The Ramblings of a Journalist and Internet Marketer

Is Google Adwords the only answer to profitable PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns? Of course not! In fact, although Google is probably the most used Search Engine, it is also the most difficult to break into.

Of course there are hundreds of marketers making thousands of dollars every day using Google Adwords PPC campaigns. These are guys who have been using Google PPC for years. They’re experienced, they have a system that works well for them, they know which keywords work for them and which don’t.

Do you really want to go head to head with these guys? Do you really think you can break into Google Adwords campaigns with immediate profits? Forget it! There’s just no way you can compete with the big boys as a beginner in PPC.

Or is there? Well, yes, there is a way providing that you steer clear of Google. You see, simply because Google is the biggest used Search Engine it is also the most difficult to break into with PPC.

There are several reasons for this. One, it is the Search Engine that everyone who makes big money with PPC wants to use. Two, it is the Search Engine that people who know what they want go to in order to find the things that they want.

This means that the users of Google are, in general, discriminating buyers. They are the people who are more likely to search thru more than ten websites to find either the best supplier or best deal before they click the Buy Now button.

These are not the ideal buyers to single out for your PPC campaigns. Discriminating buyers = poor conversion ratio, that is unless you have a campaign for a product that has little or no competition!

So just where do you go to find PPC campaigns that will work for you and won’t cost you a fortune to enter? One answer is Yahoo PPC and I’ve shown in a previous post how you can learn how to use Yahoo for instantly profitable PPC campaigns (see Yahoo Cash 4 Idiots).

But recently I’ve been following Rob in Dominate IM to see how he runs profitable marketing through PPC. I’ve been a member of Dominate IM for over six months but I haven’t mentioned it up till now because I’ve been working on the strategies they lay out to see if they work for me.

Rob’s approach to PPC struck a chord with me and I had to follow it up with a few experiments myself. Just like I’ve outlined Rob doesn’t use Google for PPC but he’s found another approach which allows him to copy and paste campaigns straight into profit, and it works!

If you want to find out for yourself how you can copy and paste successful campaigns straight into your own, new, PPC account and start making profits in just a few days you’d better join Dominate IM now and let Rob show you how he does it.

BTW that’s not all Dominate IM teaches you, but I’ll be reporting on more about this no-BS coaching system in later posts.

Could you be a Slumdog eMillionaire?

That’s the question asked by Mo Latif once, on his own admission, a ’slumdog’, now a successful internet marketer. Like he says, internet marketing is easy. The difficulty is in finding out how to be successful at it - become an eSlumdog Millionaire.

So Slumdog eMillionaire breaks the steps to becoming successful into 15 modules. This is easy learning in simple steps. Each module comes with a mindmap, which shows you the steps to take, and a series of blueprints which detail each step and sets out a progress chart.

That way, as you tick off the progress you’re making, you feel you are on the way to getting away from slumdog status. By Module 15 you should be all set to be grabbing sales from your chosen niches.

But what I’d like you to do first is take a look at the salespage for Slumdog eMillionaire - jonathanpaston.com/presents/slumdogemillionaire -  because it is a prime example of how to put together an arresting and persuasive salesletter.

First the headline. It grabs your attention because it tells you what you can hope to achieve by following the ’system’. The opening section of the salesletter then reinforces this, including a ‘proof’ video.

Once into the salesletter proper Latif reveals who has already benefited from his ’system’ and, of course, includes testimonials. By this time you’re feeling ‘it could be me’!

Then he tells you about his Slumdog background - in detail so you can almost see his rags to riches story. Then Latif shows his system, with a series of ticked bullet points. If you’re experienced you can already ‘read’ his system right there!

Finally there’s the call to action - and the guarantee. It’s a real guarantee, backed by Clickbank. And the call to action isn’t just ‘buy here’ - it’s a ‘do this and you’ll succeed’ call; yes you’ll need to do a little work, and go through each module in detail, but the system will get you there, if you promise to follow it.

Take a look. Let me know what you think…

jonathanpaston.com/presents/slumdogemillionaire

Today, in my Inbox, popped a message encouraging me to download a free handbook that would bring me more website visitors, more signups and more money than I would know what to do with! Naturally I had to investigate…

The premise of Simple Profit Setup is, at the outset, quite simple. It follows a variation of viral and network marketing that, if carried through correctly, is often very successful. A good example of viral marketing is 7 Dollar Expert which does, indeed, work brilliantly.

Simple Profit Setup seemed to follow the same mantra, which is where I got interested. The idea is that you promote the free handbook via your own squeeze page and website rebranded with your affiliate links to Simple Profit Setup. When you sign up to the program you’re given all the details necessary to create your site and landing page and how to drive traffic to it. So far, so good.

