Marketing With Waiman

With all the latest Google updates there has been a load of discontent amongst the Internet marketing community. Sites that were making money have suddenly disappeared off the face of Google.

My case study website seems to be affected. So, that’s that down the drain. I think it may have been some poor link building techinques that I used early on but hey we live and learn.

I’m now focusing my efforts on a about 3 of my key sites and will continue to do affiliate marketing with them and keep adding content etc. One of my other niche sites is at number 3 of Google so it’s not all bad.

Anyway, with all of the stuff happening in the search world and the warpath Google seem to be on, it makes me nervous about relying too much on SEO and organic search results. This has been my main focus and I think will continue to be for the time being. I will later diversify my traffic sources and use other PPC engines like Facebook and banner ads perhaps.

For the time being, it has got me into thinking that I need to look elsewhere to diversify further and at the moment I’m looking to add another stram to my arsenal and that is mobile apps. This is a hot topic at the moment and an industry ripe for the picking. It seems to be where the Internet was back in late 1998, early 2000 when things were easy and the industry young. The mobile app industry seems to be massively growing and set to overtake Internet usage via computers. Since I don’t really know much about mobile apps, I’ve signup for a course by a very experience and respected marketer to see if I can get some help in making an inroad in this industry. Click here for the site.

Not having to worry about link building and when the next Google update will happen and if it will affect me will be a great bonus. It’s an 8 week course so once that’s done and I have something to report back on I will. At the moment it looks great and look forwards to getting stuck in.

The course is called Passive Profit System and it marries up affiliate marketing with mobile apps. Check it out.

Well, since my first initial post, I have added a couple of more pages to my website and have started doing some link building. The site is essentially complete for now and I may add some more content pages later on, but for now it should be ok.

For the link building, I’m using Ultimate Demon to automate as much of the leg work as possible. Whilst this is not necessarily the best way to do things, it’s what I’ve decided to do in order to save time. One of the things to do with link building and is more popular nowadays is to create link wheels. This is where you have 2 or more tiers of links. The first tier links are those that link direct to your money page website. These are the highest quality links that you get and include lots of Web 2.0 properties like blogs and Squidoo.

A second tier of links are then built that point to your first tier links. This boosts the power of the 1st tier and therefore passes its ranking juice to the money site. The 1st tier sites act as a protective buffer for the money page in case there are a load of poor quality links that Google may penalise, in this case, only the 1st tier site would be affected and the money page would be protected.

I have a load of other sites that I’m working on so they are my priority. I do plan on creating higher quality links to this case study site and get it ranking eventually.

My next tasks over the next few days or so would be to add some more content and build some more quality links.

I have decided to make one of the websites that I have jsut started working on yesterday a working case study. The details of which I will post on this blog. I will not reveal the actual product or the website that I’m building (too many people copy from previous case studies others have done despite there being thousands of niches out there!).

I will keep an ongoing log of what I’m doing in terms of website development, optimization and marketing. I will also post my ranking details and any earnings from it. This is a useful exercise for me personally as I get to focus on my thoughts and actions a bit more by making it public.

So, to get things going, yesterday I was working on something and browsing a forum and saw an advert for a newish product that had been launched on clickbank. It had already launched but the product creators were looking for more affiliates and were running an affiliate competition to see who could get the most sales.

So, the product I’ve chosen is in the music niche and is being sold through Clickbank. I decided as with all of my other sites to use WordPress as my platform of choice as it’s very easy to setup and easy to manage.

I personally use Hostgator (if you need hosting, you can use this Hostagor coupon code for 25% off: mwmblogcasestudy1 ) for my hosting and have the Hatchling shared hosting plan. It’s the cheapest, very reliable and I can host unlimited websites! I must have about 20 sites on it. Anyway, with that setup, I installed WordPress using Fantastico (just a few clicks of a button) and its all done.

