MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

Internet Marketing

Can Ebooks Help You Make Money?

Can Ebooks Help You Make Money?

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LOLz, I know I’m probably gonna be biased in talking here because of I, myself having an upcoming ebook but trust me I’m not. 😉

A lot of people who are starting usually ask ‘if ebooks can really help them start making money online’  or if it’s just a complete worthless crap. Most people who ask this are probably getting lost because they see a lot of people selling ebooks but on the other side they see different types of people saying 99% of ebooks are scam and worthless. Can ebooks help you make money?

The short answer to the question is no! Ebooks can be informative and rich in content but we also need to take a look at the fact that most ‘gurus’ who sell ebooks aren’t really making money online outside of selling their books! I once bought an ebook w/c exposes how to do your own make money online book w/o being an expert in the certain niche and I was flabbergasted. Not only I discovered how anyone can easily make a book but also how idiots can make big bucks writing ebooks they don’t even implement. Another thing is that most ebooks are effective for just a very short period in time as it easily gets saturated. It’s not timeless. Most guru would discover a new way to make $100 a day, then test it more and more. After it they would sell the information only to find out that its not as profitable anymore as it once started.

Theoretically the answer could be yes as well. Over the course of my young internet marketing life I have purchased over 50 books related to mmo. 80% are junk, 20% ‘can’ be useful but not really implementable. I say yes, because there are really some useful infos on an ebook that’s not about getting rich but is about something you think is more trivial yet, can really be a good find. What I normally do is just pick something from the book and implement it to my own ideas. I’m not saying my ideas are better but it’s far better to believe more in your own skills (so not to blame anyone).

So to end this one, if a good friend of mine asks about that question my answer would definitely be no! I really used to have grit with ebooks as most marketers who market other people’s product rather than creating their own do. Buying ebooks ‘may not’ be a good way to start or it could be. And since ebooks are way cheaper than buying a pair of Nike shoes, there really isn’t anything to lose in buying one. So my piece of advice? If you have the money (and good faith in that certain ebook/s), then go ahead and buy as much ebooks as you can. Just don’t expect too much from it and stop being a crybaby afterwards.

Promoting Email Submits? Don’t!

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affiliate fraud Pictures, Images and Photos

When every newcomer enters the world of affiliate marketing, he’s normally advised to try out the low-risk email submit types of offers. Why not, I mean email submits are pretty easy to convert. All you need to get a lead is an email of a customer. Also you don’t need to compete for those very high keyword competing keywords Promoting email submits ‘could’ really be the way to start for newbies.

Anyway here in this blog I have written some email submit walkthroughs that I have done (which has become outdated already). The last successful email submit campaign I had was last year when I heavily promoted the Obama vs. McCain thing. The campaign nearly brought me $20+ for almost 1 1/2 straight months and I was promoting them through Copeac.

Just to let you guys know email submits work this way. The merchant  ‘is ‘said’ to pay affiliates (us) $1+ for every email submit lead. The truth behind the offer is that when someone enters his email, he is then presented to 20+ more incentivized offers which the merchant runs as an affiliate as well. Affiliates get scrubbed when the certain customer enters his email but never completed 6-7 more offers (both paid and free offers). On some shitty email submits offers, they even demand 15-20 offers to be completed before they even get you the $1.50 per lead! Sucks? Yes it does!

For the customer’s side (our lead) here is how it goes.  So what is going to happen about that “free” something on email submit? Well as I’ve said they’d be entered into a larger plethora of offers in which in order to get that freebie, they have to complete those. To be able to complete, they have to purchase something and again in the end, it’s like they just paid  that free stuff.

Convert2Media founder Ruck told me in their IRC channel that these types of offers are something that they don’t have control at. So the best thing they did is just to eliminate all email and zip submit offers. If you look around the other affiliate networks, Copeac has taken down all of them as well, Market Leverage on the other hand has lessened theirs. It seems like the once mighty and in-demand type of offer has rapidly plunged down.

So to end this one is it still worth promoting email and zip submit offers? Hmmm, partly? Well if you could go for other higher converting offers that don’t scrub your balls that much then why not just go for them instead? I would very much love to hear your opinion about it

Failures That I Implemented in This Blog…

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So you probably have read it everywhere. A lot of people are really open into sharing their mistakes and faults with their business. Why? Because it takes so much interest from the readers. Readers are usually interested about these things and so I think I need to create my list as well. 🙂

But with a twist. I think if I would put a general list then it would quickly grow up to over 200 major failures. And so I would limit it to this specific blog known as melvin blog. Here they are (no order):

