Archive for the ‘Misc Babble’ Category
lurksteraz on December 14th, 2007
So I was searching around, and found SnowGlobeBoy.com . I love viral marketing, and this is a great way to promote a product, service or whatever. McKinney Advertising has put together something fun for everyone. I’m not sure how long the guy s going to be in the globe, but I think it would start to suck after a while.
When I joined the chat there were so many people on there it was funny. There are 3 camera views and audio to hear the guy talk back to everyone.
Check it out!
lurksteraz on November 17th, 2007
I’m sure everyone has had this happen to them.
You research a niche to find that it’s untapped, great pay, and a gem waiting to be polished to make some money. Well, I signed up for some affiliate accounts(can’t say which yet), register the perfect domain name and start to build out the website.
After the site is built, I like to launch with no ads and let marinate for a while. Get the site indexed, build some links and wait about a month before really pushing anything on it. So, the site does better than I thought with natural rankings and starts to compete with the main affiliate site.
Within a month, I get an email and also a letter from a lawyer stating that the domain I registered infringes on a trademark and I need to ‘cease and desist’ while turning over the domain name. But the weird thing was that in the letter, it seemed to mainly speak of ‘Unfair Competition’. I’m sure there is a bunch of legal mambo-jambo that I don’t understand, but fuck it.
The last time I checked, the purpose of offering an affiliate program is to create more sales for the company and for the affiliate… This kind of crap pisses me off, especially since the site was ranking great naturally.
In the end, I lose no matter what. I removed the site, and have to turn over the domain name. If I ever hear of anyone promoting this particular site or mentioning anything about it, I will do my best to sway them against promoting the at all costs.
I would have thought that a business would want to be promoted to make money, I guess not.
lurksteraz on October 13th, 2007
Since joining the ranks of affiliate marketing, one thing I cannot find an answer to, are the long, testimonial, video, screenshot super duper long sales pages everyone makes…. You know the pages I’m talking about. If you don’t, I’ll give you a hint. It’s normally a single page that takes about 5 minutes to scroll through until you find the ‘Buy’ button.
I don’t get it. I’m guessing that they work, they seem to be everywhere. Is there a history to these kinds pages? Did some super affiliate marketer one day spread the word that extra long, 82,000 words a page websites work? Are there statistics out there that prove that they work better than a normal looking website? I’m guessing so, since everyone and their mother is reproducing them to no end.
I couldn’t bring myself to creating one, simply because they seem stupid to me. You have 30 testimonials, screenshots of bank records and includes every free e-book out there. I may be missing something and if I am, please, tell me, send me some links to stats on them.
Last but not least, the email capturing just to get to checkout. This I understand, this I can deal with. I understand the purpose of gathering additional information for cross promoting products and services.
Anyways, I just wanted to throw out some questions and thoughts, if you can explain any of the above, feel free to comment, I’d be interested in some stats.
lurksteraz on September 16th, 2007
I’ve decided to write a little post about keyword research tools that I’ve used. I ran into a couple people that thought they were gods gift to the SEO world and everything they talked about were solid gold and they would never be wrong. When we talked about researching keywords, they were only using one tools, Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool. Well, I didn’t have the heart to tell them as this gave me an edge, but if you didn’t know, Yahoo hasn’t supported this tool in a long time. I think it’s been since January for an update. So this makes the counts a little skewed as well as seasonality being reflected.
These guys also tried to convince me that the counts were for natural search only. I had to laugh and walk away for a second. YST uses paid numbers and inflated a little to get people to buy more keywords for PPC. Although the numbers are a good reflection of a particular market, they shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Next we had talked about the Trellian keyword tool. If you have ever used this tool, it’s pretty good but limited. Anyways, these guys were trash talking the service to no ends. From the search counts being not accurate to they charge too much yet they still used it. Personally, I like this service, but everyone has their opinions. This service gathers their keywords from ISPs. One important element though is the search counts are from about 2 million users. So, do the math on 2 million users compared to however many internet users…. I think I forgot to tell these about this factor…ooops!
Now I didn’t really try to argue or attempt to correct these guys, only for the fact that they thought they were the hottest shit since sliced bread and offered no real knowledge and were just negative. These kind of people drive me nuts. I may not be the best SEO blue ribbon winner of the universe, but damn, common sense has to play a role sometime.
lurksteraz on September 11th, 2007
Well, the wife and I decided to take a trip from Arizona to Bend Oregon to scope out real estate. I’ve never been to Oregon, so if you ever get a chance, I would highly suggest going their.
So we flew into Portland and checked a few areas around the airport. Then we drove over the bridge to Vancouver, WA. Very nice place with alot of older homes. We then drove down to Salem to check out homes in the surrounding areas. They weren’t bad, but not quite what we were looking for. We found ourselves heading over to Bend, and all I have to say is Wow! We stayed there for 3 nights and we both love it. You can’t beat lots of trees, great weather, and all of the outdoor activities that are available.
So now my wife is hard at work trying to scrounge up some real estate. I guess this means I’ll have to either telecommute from my current job, find a new agency in the area OR work for myself. I’m loving the idea of working for myself but freaked out about the unknown. I’m kind of a creature of habit of wanting to have a secure job, medical insurance for the family and so on. I’m in huge debate with myself on what to do. Knowing I can probably take some contract jobs for quick cash is OK with me, but there is still that unknowing factor of not being able to pay bills.