I configure my WordPress site, which I can go into in another post if people want me to. I install my favourite theme Flexibility 3 Theme, this is now free I believe. It’s a brilliant theme and I use it pretty much for 95% of my sites. It’s very customizable and easy to use. I recently bought a review theme from somewhere else and decided that it was crap so went back to my tried and tested theme.

The product I decided to promote had an extensive affiliate section and provided some great resources that I could use and make my own. This definitely makes website creation a whole lot quicker. I took some of their articles and merged them and re-written it to make it more unique. The article was in the format of a review.

I have to say that before I did all of this I had a quick look at the keyword analysis and there was not huge search numbers for the product name but it was sufficient. The Google Keyword tool showed 1300 exact searches per month which is not bad. For other keywords related to the product in terms of function, the exactly monthly searches was more like 12,100.  In terms of competition in the organic results, it was doable is all I can say. Not easy but shouldn’t be difficult. I will not go into how I do keyword research here as I don’t have time but if people want me to, then just let me know and I will write a post later on.

So, I’ve decided to plunge for it and develop my site. I have rewritten a review article based on the articles the developers provided in the affiliate section. I don’t think it really matters if your ‘money page’ is a post or page in WordPress but my preference is a page, for no particular reason.

Anyway, once I have published my review page, I optimize it for the search engines until it is the best I can get it. Onpage SEO is very important and can be undervalued by some. I will post more details later on how I do it. So, I have my domain name, my website with a one page review article that links to the main sales page of the product. Of course my affiliate link is in there but cloaked so it looks more professional as well.

I then fire up Ultimate Demon which is my software of choice to help me with my link building. It’s a great piece of software, makes it simple and automates a lot of the work though there is a bit of setting up to do. Anyway, again if people are interested I can write about it more later, I just want to get through this post as I have a load of other stuff to do!

Using Ultimate Demon, I submited 7 spun articles to article directories and I also pinged my home page using pingomatic.

In addition to all of this I setup a Facebook fanpage and a PPC campaign using a technique/strategy that I learned somewhere. This is a test to see how it works, which of course I will report back. I did try setting up an Adwords campaign but Google being Google declined it because it was a ‘doorway’ page.

Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment, and looking back on it, I got a hell of a lot of work done for a day. My next steps is to add more content and build more links. Watch out for part 2! Let me know what you think.

At the moment I’ve been extremely busy working hard on the Internet marketing side of things and lots and lots of testing. I’m testing lots of different strategies at the moment that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with myself! lol!

Anyway, I’ve been testing out different websites, different ‘out of the box’ type strategies and different link building and marketing strategies. I’m starting to formulate more of an idea for a game plan that I will follow through more. At the moment I want to try a load of different things to see what works best for me, or to be more accurate, which methods and techniques I like that I’m happy continuing more.

I know its all a little vague but things will become clearer and I will share some of my thoughts and findings, not to mention my progress as well in some of my projects.

So watch this space. For now, I will just throw in a little neat WordPress plugin that is just brilliant. It is the ‘ClickBump’ SEO plugin. It’s really cool and it’s a very simple plugin that helps you optimize your posts and pages to specific keywords. It can give you a score after you have finished writing and tell you exactly where you need to improve to maximize your onpage SEO work.

I will do a fully review on this neat plugin when I get time. For now, there is a load of stuff waiting for me to complete! Until then…

What have I been upto in the past couple of weeks or so?

It’s been a crazy busy time and I’m starting to get used to a flow of working. Working from home is quite different and requires a different mindshift and change of attitude in some respects. It’s very easy to become non-productive and without good habits and self-management, it is very easy to get not a lot done!

I’ve setup a few mini-sites as test projects and will leave them to develop however they develop for now. I’m just focusing on 2 niches now and will devote most of my time to developing these 2 websites. In fact one website is enough to keep me busy but I tend to get bored and like to have some variety. I also know myself and that if I get bored and lose focus, I end up browsing the net and wasting valuable time.

