Untethered Dreams

Does your ClickBank account look like this image? Are you bleeding those few hard-earned dollars away bit by bit. If so, then your account is dormant. No activity after 90 days leads to dormancy and then fees go up the longer it stays that way (up to $15/month after a year of inactivity).

Well here’s an easy way to solve that problem, while making a little additional income in affiliate revenues, although that’s not the important part. The important part is getting your account out of dormancy. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Here’s a quick recap of our 2-week internal competition. How did we do? In a nutshell, not well. We ended up losing money, mainly on paid advertising.

How much? We haven’t added up the numbers exactly, but we were both each under the $100 mark. It turns out that we were both a bit hesitant to throw money recklessly at media buys/PPC without testing the waters slowly at first. And two weeks just isn’t long enough to get real data. Another factor we had not planned on is that some platforms take quite a while to approve your ads.
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Well so much for blogging every 2 days or so. Participating in a game that you’ve never played before can seem deceptively easy at the onset. And this one certainly caught us.

So I got my site up and posted about it on a few forums, submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools, did some basic SEO and then I launched a few different PPC campaigns to push traffic to my offer. I’m not going to say what it is or link to it from here, because I don’t want to pollute the data just yet. If you find it, that’s ok.
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Doug’s First Week Summary

The first week of the contest could have gone better. Unfortunately the affiliate game has not provided the opportunity to untether me from the corporate world yet so I had a lot to juggle. I was working on a large infrastructure project that I played a key role and helped work though a security incident all while providing husband and daddy support for my daughter and wife (both had pinkeye and a cold and my wife had strep and an ear infection)! Regardless to say, I had my hands full but is that really any different than most of you? Probably not.

So, what was my strategery to beat my comrade? Considering the time frame of the contest and knowing the week was going to be busy outside of my affiliate game, I planned to setup and gather traffic quickly followed by analytics. Additionally, as time allowed I planned to add additional content, utilize social marketing, mail list creation with bonuses and obtaining additional traffic.

I was able to execute on the first part of the plan by setting up quickly by becoming an affiliate for the offer I choose to push, used Blogger, with a lame mail list sign-up form (with no bonuses offered), a twitter account with a couple followers already and a advertising campaign. I used bit.ly to provide some quick analytics depending on where the link was placed. I really made use of my seed money by setting up accounts with advertisers with coupons doubling the $75 investment so far into $150 of advertising.

This was all setup in the first couple of days and this is where execution ended and life took over. I was able to provide some tweaking over the next couple of days for the advertising campaigns but that’s about it.

I was able to obtain a nice amount of traffic so far, but no sales. With over 1,400 hits across my links, I’m averaging 13 links between order page impressions which I seems good. Unfortunately 0 have converted to sales. At this point, either my pre-sales is weak or the offer I’m pushing is weak.

Well, off to crush it!

Khalid’s Day 4 Summary

Wow, time does fly by when you’re <insert verb here>. Yup, so you really need to be on a plan/schedule. Boy am I glad I did. So am I on schedule? More or less. Ok, honestly, less. The big honking lesson is that I definitely underestimated how long tasks would/will take.

Anyone who ever says just a few clicks will get you to ‘done’ is exaggerating. Not lying, because in all likelihood they’ve done it a hundred times and know what it takes to perform a few clicks confidently knowing that they’ve done it correctly.

So what did I do in the past few days (Tue-Thur)? Well, I stood up a site, a Wordpress blog actually, wrestled with my domain registrar a bit (but they, NameCheap, are great and totally helped me out), wrote a sales letter, created a mailing list (using Aweber), put together a bunch of bonuses to give away to my mail list, and wrote a wicked cool little htaccess file that I’m very proud of (I’ll leak that one later )!

Whew! Actually, I’m pretty happy to have written all of that down, because it demonstrates that I’ve been working hard and accomplishing tasks. Sure, not as quickly as I would have wished, but it’s still progress.

And there is a bright side – there’s a fair amount of this material that I can replicate faster the next time I put together a similar program/site. I just need to document ASAP.

Day 5, here I come!

Khalid’s Day 1 Summary

As promised, here is a post describing my efforts so far. Doug’s summaries will appear in separate posts.

As I was thinking how to sum up my day 1 of our contest, I initially thought it was mostly a failure, but then I had a second opinion and that was that it *is* important to plan ahead. As the saying goes “Failures don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” Honestly though, I did not get started as soon as I would have liked, and I have a number of excuses, but I won’t list them, because success doesn’t care about excuses, does it?

Here’s how I went about planning. First I did some mind-mapping. Essentially, I started with a blank whiteboard (yes, I have a whiteboard!), and drew an oval in the middle with my goal in the middle. From there, I started drawing more ovals with tasks and subtasks and ideas and linking them all up, as fast as I could think of the ideas. It’s interesting how your brain is able to generate more ideas when you write things down and/or talk about them. By the way, these are called Mind Maps.

