February 2007 archive
I was shocked, dumbfounded and aghast when I saw this top Internet Marketer doing what seemed to be promotion of hardcore pornography, “sex enhancement” pills and gambling on their personal blog.
Had something happened?
I have been reading some of their emails, visiting their site regularly and have even bought a number of their products.
Had they moved to the “dark side”?
I looked at my screen again:
And even (more…)
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to share the stage with Internet Marketing Guru Jo Han Mok and we shared some of our insider strategies.
The crowd has been expecting some blogging tips, but sadly I had to disappoint.
Instead, I’m getting a number of positive vibes about the traffic strategies I’ve developed over the past couple of months.
It has been a funny experience, just seeing the traffic surge every month by between 50% and 100%.
January was an especially good month with more than 7,500 unique visitors heading over.
This month looks like it’ll bust that fairly easily.
I think one major difference between what I’ve been doing with my Social Traffic Generation and the Spike/Surge strategies used by other Internet Marketers, is that the traffic I generate is very (more…)
Bloggers take note, there’re 2 basic types of blogs:
- Branding blogs
- Monetization blogs
Branding blogs: Build either your personal brand or a product/service brand. An example of this could be high-end gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer’s blog or this blog which focuses on blogging, affiliate marketing and traffic generation.
On the other hand, you have “Monetization blogs” which are intended to generate income. The blogs can serve either as traffic generation tools to push visitors to a site, or sell products or services themselves. Product review blogs designed to close transactions fall into this category.
Monetization blogs also include blogs created solely to monetize Google’s Adsense contextual advertising program. Such blogs feature prominent locations for adsense advertising blocks, or other advertising networks like Yahoo Search Marketing or Adbrite’s ad blocks.
You can recognize (more…)
The major problem why many fail at Internet Marketing has to do with a lack of systems.
Increasingly over the last couple of weeks I’ve received emails along the lines of:
“I earned a couple of hundred dollars over the past few weeks using XYZ adsense system from XYZ guru. All of a sudden, the product doesn’t work anymore. What happened?”
Or
“I used this affiliate marketing product and surprised myself by racking up 30 sales in my first month. Now I’m getting 1 sale a week. I’m never going to be able to quit my day job and go fully into Internet Marketing”
It’s a constant refrain and I can understand the situation that many are going through.
During my first couple of months in Internet Marketing, I was pretty psyched too, especially when my sales were doubling every month, from $1,500 the first month, to $2,500 the next month. And it just seemed like sales were set to continue doubling every month. Each time I sent out an email, it was just a matter of waking up in the morning and refreshing my payment processor screens to see the sales flying in.
I was really feeling happy till three days went by without sales.
Then a week. I was getting really concerned.
Then a couple of sales came in, but nowhere near the phenomenal level I had seen starting out, where seeing $500 a day in net profit seemed to be business as usual.
Going from my high earning days to consecutive days of zero sales was demoralizing.
It was only when I discovered (more…)
18th February was the first year of the Chinese New Year and we’ve entered the year of the pig, according to the Chinese 12 Year Animal Astrological cycle.
This year is expected to be an especially prosperous one, since it’s a “Golden Pig” year. As I understand it, a “Golden” year comes about every 5 cycles (With each cycle comprising 12 years, that’s once every 60 years).
Chinese typically take the first three days of the Chinese New Year off (and they work for the next 362 days of the year…).
What’re the implications for Internet Marketing? (more…)
Some caveats about Alexa. Data collected from Alexa comes from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.
If you’re in a tech-oriented space like online marketing or technology, you’d generally rank better than non-tech-oriented niches like scrapbooking or home repairs.
Alexa is not a comprehensive metric, but it’s useful to get a rough indication of your traffic and it’s origins.
That being said, Alexa has recently (within the last 24-48 hours) been tweaking the presentation of their traffic rankings so the information is presently in a holistic fashion.
There’s no “new” data being presented, but you can access it in a single screen now, where previously you had to flip between several screens.
Best of all, the service continues to be free.
What’re the major changes?
The “reach” has been changed to present the percentage of Internet users you’re reaching (eg. 5% of “all” Internet users), where previously it showed a reach of 100 users per million users.
In my opinion, it’s not a very useful metric.
“Traffic Rank” and “Page Views” don’t appear to have changed.
What’s interesting are 2 new metrics.
I don’t want you to get the idea that they’re “new”, but rather Alexa now aggregates the information from other screens and consolidates them on your “Traffic Ranking” page.
Here’s the first one:
Which is useful because (more…)
