Great Content Is Really King!

Google has seem to finally weed out all the junk content that was crowding the serp results. Hundreds of marketers sites have been slammed down the serps even HUGE authority sites like EZINEARTICLES and BUZZLE have felt the google wrath!

EZA has completely changed up its whole game plan.  It now only accepts articles with a minimum word count of 400.  They also said they have double the time it takes for articles to reviewed and approved.

Now to some marketers this is a nightmare but to others this is a godsend.  I for one am happy that google is deciding to lay the SMACK DOWN on sites with poor content.  Maybe now we can get back to the days where people create high quality articles that actually provides solutions and helps the readers? Maybe....

No more outsourcing $3 dollar 500 word articles to clog up article directories and stink up your blogs.  Well I guess you can still buy these kind of articles if you don't care about good rankings.

Now you will have to have HIGH QUALITY PREMIUM CONTENT if you want to have a chance to rank high and STAY ranked.

This is great news for us REAL marketers because that means we can actually start to provide real value to our visitors and not some crap content.

Now more then ever it is important to treat your visitors like real humans not just traffic or conversions. Now its all about creating value.

So when your writing your articles for your niche sites keep in mind adding value. If you focus on really helping your niche and providing great information they will keep coming back. Then you can start recommending products and your know what? They will actually buy them just based on your recommendation because of all the free invaluable content you have been giving them.

This is what this blog is going to focus on! I want to provide great and awesome value to my readers. I just started this blog not to long ago but I already have people that come here daily to read and check updates.

So to the few readers that I do have I want this to be a place of no none-sense just straight helpful and valuable content. I will be updating this blog more often and will provide insight to my business as I go from nothing to something.

If you have questions or have any advice for me please leave a comment or you can skype me @ "race2mill"

So remember to stay tuned and keep providing value to others in the end you will always win!

Race

New Business Direction...

I have decided to head in a new business direction. I am going to focus on offline marketing because it is so easy to drive traffic to these kind of sites.

Your not competing against the HORDES of other affiliate marketers and these business are really desperate for your help. The hardest part is just getting your foot in the door with these kind of businesses. Despite what you might think these owners receive hundreds of calls and emails from people like us daily trying to sell them SEO work and the sorts.

So my plan is to give them something of great value first for free then try to close them as a client. Like my first client I closed I did a web design for her completely free and showed it to her. She loved it and she is now paying for monthly seo services and she also paid for the new web design.

I got a comment the other day from someone saying that they wish they can do what I am doing but they do not know how to design a website. Well I have some news for you neither do I!!! There are dozens on the WF for hire section that do though. There are hundreds of people on freelancer.com, rentacoder.com, odesk ect ect...that do know how to do a web design.

So don't let that be a excuse when it comes to helping out these businesses. I actually am doing a new design for a new client I emailed. And we agreed if he likes the design he will buy it...if he doesn't likes it then I can kick rocks...Its easy as that!

Yea some people are going to say NO and I am outsourcing and paying before I get the client to pay. But I rather spend $40-$60 dollars on a design that could possibly bring me in $1,000 dollars plus any SEO services I can upsell the client to.

I see it as the same risk as doing a media buy, ppc campaign, or even paying someone for SEO. But rarely in any of the previous methods can it net you the kind of ROI that selling a website can.

As far as for me doing anything related to affilate marketing its still a goal of mine. But its currently on hold because I can see myself making passive income far more quickly going offline.

I also want to learn more about paid traffic and move away from SEO....Its to unpredictable, I am tired of keeping up on all the backlinking and optimizing tricks to try to stay in googles good favor.

Paid traffic is predictable you know if you spend a certain amount of dollars you get X amount of visitors. You just have to make sure that your sales funnel is set up properly to capitalize on every visitor.

So with this being said my next investment when it comes to doing anything online will be in coaching. I am trying to save up around $2,000 to get 2 weeks worth of coaching from this IMer I learned so much from. I am willing to invest this amount to learn from the best and eliminate all my trial and error....

I will be updating this blog more frequently telling you about different tips and tricks I am using to get offline clients. And once I get back into the affiliate marketing world I will share everything about that also.

Until next time.
Race

First Offline Client!!!!

YEAH BABY!!!

Today I booked my first offline client!! It was not easy though multiple reschedules and various other things that happen almost made me give up. But I didn't....

I was suppose to have a meeting with her today. by the way she is a wedding planner. But she called me and tried to reschedule once again. So I had to pull out the big guns to get her to come to me!

