Commission Junction CJ Payment Proof

After the postal strike finally ended it took a few weeks for all the backed up mail to catch up, including this Commission Junction (CJ) check from June for $170.50 USD that I have just scanned as my payment proof from them.

The thing I like best about CJ is that they have both physical and digital products that can be promoted and most are from brand name companies that people know and trust. This makes it MUCH easier to make a sale and all you have to do is paste the code they give you right into your website for whatever product you like.

Of course with marketing ANY product, you should make sure you choose wisely and pick something that fits the niche and audience that your own site attracts. DON'T post a banner for furniture on a car site!

The other nice thing is that some of their sponsors have really good payouts. I made $100 just for one lead to a psychic phone line! Sweet!!

I hope everyone is having a great summer. Bye for now!

Instant Passive Profits Reviews

"OMG! HI!!" says the hot girl...lol



Yes, that's how the video starts in the intro to the new Instant Passive Profits money making program by Andy Parker. I know that a beautiful woman showing lots of cleavage could probably sell anything, but this is hilarious! I think she, uh...really expressed what it takes to be an MMO guru...yup. Lovely.



The vid itself is pure genius and will have you watching right until the very end. You can see it right here (there was no way to embed it in this blog post, so I'm just going to link to it). My one word review is "Brilliant!"



Seriously though, are there any Instant Passive Profits reviews out yet? What are your thoughts on the product or marketing strategy? After watching it, do you see this humorous "in your face" approach as being the wave of the future?



I like that there is a mobile form option and I think we'll be seeing more of that. This one will be worth following...

Slow Month

I know I've talked about the "summer slowdown" before and how things online are slower when the weather here is warmer and more people are outside, but this month is worse for me because of a postal strike going on here in Canada. This means that my weekly checks are being held up as nothing is being delivered. I've been scrambling to have payments sent out by other methods, but since most networks pay by Net30-60 terms it means the checks were already made up before I could do much about it.

I've always said that "persistence, patience and perseverance" is what it takes to be successful online, and this month is putting that to the test. Just hang in there a little longer...

On a more positive note, after 6 weeks of almost steady rain, it's finally nice outside, so it's time for the beach! Have a great weekend everyone!! :)

Times Are Tough All Over

I've never been one to sugarcoat reality, and that goes for online as well. Times are tough, the economy sucks and it takes REAL effort to earn money online, so if you're looking for the "lazy guide to riches", then I suggest you give up NOW!

There has been a series of events recently that hit me very hard. The first is the latest Google algorithm change, called "Panda", that has many established webmasters upset that they have lost their site rankings in favor of the search engine choosing long, spammy websites, including many blackhat sites created with content stolen from the previously high ranking sites.

It's a shitty system, to be quite frank, and one that makes the Google search results LESS relevant than ever before. Currently, it's mostly spam sites being rewarded with high spots in the SERP and good quality sites are being penalized. Luckily, searchers have noticed this, and Google recently lost a percentage of it's search engine dominance to people moving over to Bing and Yahoo for more relevant results. It's much easier to optimize good content for Yahoo, and it's more of a buyer's market there anyway, as I've mentioned many times before.

The next problem I encountered recently was with a scammer from Egypt who is selling one of my scripts illegally on his website 7turnkey.com (he doesn't deserve a backlink from me) and also selling scripts from other webmasters which he has no right to sell. I sent his host (mellowhost.com, the hosting for scammers) a DMCA takedown notice and they ignored it. Then the bastard had the balls to send ME a takedown notice! I filed a counterclaim and won and now I'm faced with the exhausting task of sending notices to all the forums where he has posted sales threads for my script.

I managed to get the scumbag banned from DP and V7N forums so far for trying to sell my script, but I'd like others to help me in the battle. If you see a forum thread offering an online TV script with a link to buy it on the 7turnkey site, then please report it to me with a link to the thread either by commenting below or via email. Thanks in advance for your help!

The final problem (for now) was the worst one. I was on Facebook and got hit with a terrible virus that wiped out my whole computer and rendered it dead and useless! While I do keep regular backups, as everyone should, on several external drives, it was still a huge pain in the ass to have to get another computer and piece everything together like I had it before.

The disturbing thing is that these new viruses seem to be served through seemingly normal ads on trusted websites. It's no longer a matter of worrying about opening up a shady looking attachment in an email message anymore. Now the viruses are loaded when the ad is loaded on the page without even clicking on it. There were several malicious ads served through the sidebar of Hotmail recently, plus networks like Clicksor and Trafficrevenue are notorious for serving up this crap, but this one was on Facebook and it was a killer.

I never even clicked anything! My antivirus tried to block it and I noticed it had a .in extension before everything died, but it was too fast for me to prevent it. Be careful!

Those are my tales of woe for now. Thank you for reading this and I hope others can learn from my mistakes.

UPDATE! The script issue has been resolved, as I simply bought the site. I am now the new owner of the 7turnkey revenue sharing scripts website (with link!), so feel free to pay a visit and say hello there anytime :)

Affiliate Clickbank Payment Proof

I'm going to focus on the affiliate Clickbank payment proof here because the vendor program is set up differently and I plan to write a post explaining how that works in the future. All CB affiliates get paid every 2 weeks and this is my latest check in the amount of $153.53

Making money with Clickbank is mostly about matching the right product to your audience. I recently wrote a related post about website monetization that is relevant here as well. Basically, you want to find something to promote in the Clickbank marketplace that your own website visitors will WANT to buy. This is important! Get it wrong and you WILL fail!