  1. Putting a pop-up ad on this blog –> Not a lot of you might have noticed it but I actually did it about 2-3 months after I started. The pop-up geographically targets US, canada visitors so traffic outside those countries wouldn’t experience it. After 2 months it drew over $10 before I learned the company actually is on hiatus for about 1 year. sucks!
  2. Putting an incentives page –> The page was actually still active and is found on /incentives of the blog. The initial thought was I would present incentivizable offers and have people sign to it and get paid (like gpt sites). It’s only at the end that I learned that merchants were scrubbing most of the leads and actually bots taking over the chatbox. 🙁 In the end I’ve spent $20 and barely made $5.
  3. WidgetSucks Experiment –> Well I thought this one is gonna be successful but its not. I implemented it for 2 months and never barely made a dollar with it. I am getting the impressions but for some reasons its not matching with the Widgetbucks stats. Failed!
  4. Thinking this blog was popular –> When the blog was on its peak during September and October, I almost neglected it. I thought “oh wow, my blog is now popular like a rockstar!” I am getting great number of responses and sold out ad spots as well. It wasn’t until November that I realized I lost 2/4 of my readers (for not posting useful stuffs) and 3/4 advertisers…
  5. Selling the blog on DP –> I’ll tell you what, the reason I actually had thoughts of selling the blog was because I eagerly want to have macbook Air before january this year.. Because I am idiot I listed it in DP instead of Sitepoint. The maximum bid I got there is a lil over $100! wtf!
  6. Not Canonicalizing –> It wasn’t until last month that I found out my url isn’t canonicalized. Hmm, thats why my pr is 0!

Well they say you learn from mistakes and failures. But I say I enjoy mistakes and failures after I actually realized how pointless those mistakes are. Sure it could be fun but I guess sometimes we have to be wary because it could hurt us sometimes not just financially. How about you and your blog, maybe you can tell your own story as well!

I learned my lesson!

Paid Promotion Is The Key

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A lot of bloggers in the industry mostly talk about getting traffic flowing into blogs by doing the traditional things. Blog commenting, forum and article marketing, social media, even offline interaction. These free ways, while it has been used a lot and is certainly a great way to target visitors to your site, it’s not the only ones!

Most people don’t bother to talk about paid promotions because not a lot of people are interested  spending dimes with it. But the truth is it’s actually a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog. I have used some of them here and some of them in other blogs and so far it’s really doing good. Without further ado, here they are:

  1. PPC Marketing – Who said PPC is just for affiliate offers? After about 1 1/2 month my blog has started, I spent some $50 each in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. I am getting dead cheap clicks for every long tail keyword and I can say it really did well. The tip is that you need to make the users understand that the ad directs them to a blog of that certain topic. Use a landing page as well! Here I have a welcome page as a landing page so that new users can explore the content of my blog more and figure out how it can benefit them. Believe me folks, it converts the curious dudes into readers/subscribers.
  2. Paid Review – While there are tons of ways on doing advertising on a blog, paid review obviously is the best. Why? Paid review targets the audience well, gives permanent backlinks, and guess what, adds kudos to your blog easily.  Let’s face it, bloggers are paid to review. And I have never seen a negative review, believe me! Most of the times the blogger just recommends the site and that alone can sum it all up against other paid advertising options on blogs.
  3. Paid Social Media – The social media days are getting more saturated. Before it’s like you can put a humor content and get tons of great responses. Now it’s different! Ok, so the idea here is to post some really nice content. Then buy 100 diggs/stumbles/reddit/propells or whatsoever. These diggs wouldn’t get you in the front page but at least they can get you traction. You are getting noticed now. If you’re submitted content is liked, then prepare your server for truckloads of traffic.
  4. Press Release – PR (not to be confused with page rank) is something that I haven’t really utilized for my blogs. Some people however do have some success with it. A release usually costs $100 and up and it’s a high risk, high reward form of promotion. It is gonna either flop so bad or do good. Problem is that most people are tired reading a release stating “this guy started a blog about making money online”. If you’re into the IM niche, Im not sure you should use this as an option.
  5. Sponsor a Contest – Seriously a contest can give you a lot. The quality of traffic that can come back to you depends on what you sponsor. Most users are curious on why this dude gave this prize away so if you sponsored something really nice then more likely people will pay you a visit or even a comment. Look who looks better, one who sponsored an Ipod or one who sponsored an Internet Marketing Book? 😉

There are tons of paid options but basically these are what I think the most effective. If you have some $100 to spend or a credit card, then why not try to invest in it. Quality of Traffic and targeting is what the paid advertising gives that most free promotion tactics don’t.  What do you think?

Does Your Blog Really Add Value?

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The exams are almost over and so is the contest. I am very thrilled to have this many contestants and I think it really boosted my blog’s traffic and search rankings. 🙂 To all sponsors and participants, I really wanted to thank you for supporting my first contest.