Earlier in the week I decided to get a mock-up of a brand new site done for her. I looked at her website and seen that it was not very pretty and she might need to do a new website. So I had my designer do a mock-up that is formatted for wordpress.

Since she called and rescheduled again I decided to water mark the mock-up and send it to her. I was waiting to meet her face to face to show her the design but I said what the heck what could it hurt and emailed it to her anyway.

As soon as I push the SEND BUTTON she was calling on my iPhone. I was stunned....anyway when I answered she just was gushing over the new design. She basically said ok im sold tell me how much?

I told her that it would be a one time fee for $950 then $375 per month for ongoing SEO. She gave me the spiel about how money is tight and this and that. She said that she would hang up and thank about it. So about 5 mins later she called me and said lets do it!

She said that she will pay Monday but send her the PayPal info and the contract. I was so shocked I almost dropped the phone. This was the quickest money I ever made (besides selling some sites on flippa) and I never even met this person.

Now I have the confidence to approach other business owners and closing even more deals.

I think the key item to really closing her was the mock-up. So now im thinking about calling businesses with terrible website and telling them I will design a website for them and if they like it they can pay for it if they don't like it they pay nothing.

I know its kind of risky because I am paying up-front for the design to get done and there maybe a chance that they wont buy it but hey im gonna try it anyway. I figure the worst case scenario I can just add the site to my portfolio. Best case scenario im up $1,000.

Have you guys started any offline work??

Race

Day 14 - Offline Marketing?

Ok guys I know its been a couple of days since I wrote on this blog. I have been busy!

And not with online but with offline activities. Im starting to get pretty desperate as far as cashflow and the last thing I want to do is go back to the 9-5 life. So I started to contact people I know that have businesses and calling friends and family for referrals.

I got a friend that I been helping dominate the local serps for a couple of months now. His traffic went from none existent to over 400 per month.

I know in the IM world 400 is nothing but to a local business owner 400 extra potential leads per month is life changing!

So I called up my friend and asked him if he has some referrals for me. He sent out a email blast to some of his contacts and within 2 days I received 4 inquires.

Out of those 4 inquires I set up 2 meetings. One of the clients is a wedding and event planner and the other has a accountant firm. So if I know anything about the offline world the accountant firm can be a big deal.

I also know that the wedding planner is 100% sold she even asked me to bring a contract to sign. I know that I can lock her in for atleast $300 bucks per month. SO EXCITING!!

I have been working on my offline marketing website and packages past couple of days to get ready for the clients.

Now back to the IM world.

My list is up to 37 people. I haven't gotten any sales yet but people are opening and ready the emails. I even got an email from a subscriber saying thanks for the great info, so I guess im doing something right huh?

My adsense authority site has been avg over $1 buck for the past couple of days. I know once I start making money in the offline I am going to dump it into this authority site to start ranking for some big words.

Ok that enough for today I have to get back to working on these offline packages.

How do you guys feel about offline? Are you trying to get clients?

Google Sniper Or Google Liar?

EDIT: It seems like George Brown is going through a lot of trouble trying to keep is LIE a SECRET. First the thread on WF got locked now the images showing his proof of income lies get deleted. Coincidence? I think not! What's next my WF profile or this blog?

Past couple of days I have been getting bombarded with emails promoting the popular GSniper 2.0. This is a very popular product in the IM world and the product owner George got his start on Warrior Forum.

Being though he is a fellow Warrior I had a lot of trust in him. I though that he really cared about the newbies who are trying to make some income.

But sadly it seems he doesn't he only cares about generating a lot of hype and money from his products. If you go to his new site http://gsniper2.com/ you will see a video where he is showing his clickbank income.

He shows that last year he made over 400k just by using is sniper system. But if you look really close you can see that the clickbank account he uses is actually a vendor account to a product that was very popular and heavly promoted last year.

The vendor name is TSIPHON as shown here

So he is indeed lying when he says his income shown is strictly from using his system. Income shown was from his very popular IM product traffic siphon.

Be careful who you trust guys...

Race

Day 10 - Made a Sale

Last night I made a sale from site number 2. Just to clarify im working on 2 clickbank sites. Site #1 I am using article marketing to drive traffic to while Site #2 already ranks high and gets traffic but I have not been able to convert it into sales.

So last night I checked my CB stats and see I made a sale from Site #2. Yesterday I spent hours and I did a total rehaul on Site #2. I wrote a 5 day email series and a brand new landing page with a opt-in form.

