is distinct from Oronjo, which specializes in products that can be digitally delivered and handles that for you. Flogd seems more suitable for physical products that need shipped.

The big disadvantage is that you need a product to sell! Luckily, Flogd has partnered with Bravisa to let you import all the products from your Bravisa store into Flogd. The idea is that Bravisa would take care of shipping and customer service, leaving you to just put your Flogd store on a web page that gets targeted visitors. The current integration has a shopper redirected to Bravisa to finalize the purchase of Bravisa items, although that’s supposed to be more seamless in the future.

Another feature that would work well with the target market is the ability to allow affiliates to put the store on their web sites, and earn a commission from sales. That feature doesn’t currently exist, but reportedly is coming soon.

Flogd seems ideal for small groups that have physical products to ship. A band might use Flogd to sell their CDs, or someone who makes crafts or homemade jewelry might use Flogd to sell their products. Other solutions exist if you’re selling info products, but if you’re selling something that you produce and physically ship, Flogd might just cut down the time you need to sell online.

Note that Flogd is currently free, but that is only through the beta period. No details are available right now on the fee structure that will go into place at the end of the beta period, but that should be in September 2008.

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BlinkWeb Review

BlinkWeb is a new service that claims to allow anyone to build a web site through point and click technology.

BlinkWeb is a bit like Google Pages. The features of both are similar. You can create a multi-page site, choose a layout and template from their gallery, and drag and drop different components onto the pages. BlinkWeb has more features specific to Internet Marketers, though.

The components supported by BlinkWeb right now include a contact form, a guest book, Google Maps integration for showing where an address is, Google Adsense integration, and a custom HTML widget. You can also include paragraphs, a paragraph with an attached title, images, and a paragraph with an image embedded in it, along with doing a two column layout for part of the page. You can also easily add in video and Flickr integration.

The templates available are a bit sparse right now. You might find something for your niche, or you might not. The widgets available are also a bit sparse. They’re fine for basic sites, but you’ll have to use the custom HTML widget for anything more complicated.

One of the attractive points about BlinkWeb is that it offers a Sales Letter as a page type. These pages have a different set of templates, all modeled after typical Internet Marketing type sales pages. So putting up a simple sales page with BlinkWeb is very trivial.

Another type of page provided is a blog page. This provides the standard blog sorts of widgets and a sidebar. Of course, you can specify the typical SEO information, such as meta keywords and description, and the page title.

BlinkWeb is definitely targeted toward Internet Marketers. They offer a five day lesson in how to earn using BlinkWeb, which basically walks you through an overview of developing an information product and using BlinkWeb to create a sales site. They also provide a Facebook widget so you can promote your site on Facebook easily.

This is all free. So what does BlinkWeb get from it? In Day 5 of the lessons, they suggest you obtain a domain name instead of using a subdomain of BlinkWeb.com. The way you can use a domain of your own that’s built into BlinkWeb is to purchase web hosting from them. You get the domain itself for free, and web hosting at $1 for the first month and $14.95 a month after that.

It isn’t clear from reading the site if the $14.95 a month only covers a single web site, or multiple. I’d guess a single web site, and that they intend for online marketers to pay out of the profits from selling their product.

BlinkWeb does do what it says. Anyone can make a web site with it, although you might need to figure out what to put into the meta keywords, etc. And, you can do it for free, and get your web site up and running and perfected before you make a decision on whether you want to pay $14.95 a month basically to use your own domain name with the site.

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Online Time Management

When you’re working online time management becomes an important part of what you do.

After all, we all know how easy it is to become distracted by various notifications coming into our email. Bloggers usually get emails when someone leaves a comment, or a comment needs to be moderated. If you run a forum, you probably get notified when a new member registers. If you participate in forums, you have tons of notifications from threads you’ve participated in, telling you that someone has added a new post to the thread. And then there are the tons of emails you get out of the blue, or from lists you’ve subscribed to, that all want your attention.

This has become a big thing lately, and lots of people will offer you advice and coaching, generally for a fee.

But the key to managing your time online is easy: Don’t get distracted!

Working online, you probably have your email up constantly when you’re on the computer. It may even be one of those programs that plays a chime when you get new mail. New emails practically beg to be processed immediately. My first thought, when I check to see who the email is from, is, “I can reply to that in just a couple of minutes, why put it off?” Over time I’ve gotten a reputation for being prompt to reply to emails.

Those two minutes add up, though, when you count all the emails you need to reply to over the course of a day. More damaging by far, though, is that while you can answer that email in just two minutes, it will take you more than two minutes to get back into the mind-set of what you were doing before you took your email break. It’s like having the answer to a question on the tip of your tongue, and then having someone ask you an entirely unrelated question. It takes me days sometimes to remember what I was going to say.

Online time management is all about focus. You don’t have to schedule your day, but if you sit down and feel like working on a web site you are creating, block off an hour or two to do nothing but that. Close your email program, and don’t check email until your hour or two is finished (breathe, it’ll be okay…everyone can wait for a reply that long, or they would have called you instead). Don’t open up a web browser to pop onto another web site, unless it’s research you need to do for the one you’re creating.

After the hour or two you’ve allocated, take a break. The more time you spend on a particular task, the less you get done. You could process your emails during your break, but you’ll get more out of getting away from the computer and doing something physical. Get your blood moving and your heart pumping, even if you just take a walk around your neighborhood. You’ll be refreshed then, to sit down and spend another hour or two doing something online.

Other distractions are harder to cope with, such as kids and pets. But try to isolate yourself for the hour or two that you’ll be working, so you can focus and concentrate. You’ll get far more done that way.

We’ve become so used to reacting to online events as soon as they happen that it might take you a while to get comfortable with choosing when to process emails, post forum replies, etc. But the result in terms of productivity is well worth it!