So, the aim of having 2 niche websites are to develop them into mini-authority websites and grow them. I will write a lot of the content myself and will outsource some of it as well. One website will eventually be monetised using Google Adsense, the other website will be monetised with affiliate products in that niche.

I’m quite optimistic and enjoying the work. I have set myself up with a schedule of sorts of what I need to do each day and if I stick with it, then the sites will develop very nicely. I have also just sorted out my home office, which is a packed out spare room with a desk and my laptop! I have invested in a whiteboard as I can just scribble down my thoughts and projects. I find that I use notebooks and have about 3-4 of them. It makes finding information difficult just when you need it!

So with my new setup, my 2 new projects that I will focus on, I should be well away and hopefully get the websites upto a good content level oer the next couple of weeks. I will then focus on the marketing and rankings. Will post more soon.

One of the great things about being self-employed and working from home is the ability to be very flexible. Sure there is work to do and you need to be quite disciplined with your time if you are to be successful working from home. But there is an inherent flexbility in your schedule in that your time is your own to do as you wish.

It’s great to be around and to be able to help out with our little son when my wife needs a hand doing things or if one of them is not feeling particularly well one day, it’s really nice to be able to step in and help out and be around. Of course you need boundaries where your work time is your work time, but having flexibility is a massive benefit to working from home.

As a work at home parent this is one of the reasons i do what I do. What do you see are the great advantages for you when working from home?

We had a one bedroom flat in London for the past 4 years and have had some great memories there. But as things happened during life, it was definitely time to move on. After putting it onto the market, we ended up taking it off again as we were not 100% sure we should sell. Anyhow, we ended up putting it on the market again!

Over the course of a year or so, we had 2 offers on the flat, one fell through early on as the lady couldn’t get a mortgage after putting in her offer, and the second offer just fell through after a long delay when we had to get the lease extended on it! Anyway, as things turned out over the Christmas/New Year period just gone, we had 2 offers and accepted one.

Only yesterday have we just completed the sale and what a relief it is! It has been a long journey for myself and my wife. Not to mention our little toddler son. Anyway, it is all sorted now and we can really move on and put that episode of our lies behind us.

To say we have learned a great deal from our experiences whilst owning that flat is an understatement but suffice to say that we are moving onto better things for our family.

I have also been thinking about this blog and have decided to change its direction a little. More in the sense that I will talk about more general things in life, especially family life and working from home. For many people that is an ultimate goal, to work from home and I am fortunate enough for the time being to be able to do just that and have great quality time with family and also diong what I love.

Wow, I’ve not posted in a while despite my good intentions, but things have been very busy in life (as always!).

Firstly, I have moved back to Birmingham with my family. It’s great to finally be back together again as we have a little toddler (so cute!). We have also sold out flat in London and are living in rented accommodation at present until the house we are buying goes through.

I have not been totally quiet on the Internet front but have been putting into action some other websites and little projects that I am currently experimenting with. I will report on how I get on with them in a few weeks (hopefully). Since we have moved into our rented flat, we have not fully unpacked and so everything feels a bit temporary and messy. Not the best place to work out of as I do tend to like a clear space, but hey you have to work with what you have.

Anyway, just a quick post to update that I am still around and working in the background!

Internet marketing is a funny old business. In the early days, Internet business seemed to follow a different set of rules. Especially true to this was how time was compressed such was the speed of change and development in the virtual world. A week on the Internet was often likened to a year or so in the offline World. It was and still is a fast moving industry.

With all of this was also an attitude to how things are expected to be done online. Information should be available instantly, replies to emails within 24 hours or sooner, Internet connections should be fast. If you bought something online, you would want to have access to it immediately. It caused something of a shift in the psyche of users. It led to the expansion of instant gratification. This was a defining feature of the Internet, where you could get things faster than in the offline world.