I took all affiliate links of the page and I am now funneling all traffic to the opt-in. So far I have 2 subscribers, mind you a completed everything around 3:30am yesterday. I just checked my aweber stats and it says I had 32 unique displays and only 2 signups. So it looks like I have to tweak the copy some more.

This is the hard part tweaking your page until you have good enough conversions. I would love to have a opt-in rate of 25%. So this is what I am going to tweak for. I have no idea how to make a high converting landing page. All I can do is search around and look at others and try to emulate with my own copy.

If anyone has a good course or something on making high converting squeeze pages please leave a comment.

I didn't get a chance to write anymore articles for Site #1 because I spent all day working on Site #2. Today I do plan on getting some articles out for Site #1.

I think I am going to put more focus on Site #2 because its already getting stead daily traffic and I should focus on trying to convert that. I believe with the traffic that site gets I should be able to make a full time income.

We will see..

Race

Yesterday's Earnings:

Adsense: $1.23

Clickbank: $31.85

Day 9 - When The Clicks Stop Coming In

So I have 6 articles approved on EZA with 4 waiting for approval. The problem is that traffic has virtually stopped to my articles and im not getting traffic so im not getting clicks.

This can be a real problem. I had 3 articles go live yesterday and they have about 6 views total for all three. And the 3 article that where already approved have not been getting anymore traffic but they do have a nice CTR of 37%

I did order a Xrumer blast to one of my articles maybe that will boost it up the serps so I can start seeing some more traffic.

Now as for my list it still sits at 4 subscribers :) but they are a very responsive 4 subscribers. 3 out of 4 opens every email. How I have it set up is that I give them 5 days of great information but in each email I make sure to tell them about a product that will help them along. Then on the 6th day I tell them the name of the product.

How well this will work we will see for one of my subscribers today is the 6th day. So I will get to see if he will buy. Im not expecting a sale out of 4 people on my list but it would be nice.

Back to site number 2. I don't know if I mentioned here but I have a health site that is getting around 120 visits per day from pretty good keywords. I am promoting a clickbank product on there but it gets like 1 sale every 3000 visits I know terrible.

Even though the traffic I am getting is targeted I think this crowd needs to be warmed up a little bit before they buy. So I am working on a email series for this site.

I am going to remove all the clickbank links and only have my opt-in form on there funneling all my traffic through my email sales funnel.

Hopefully this can work out well for me. Since this site is aged and I know I can easily expand it to 300 visitors per month. The only reason why I have been reluctant to do this in the past is because of the horrible conversion rates.

But by setting up a proper sales funnel I should be able to make a lot more sales.

Adsense is the same ol same ol. When I start making some clickbank money I will be able to re invest into building some backlinks for my authority adsense site.

This is all I have for today guys just remember you have to be consistent. I know starting out its tough but as long as you have a proven sales funnel like list building ect....Its going to be hard not seeing results.

[2/12/11 12:54:24 PM]Richard: the way i see it is all you need is a sales funnel and traffic

[2/12/11 12:54:25 PM] Richard: it doesn't get more simple than that

Wise words from one of my IM buddies....

Get UNcomfortable.
Push through the resistance.

Race

Today's Goals

Write email series for health site.

Write 3 articles for site 1

Day 8 - Articles and more articles

Ok so I have written in submitted a total of 8 articles. Some of them are approved while others are still in review.

I will say more and more I write articles the easier and easier it gets. My goal is to have 50 total article written by the 24th of this month so that means I have about 42 more to go at a rate of 3 per day to reach this goal.

I think this is easily doable for me. My aim is to write 6 articles per day. Since my finance has allowed me to leave my job to work on IM fulltime. Well kinda sorta fulltime being though I have 2 young kids 8 months and 2 years old.

So its almost like part-time IMer and full-time daddy day care. But if I can carve out 1 hour 3 times per day to wright 2 articles at each setting I will be on my way.

I only have 4 people on my list right now but they seem to be responding well. All of them are opening and reading the emails and tomorrow my first promotional email is going out.

I know that i shouldn't expect any sales with only 4 people on my list but the though of it is exciting by itself.

The reason I only have 4 people on my list is that I haven't had anymore traffic to my site from the articles I written and I have been waiting for EZA to approve the current articles so I can start getting some clicks and some more sign ups.

I would love to have 300 people on my list by the end of the month. This means I will have to average 16-17 sign ups per day. I think this is possible once I start getting some more of these articles approved.

A list of 300 and I am aiming for a conversion rate of at least 8% (hopefully higher) will net me around 24 sales. 24 sales and a commission of $26 bucks per sale will net me $624 profit. That wouldn't be bad for the first month eh?