Where it all falls down, however, is in the detail. Basically the owner of Simple Profit Setup has gotten greedy. Because, to sign up, you have to run through hoops which involve:

1. Registering a domain with GDI ($10 a month - you’re kidding me)!

2. Opening an autoresponder account with GetResponse - (fair enough).

3. Join the New Plan Network - a network (yuk) marketing plan for $10 a month.

4. Join PROFITmatic - (I have no idea why, other than to put more money in the owner’s pocket).

All along the way the emphasis is not on marketing products, providing solutions for people’s problems, giving out valuable information or anything else that could be considered worthwhile.

No, the emphasis, as with all these ‘network’ plans, is to ‘build your downline’. In other words the sole purpose of the Simple Profit Setup is to recruit as many people as possible to 1., 3. and 4. above. Of course, as you build your downline you build in more people under the site owner, and so his income grows.

Now I have one thing to say about network marketing - it is unbelievably hard work recruiting people and it usually fails. The only people making money are the people at the top of the tree who got in early. The ones doing the work are the poor sods who are trying to harness recruits, and that’s tough, believe me.

So, as an example of viral marketing, Simple Profit Setup fails on many counts. My advice - stay away from this one.

In its most basic form Affiliate Marketing is a cinch. You don’t have to create a product, you don’t have to deal with customers, you don’t have to handle payments or order processing. In fact it’s the easiest way to earn online there is!

But, there’s a catch.

You won’t make a penny as an Affiliate Marketer unless you can convert your blog or website visitors into sales. Because, no matter how much you praise a product to the skies, the natural insecurity of those looking to buy is likely as not to completely over-rule any recommendation.

So, just how do you gain the trust of your readers? How do you prove to them that a product really is all you say it is?

One way is to set up a review page highlighting one, two or three competing products. By giving honest opinions about the benefits of several products vying for your reader’s cash, buyers feel they can make an informed choice.

Great, but did you also know there is a right way and a wrong way to set up a review site? This is where Commission Blueprint comes in.

One of the authors behind Commission Blueprint is Tim Godfrey, the guy behind the highly rated Product Praxis, a product I’ve been using and recommending for over a year now. So I knew that Commission Blueprint had a good pedigree!

Nearly all the training in setting up your Affiliate landing pages is through a series of 14 in-depth videos which take you from finding and analyzing the best Clickbank products to promote, thru setting up your pre-selling pages to creating and managing your marketing campaigns.

This series is more targeted than Profit Praxis. While the latter covers nearly every method that successful Affiliates use to pre-sell and market any product, Commission Blueprint is more focused.

Commission Blueprint’s emphasis is on getting you up and running with your own campaigns in as fast a time as possible, even to the point of giving you real review pages that you can cut and paste to your own website or blog.

This means that you can get started with your first campaigns almost immediately and then go on to develop your own review pages, based around the Commission Blueprint formula, for products that you are enthusiastic about.

By giving you review pages to work with, Commission Blueprint neatly gets over the hurdle of ‘getting started’ which is always the block that new marketers face. And if you really feel you can’t be bothered to set up your own review pages for further products there’s an option, when you buy Commission Blueprint, to receive extra pre-made review sites every month.

So now you’ve no excuses left to start Affiliate Marketing! Commission Blueprint hands it to you on a plate - click here to find out more.

If you are looking to add a little more emphasis to your landing page or squeeze page then I suggest you try Slide Up FX, on sale today at www.monday-madness.com

I’ve found that static pop up boxes are all very well but more and more website visitors are just finding them an irritation and closing them before even reading the contents. Slide UP FX is rather different in that, as it’s name suggests, your info box slides up from the bottom of the screen.

You can see it in action here…

www.monday-madness.com/SlideFX/

but what this doesn’t show is the sophisticated engine behind Slide UP FX that provides a multitude of options to enable you to program the slide up box any way you wish.

For example you can set the delay of sliding from 1 to 20 seconds or anywhere in between. You can add a ‘Do Not Show Again’ button in addition to the Close button, if you want to avoid annoying visitors to, say, your blog, or remove the Close button entirely if you want the box to be visible at all times.

And there’s a full WISYWIG and HTML editor to compose your info/pop-up box as well as a Preview so you can see what it looks like before copying the Javascript code to your website. Of course you can insert your Autoresponder form in the box, just like a standard pop-up.

There’s no restriction on the number of sites you can use SlideUp FX on, you can even add it to a Wordpress blog or anywhere you can insert a Javascript bit of code. Installation is a cinch too, so you can see why I’m recommending it, especially at this Monday Madness Bargain price!

www.monday-madness.com/SlideFX/