So, before I made a post about giving reason why people should follow and read your blog. While I never really considered this blog a “helpful blog”, I think I have still provided some value to my readers by giving out necessary tips. Let’s face it, when your blog doesn’t hand out something useful then more likely people will just leave you.

So today I will just list here some of the useful posts from this blog that can hopefully benefit you. I also do hope that some of the my new readers can read it in case they haven’t before. Here it is:

The Whole Make Money Online Concept

Blogging Tips

Blog Monetization

Affiliate Marketing

Some recommended reads

Thinking Outside The Goddamn Box

Thinking Outside The Goddamn Box

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So a few days ago I was hanging out with the wickedfire guys on their forum and basically I just asked them every annoying questions you could ever think of.

Anyway I asked them some questions with regards to some dating offers on Copeac on whether they do convert well or what. And fortunately a lot of people give their piece of shiet!

So I promoted an exclusive offer there named “Spicy or Sweet” and well after some days of split testing here’s what I got:

spicysweet

It isn’t really that big of an amount but I felt its awesome. The expenses on Google Adwords aren’t really that big considering dating is a saturated niche. I also used Facebook with it using the free credit I received and although its harder to get your ads approved, it worths it when you start getting it right. So I know you’d ask how did I do it? Well first and foremost I do have a landing page. Most people promoting dating offers do direct linking which definitely adds up to the cost. Another is I targeted long tail keywords and seriously this one is the harder part of it.

The last thing is that I promoted the offer outside US. I don’t know but I feel that if you run an offer in other countries it is easier to convert. Fortunately the offer accepts traffic from New Zealand, Australia, and United Kingdom and upon studying their trends, I knew I can make some bigs with this! Still got to push my ass up!

*****Secret Entry Alert*******

Like what I have said in my contest, I would be revealing secret entries that would definitely add some points. This entry costs 5 points! Basically its a twitter entry and all you have to do is tweet this:

“Just entered to win over $700 in prizes. Just follow @melvinblog and retweet http://xr.com/melvinblogcontest”

Taking Advantage Of Startup Stuffs

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Most marketers usually take advantage of stuffs that are startup or unpopular at first, and then make big profits out of it. And I know that well because I have done that a lot of times. In affiliate marketing or whatever, when there’s a new and untested offer that is up, I usually take advantage of it and even “abuse” it as possible. Now I know that its either it could make you quick cash or it can do you trouble but what I do mean by saying “abuse” is to pawn it as quickly as you can before it gets saturated. Marketers are all common for being quick so maybe a day or 2, an offer would all of a sudden be saturated.

So know you’re asking, how can I take advantage of an offer then? or how will I know what to take advantage? Unfortunately I don’t know the answer. 🙁 For me its more of an instinct and bit of luck at my side. Basically, most people spend their time in front of the computer so my advice is to just be productive with spending your time. I mean, do researches, take a look at the newest offer and etc. So know I am gonna share w/you some of my experiences  quickly making a buck w/a non saturated stuff (of course it becomes saturated then after some time)

  • Performancing Ads – Well its not really me but a good friend of mine who told me to let him anonymous. When Performancing Ads has just started, they are basically paying $10 per referral. That friend is actually a part of SplashPressMedia which happens to have connection w/performancing so he had the inside details and he pretty knew the $10 referral before everyone else did.  What happened then? At the end of one week he made $1300 of affiliate commission from Performancing. Pretty quick huh! Now its impossible to duplicate that because PerfAds has changed their affiliate program terms.
  • Clickbooth Select Campaign – Now I don’t know if I am gonna be hunted by doing it but what I know is I do it legitimately. So Clickbooth is an affiliate program that pays $10 per signup and 2% lifetime ref commission (I’m talking Clickbooth’s own affiliate program). Before the Wickedfire-Clickbooth dispute I was already promoting it like mad man. The result is $400 on one month just by promoting them. 🙂 After a year, my affiliate manager told me they have just removed it because some affiliates are abusing it. 😉
  • Dating Offers – Most of the offers I promote before are offers related to dating and more or less there is always a startup dating offer that usually accepts traffic from any part of the world. I just contacted my friends and asked to sign for this offer under my ref. Of course here in my country 85% are interested with dating sites so its another quick buck for me. It’s not really incentivizing but its just I gave them members I know are willing to stay. A month after I had a chat w/the merchant and they told me they have reduced the traffic to US only. And of course they’re too late because I already did my thing.

So those are the stuffs. Again it’s kinda risky because some are notorious for scrubbing leads and so on. But my advice is, if you do it legitimately and nothing against their terms then at the end of the day you’re still the winner