Nothing really else to talk about adsense has been a non factor since the latest algo changes. While my site is still ranking for tons of keywords in the TOP 5 of google they are not getting traffic.

Soon as I start to make some consistent weekly sales I am going to outsource weekly backlinking to my authority adsense site.

So thats it for today I guess this is the hardest part about starting out in IM and thats the initial work. You may go months before you see any of your hardwork pay off but I believe that I have a sound system and should start seeing my work payoff sooner then later.

Get UNcomfortable.
Push through the resistance.

Race

Yesterdays Earnings:

AdSense: $0.78

Clickbank: $0

Day 6 - Google Slap

So it appears yesterday there will a Google algo change. I had a couple sites I was working on that was gaining some traction in google that got dropped 2-3 pages.

My authority adsense site also dropped some spots so my adsense income for yesterday was a big fat $0. All I can do is just keep pumping out high quality backlinks to this site and hope that it starts to rise again. Mind you this site is a PR2 2year old domain.

Flippa

So I posted a site on flippa the other day and the auction ended for only $25 bucks. The site had at least $300 dollar worth of backlinks into it but I guess people didn't see the value in the site or I didn't showcase the value properly.

I am still determined to make some income off flippa because like I mentioned in my last post I see a lot of terrible sites making $347 or more per site. I also see sellers making outrages claims like make $800 dollars per day guaranteed in the next 30 days. These sites are selling for over $1000 this baffles me how people can be so dumb.

List Building

So yesterday I decided to completely re-work my opt-in landing page. Since it was converting horribly. I went to clickbank sales pages and study them for a while to see if I can get down a certain format they use. The page I studied the most was magicofmakingup.com because I know Travis is awesome when it comes to conversions.

This is a little bit of a difficult task because I never wrote any type of copy before some I am really teaching myself. I do need to pick up some materiel on copy writing because this is key if I am to survive in IM.

So after I re-worked my copy I went to sleep and woke up to a brand new subscriber. Hopefully this is good news and this page can start to convert better. In the past week my site has had 36 visits from EZA with 3 subscribers.

I have more article waiting to get reviewed and until this site can start making some money for me to reinvest back into it I am going to have to keep pumping out articles. I think I am going to continue to write until I reach 50 then I can reevaluate.

Today Goals:

Write 5 articles

Monitor my new and improve copy

Yesterday's Earnings:

Adsense: $0

Clickbank: $0

Flippa: $25

Day 5 - Squeeze Page Conversions

Back with another update.

Yesterday finally got some more articles approved. Now I got 3 articles approved 81 total views and 31 total clicks. Right now I have a 36.9% CTR to my squeeze page but my squeeze page is converting terribly.

I only have 2 subscribers thats like a 6.5% opt-in rate which is horrible. All day today I have been searching the warriorforum and other forums for a possible WSO or Thread on creating high converting squeeze pages but found nothing.

If anyone has a good course or advice on creating high converting squeese page please let me know.

I would love to get this squeeze page to a 30% conversion rate.

So yesterday I posted my flippa auction for my starter site and as of now it has 0 bids with 8 hours to go :(. What I don't understand is how some flippa sellers are making a killing selling terrible starter sites (like this guy https://flippa.com/users/155822) while my site is not getting any attention. This is site is already starting to rank in google and has a lot of high quality backlinks already built to it.

Hopefully in the last hours I will get some bids on it because its really a great value in my eyes. The plan was to make some extra backlinking bucks on flippa to re invest into building links to my articles and authority adsense site but I don't know how that is going to work out.

Maybe tomorrow I can report back with some good news that my site sold for a good piece of change.

Yesterdays Earnings:

Adsense: $1.07

Clickbank: $0

Flippa: $0

Today's Goals:

Write 3 more articles

Tweak squeeze page for higher conversions

Super Bowl Sunday - Day 4

Im on day 4 and really didn't get nothing done again today. Spent time with the kids and family and went to a superbowl party. GO GREEN BAY!!!

I did manage to get site ready for flippa. I decided that I am going to build starter sites for clickbank and amazon and put them up on flippa. I need to start generating some income so I can start outsourcing some much needed work. So I am going to use flippa for that it seems like there are a lot of sites on there that are selling well to be starter sites.

If I can make a extra $500 net profit per week doing this I will be happy.

Today didn't get much traffic to my autoresponder test site im thinking because today was the superbowl. I managed only two measly visits today and no opt-ins. As I drive more article traffic to my squeeze page I can start tweaking the copy for maximum conversions.