In the earlier days of Internet marketing, business opportunities that promised instant riches just by pressing a few buttons were rife, $20 ebooks that taught you how to make a million dollars online by sending out an email or two, courses that promised to show you how to make tens of thousands of dollars online within 30 days, etc. You get what I mean, get-rich-quick schemes and the like.

Well, in today’s Internet World, things are not so different, many of those types of get-rich-quick products are still around in one guise or another. The nature of the Internet is still essentially the same, the ability to have information literally at your fingertips and this has allowed the instant gratification mindset to continue. With this mindset come those individuals who seek to achieve the Internet dream of earning lots of money doing not a lot, and in a very short time!

It has really led to the massive amount of crap online, the so-called ‘business opportunities’ that promise quick and easy wealth with a push of a button! In an effort to try and make quick, easy money, people fall for these opportunities by the bucket load, all fuelled by the need to have instant gratification and instant results. Of course it doesn’t work that way and the huge number of people who go online hoping to make money actually failing is massive at around 95%.

What is required is a change in attitude to developing an online business, and change in mindset no less. In reality we all know that there no such thing as a free lunch, and this is just as true on the Internet as elsewhere. Making money online and building an online business takes time and it takes money. In fact, as the Internet business opportunity market has matured, people are starting to realise that although there is huge potential to making money online, it is no easy feat.

The guru’s who claim to be able to teach you to make some easy money just by sending some emails out are not telling you everything, they are holding back on you. Most likely, they have a subscriber list of tens of thousands of people and this was most probably built up over many years and at great cost and effort to them. Of course once you are in possession of a large list of subscribers, then making money from it is not really much more difficult than sending out an email. The pre-work to get to that point however, is another story.

My point here is, building a real and sustainable Internet business takes time, effort and money. The Internet game is not a sprint but a marathon. This is how you should treat your business. Working steady and consistently will ensure that you don’t get caught up in the get-rich-quick mindset that dooms so many to failure.

Far too many people get out of the starting blocks and sprint before they have a solid foundation. They are too keen and jump on to any business venture that promises a lot for nothing. This is a receipe for disaster. By treating your Internet business as a real business, then you have already made a big leap toward success. Keep working toward your goals, steadily, consistently and looking at the long-term, then success will find you.

Living an Internet laptop lifestyle is one that is highly desirable to many. Being able to be location independent and being able to work when and where you want is very attractive to many people, and indeed is a reason why many people strive to build an Internet business.

To achieve this lifestyle, you need the right equipment and this usually means that you need access to the Internet. Ideally your own laptop for security reasons, though you could always log on at Internet cafes (not recommended). Most computers have WiFi capabilities and most places have some sort of WiFi network that you can connect to.

However, occasionally it WiFi is not always readily available and can scupper your plans to live this mobile life as you wish. The answer? How about MiFi. This is a mobile modem unit that provides you with a mobile WiFi access. I bought a unit myself recently for about £80 and then bought a pay as you go data Sim card to use. This was for a recently trip to Hong Kong where the Internet is not readily available where I was staying.

I must say, generally it worked really well and connection speeds were fast with HSPDA and 3G data access. Also it only cost me $28 Hong Kong dollars per day which is only about £2/day for unlimited Internet access! When I was over in Hong Kong, I stayed with family who lived in the more rural areas and Internet was not available. Fortunately with my MiFi unit I was able to get good reception and able to access the Internet and my emails.

Of course I did not do lots of ‘work’ but it was very useful to be able to send out some emails, browse the web and do lots of skype calls (mainly with family in the UK).

I now take my MiFi unit with me most of the time when travelling, especially when on the train and can do some ‘work’ when necessary. It really brought home to me the fact that modern technology is such now that you can really work where you wish as long as you have the right equipment that doesn’t cost the earth.

My current mobile ‘office’ setup includes:

Apple MacBook 13″ (2008)
Huawei E586 MiFi unit
Three Mobile pay as you go data sim card