My goal: 100% ROI (Return on Investment) – $250. Why did I pick that? Well I had to choose some tangible goal, and my reading/research to date showed that PPC marketers tend to shoot for 100% ROI. Now you may note that SEO and mail list and viral marketers get what amounts to an infinite ROI, but their efforts take time and we only have 2 weeks.

The largest initial task was creating a schedule with tasks & subtasks and time estimates for each item. I also created daily goals. To be conservative, I estimated a maximum of 3 hours per day, so that I would have some extra time in case I ran over, and I fully expect that I will on many days.

One last note regarding affiliate links in these posts. You will notice that as we go, we’ll be sprinkling in affiliate links in our posts. Some of you may question our honesty in recommending products, and we can’t say we blame you. However, if we left them out, we would be ‘leaving money on the table’, and any marketer/business person will tell you that is just dumb. We can only hope that our honesty shines through in our writing and that in time our regular readers will come to trust that we’re not simply out to make a buck off of you, but are giving back to the community.

The sys admin geek in me has always loved O’Reilly books and they’ve continued producing quality computer books as well as branching out into other areas, one of which is the Missing Manuals series. O’Reilly was good enough to send me a sample copy of one of their latest on attracting visitors to your website and given the subject material of our site thought it quite appropriate.

First off, this is an inexpensive book ($5) that clocks in around 50 pages. It is after all a “mini manual”. I should have known based on the size that this was not going to be an advanced set of tips, but rather geared to newbie website owners. However, let me not disparage this book – it is a pretty comprehensive set of guidelines on what to do when you set up a website for the 1st time.

It covers things like reciprocal links, web rings, promotion, meta elements, directories and getting noticed by the search engines as well as setting up Google Analytics. I would have liked to see more info on SEO, at least some basics. There are lots of disagreements on this subject, but reciprocal links don’t carry a great deal of weight with the likes of Google, and I would have liked to see a notation at least.

There was a terrible definition for Javascript that I trust they will improve in another edition:

“Note: Javascript is a type of mini-program that runs inside a browser. Virtually every Web browser in existence supports it.”

Lastly, this mini-manual would have benefited greatly from a “To Do” checklist, a.k.a. a summarized version of its steps, because who wants to poor through 50 pages the next time they need to set up a new site?

Overall, I quite liked the book, and at $5 is completely worth it. Of course, you will eventually want to get a more advanced book. We quite liked Kristopher Jones’ Search Engine Optimization book.

(Disclaimer: Untethered Dreams received a complimentary review copy of this product.)

Have you been in the affiliate marketing game for a while now and are just flailing around without any real success to speak of? Perhaps some traffic to your site or a sale here and there, but not the kind of envious profits that the gurus advertise on their products? Well, here’s an admission you probably won’t see too much in the marketing world – so have we!

[We should probably clarify though. Our main venture, gadget blog Gizmos for Geeks, has been profitable almost since day one, with income coming in mainly via affiliate sales and advertising. However, we haven't turned a profit from straight up Internet marketing, the kind where you're pushing either your own product (usually of the electronic variety) or someone else's via SEO, word of mouth, e-mail marketing, PPC or other advertising.]

Well this post isn’t about to say that we’re about to throw in the towel. Actually, just the opposite! We still have hope that success can be had in this biz. One of us has come up with an idea that will hopefully push us to get over what we think is that initial barrier. And that brilliant idea is … a friendly competition! And we aim to be as transparent about our methods and results as we can be.
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If you’re a blogger, then you probably do a lot of copying and pasting and sometimes it’s the same stuff over and over. I had been using ClipX pretty successfully for a long time, but recently had major issues with it, probably due to some recent Windows XP update. That meant I had to go searching for a replacement (free and ideally open source).

I narrowed it down to 2: Flashpaste Lite and Ditto, which is an open source project. I decided on Ditto as it was much more powerful than Flashpaste and more customizable, particularly with keyboard shortcuts to quickly paste pre-canned chunks of text.

I noticed some other folks on the Web not caring for Ditto because of its complexity, but hey, the more complex it is, then the better the chance that it’ll do what you want. I’m of the school that believes that power is accompanied by complexity. Take the time up front to learn the tool and you’ll be rewarded by many hours of improved efficiency.

References:

• Travis Illig’s blog post on finding a clipboard mgmt program
• Download.com’s Clipboard Software section

Other Possible Apps that I considered:

• clipmon32
• WinClipper
• Clipomatic

Almost a year ago, we started our trial of GetFriday, a ‘virtual assistant’ or ‘outsourced assistant’ company based in India. Their fees start at around $10/hour and go down from there the larger the monthly plan you get. We eventually decided to part ways with them, mainly due to a few factors: 1. cost-cutting on our part, and 2. our need for more technical skills.

Here’s what we learned, which you can use in many ways when looking for a new VA:
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