For example, I've noticed some sites that are very poorly monetized lately. One was a site about depression that had ads for hosting on it (do depressed people suddenly have the desire to build a website?). Another was a site with baby products that had an ad banner for a CB ebook about forex! Unbelievable! Repeat after me: MATCH YOUR NICHE!!!

I'll admit that when I started in affiliate marketing years ago I made the same mistakes, so let's chaulk it up to newbie inexperience. I made NO sales at all until I finally got smart and put up a popular game strategy guide on one of my arcade sites and finally made my first sale. I found out game guides sell VERY well, but I also learned the number one lesson about making sure you spend some time finding the right product to promote. It's well worth the effort.

For those of you getting started with Clickbank, it's important to be aware of the biggest issue that faces all CB newbies: the dreaded "CDR". It stands for Customer Distribution Requirement and states that you must have sales from at least 2 sources (Paypal, Mastercard, Visa) AND 5 different credit card numbers BEFORE you get paid! For some people who only get an occassional sale, this can be a daunting task, esp. when you consider that most sales online come from Paypal and that's not even included as part of the 5 number requirement!

You could actually have 10 sales broken down into, let's say, 6 from PP, 3 from Visa, 1 from MC and STILL not get paid. At a sale a month average it would take you almost a year to earn about $200 and yet have nothing to show for it. I've read people complaining that this was a deal breaker for them and they gave up using Clickbank because of it.

One "trick" that many affiliates do is to simply buy through their own link as an easy way to meet the CDR. If you already have sales and you need that last one to come in to make up the fifth CC number and you're tired of waiting, then just find a product in the marketplace that is dirt cheap (the lowest is 3 bucks) and create your own hoplink for it. Then simply purchase the product through your link using your own credit card. A few dollars is a small price to pay to get all your earnings released to you after meeting the full requirements, if you have over $100 or so tied up there. Consider it like an extra 3% fee to get your check. I personally don't think the CDR is fair, but it is what it is, so it's best just to find a solution around it, since you can't change it.

They also hold back 10% of each check as a “return allowance” to cover any refunds or chargebacks. That rule isn't much fun either, but it's needed when dealing with some products that have a high refund rate, so they have to cover that possibility.

A final word of advice: mask your hoplinks! Some affiliates will attempt to steal your commissions, so it's good practice not to leave your affiliate ID "out in the open". It became such a problem that now Clickbank provides encrypted links in the form of a "hoplink shield", but it wasn't always that easy. Protect your links!

Good luck!

Adbrite Payment Proof

Here is my Adbrite payment proof from last month that just arrived in the mail today. The check was for $88.20, which isn't huge, but not bad considering I really only use them on 1 site. I've only bothered to put them on 2 sites of mine, but 99% of the revenue is just from the one that gets around 3000 views a day. The 2nd site earns maybe a buck or so a month from it. They pay monthly and checks are issued in the 1st half of every month.

While Adbrite is easily one of the best known and most common Adsense alternatives, I'm still on the fence about them. They seem to pay a little higher than Adsense for North American clicks, but not so great for international traffic. Also, their ads really work best with a certain kind of audience, as they seem to all be amateur looking banners for weightloss and how to make money online.

As with any CPC based network, make sure you experiment with ad placement and keep an eye on the CTR as you move them around. A 250x250 banner above the fold seems to work best, but you might find a good 160x600 sidebar ad that works better for you.

Good luck!

Website Monetization

There was a thread on the V7N forum recently about the right time to monetize your site...when building it, or AFTER the traffic has already started flowing. Webmasters seem to be divided on this issue, with some saying you need to build up traffic first and not scare away your visitors, while others say it's all about the money, so why not monetize right away? Well, here's my 2 cents, for those who care...

I personally put the ads up on any new site I build right away, while I'm building it, and it's not because of the money. I do it for layout and SEO purposes. The layout part should be obvious: I want to know where everything is going to go and how it will really look when I launch it. I don't want any surprises where I put up a banner weeks later only to find out the template I used breaks when anything is added and I should have used a different one.

The SEO reason is even more important. The search engines rank your site according to your content (yes, there are other reasons too, but I'm refering to "on-site" optimization) and ANY changes to that content will change your keyword density and, therefore, your ranking. This includes outbound links (OBL) and banners, which is why you should never link out to a "bad neighborhood".

I take that density factor very seriously when creating a website and I create the content KNOWING where the ads (OBL) will be placed among that content. That way, all variables have been accounted for right from the start. Think of it this way: Imagine working hard to get everything "perfect" WITHOUT placing your ads at the beginning, then waiting a few weeks to rank well in the SERP and you're excited that you're now in the top 10 results for your keywords. You then start to get great organic traffic from the SE's and life seems great.

THEN you decide to finally put up a few ads to make some bucks. However, during the next crawl of your site, the search engines now re-examine your keyword density and adjust for all these new links and your site suddenly begins to drop in the SERP. You are effectively reversing all your hard work!

As with all topics I write about here, I learned from my own experience (and mistakes). I have a music website that focuses on a specific niche which I did not place ads on at the beginning. Instead, I waited until it ranked well and then put up 3 sidebar banner placements. One was for a tattoo shop and a week later my analytics showed visits coming from the tattoo keywords, which had NOTHING to do with my own site's content! My ranking then started slipping because these new keywords were messing with my density.

I recovered from it by strengthening (adjusting) my own keywords on the page, but it was a lesson learned. What if that had been a big money earner that was in the #1 position in Google and suddenly it got canned to page 2 because of further website monetization that should have been left alone? Basically, if you're already ranking well then DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING!!!! "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Website monetization is like a game of Jenga...you have to be very strategic in building and making your moves or the whole thing can come crashing down on you...