I also decided that I am not going to go the MASS article marketing route to drive traffic. Instead I am going to do around 10-20 articles and focus just on backlinking those article to drive them up the search engines.

This seems like it was the smartest way to do this without getting burnt out. Also EZA starts to get a little strict when you start submitting dozen of article on the same topic. I may change my mind about the mass article thing and just use articlebase instead.

I also need to start backlinking my adsense authority site so I can see some more cash start trickling in. Currently its only getting 5-10 visits per day and averaging a little over $1 per day. I have an insanely high CTR so I need to focus on driving more traffic.

Tomorrow goal is to list my starter site on flippa and possibly write some more articles. I have about 5 waiting for approval at EZA.

Todays Earnings:

Adsense: $1.92

Clickbank: $0

Flippa: $0

Until next time

Race

Day 3

I didn't get anything done today. I did a lot of personal things like getting the car serviced.

But I did get 10 visits to my clickbank site today from EZA and got my first opt-in to my list...YAY!

Im currently at a 10% conversion rate for my optin page which is trash. I did do some tweaking to it today so maybe I can raise it. I would love to have it at least 30% conversion rate.

And I am shooting for atleast a 8% conversion from my email autoresponder messages. As I get more people to opt-in ill be able to tweak more. I would love in the future to have 15-20% conversion rate but we will see.

In other news my adsense site made $1.34 today. I want to turn this site into an authority site then flip it for big money on flippa. The site currently has 40 pages and its in a huge niche but its awfully hard building backlinks to all those pages. So I am thinking about just focusing on 1 or 2 pages at a time.

When its all said and done this site should net me around $70-100 bucks per day.

Todays Earnings:

Adsense: $1.34

Clickbank: $0

$198.66 more to reach my daily goal :).

Until next time folks!!

Day 2

Today was nothing special. My clickbank account still sits at zero.

I did manage to get one article writing today for my niche and submitted to EZA. I currently have 1 article live and 3 article waiting submission.

I also did some backlinking to the article that is already live in efforts to boost it up the SERPS. I still haven't decided which way I am going to go with article marketing. I don't know if I am going to go mass articles like submit 100 article in one niche to EZA or submit a handful of articles and just focus on getting them to the front page.

I also started working on a email autoreponder series for another site of mine. This site has huge potential. It gets over 100 google visits per day but has horrible conversions. I am hoping to change this buy building a list and selling through my autoresponder.

Today I did make some adsense cash! I made $1.39 from one site. My plan is when I start generating some income from my clickbank ventures I can start investing in expanding and building links for this adsense site.

Well that it for today. Everyday I am going to keep pushing I just decided as I wrote this post that I am going to set a goal to make $200 per day in the next 60 days...

We will see how close I come..

Todays earnings:

Adsense: $1.39

Clickbank: $0

My Journey Starts Day 1

Hello all...

Today is the start of my long journey to freedom and IM success. I will be using this blog to document my goals and help keep myself accountable.

Hopefully along the way I can use this blog to make a few friends also.

Thats my clickbank account as you see nothing to shout about but I will be changing that in the upcoming months.

Today I finished up my email autoresponder and my squeeze page and I just submitted 3 articles to ezinearticles.

My plan is to drive article traffic to a squeeze page then sell them through email. This is what all the IM gurus are doing so its about time I do this myself.

I haven't decided on what route I am going to go with article marketing yet. I don't know if I want to submit mass articles or just submit few and just focus on getting them ranked.

For now I think I will continue to submit articles until I reach 30 articles on EZA. Then after that I think I will be able to see in what direction I need to head.

I am working in one niche. I want to make this niche profitable with a system before I go all willie nillie on dozen of niches. Ideally I want to pull in $100 dollars per day in this one niche alone. This should be possible with building a list and crafting an awesome relationship with the niche.

This niche is very desperate and they are looking for something to cure there pain. I only made 5 email articles just to see if I can get some conversions. If the product starts to convert I may do a years worth of emails. This will create a money tree ripe for the picking.

So after I see how conversions are with article marketing traffic I will start adding content to the site and getting it ranked for different search terms. I am not going to put any affiliate links on my actual website. I want to direct all traffic to my squeeze page and sell them there.

I also plan on doing some adsense site building and flipping. I have successfully flipped adsense sites before. My best flip was 6k on flippa last year. So this year I want to do more of that for sure.

Well this is all that I have to say for now. I am trying to get use to writing because I hate writing or I should say "I used to hate writing" but now I LOVE IT :/...

Until next time.....

Please leave comments if you have any questions or any advice thanks!