My goal now is to save every penny I make from affiliate marketing, stash into some high yielding bank bank(ING) and save as much as I can to make this move. How could I pass up the chance to live someplace where I could hike, camp, canoe, mountain bike etc in the spring and summer and snowboard in the winter with a quick 40 minute drive? This is like a dream playground for anyone into outdoor activities. A little harder to do when it’s 115 degrees outside. Just to give you an idea of Arizona; this year broke the record of something like 35 days straight OVER 110 degrees. DAMN HOT!!
I’ll be sure to post progress on our dream move, but probably won’t happen for another 7-12 months or so.
lurksteraz on August 17th, 2007
That’s right, Pimpin aint easy. If you think about it, affiliate marketing is just like pimpin’.
Now bear with me, and take a look at this chart I created about the relationship between them.
| AffiliateMarketing |
Pimpin |
| Find a new niche |
Find a new corner to pimp your women |
| You build a website from scratch, |
You find a new bitch, doll her up with makeup and clothes |
| Make your site conversion friendly |
Teach her how to turn tricks |
| Testing keyword sets in PPC |
Send her to private events to see if it’s the right crowd for Ho’in |
| Narrow in on a niche and capitalize |
If she does well at a moose lodge party in a major hotel, send the bitch back for more |
| Build the site out if it works |
Give her some fake breasts and new finger nails |
| If it loses money over a long period of time, start on something else |
If she can’t turn tricks, kick the bitch to the curb |
| Your niche is now making massive amounts of money |
She’s a well known Ho on the block and every Tom wants a spin |
| Recieve monthly checks |
Snatch the bitches money and send her back out |
| Affiliate company doesn’t pay |
Ball up the fist and knock the bitch out! |
Ok, so the last one is for affiliate businesses that don’t pay, I had to throw that in there. I may be crazy, but if you look at them side by side it makes sense. Now I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll stick with affiliate marketing and leave the pimpin to the Don Juan’s and Sugar Daddys.
So anyways, I’ve decided to try the global approach. I’ve secured my euro-host and registered some co.uk domains. I think I’ll give this a shot as well. has anyone else had success with the European market?
lurksteraz on August 14th, 2007
I just wanted to give a quick update on what I’ve been doing. I have been building more and more websites. In the past week I’ve added an additional 5 complete websites all in different industries. That brings my count to, well, a lot of damn sites to maintain. I’ve also resorted back to my roots of implementing many black hat techniques for natural rankings. I tried to go legit and not do any shady stuff, but when it’s easy to do it, why not.
Anyways, I’ve decided to also set up a few sites specifically for drop shipping products. I was able to work out a few deals with some vendors for unique products to drop ship. I figure this would be good for wife to at least process orders as they come through.
Unfortunately, I have to wait for payday to relaunch more PPC ads. Went broke on the first run of campaigns that hadn’t produced any conversions. When payday rolls around again, I’ll relaunch the campaigns with some tweaks that include a tests I’d like to run and see what happens. If these tests don’t pan out, I need to wait again for another paycheck just to fund them. That sucks! Luckily Adsense will be depositing in a week or so.
In other news, I seemed to have built up about 6 weeks of vacation and decided to take off. I’ve been planning my attack for building out an additional 25 domains. Shouldn’t take too long if I plan accordingly.
Well, I’ll make another post in a day or so, I’m typing this from my cube and don’t want the boss to what I’m doing.
lurksteraz on August 2nd, 2007
I don’t like asking for advice but I had to ping someone and I wanted to thank Derek B for giving me some awesome tips in an email exchange that we had. I have so many questions, and nobody to turn to. Derek stepped up with great advice.
This leads to the frustration and giving up seems like the easy way out. A lot of questions and concerns go through my head such as, ‘why am I throwing this much needed money away?’, ’why won’t these damn products or offers convert?’ and ‘why can’t I find a starting point to marketing these products?’. A lot of these thoughts run through my head nonstop. The frustration is starting to get to me and quitting seems so easy.
Google has killed 2 campaigns, disapproved numerous ads which further diminish my will to keep doing this. I mean, why research products, do the keyword research, build the campaigns yet have all that hard work come to a screeching halt? This game sucks!
After reading Amits Blog post on Why 2% of affiliates rake in 95% of the profits, I’ve since re-sparked the burning desire to make it. But what am I making, what is ‘it’? Well, to me, it’s the freedom to be financially free, being able to spend every waking moment with my 8 month old baby boy, to not have to work in a cubicle(which, by the way is where I’m typing this from), not have to drive an hour and fifteen minutes to work. I think my turning point was when I was driving home from work on Monday this week, and ended up T-boning a lady that ran a red light. Luckily nobody was hurt! What this accident did do, was further embed my desire to not have to work for anyone else.
My fire is lit to a small spark right now. My goal now will be to get that small flame to a raging inferno! The kind of fire that burns everything in sight and doesn’t stop until there is nothing but a charred landscape. My charred landscape will be me and my family on a beach someplace in the world like a Corona commercial. Except my commercial includes me with a great big middle finger in the air to the rest of the 9 to 5 working class. Do I sound bitter?
Enough ranting, I need to get some work done before my boss see’s me.
lurksteraz on July 18th, 2007
Andrew Wee has a great write up about the recent Google slap on Squidoo. If you have searched for anything on Google, you may have found yourself landing on a Squidoo page that reads more like a sales letter. I personally have.
Squidoo was recently hit hard as alot of their pages were dropped. Makes sense though if you think about it. Google has been trying clean out the search engine from spam or from what they deem spam. I think Squidoo was a perfect avenue to have additional sales pages included in the SERPs that were very effective. But it seemed whenever I would search for something, I would see the same basic sales pages but made by different people.
Anyways, check out Andrews write up which contains
lurksteraz on July 17th, 2007
I received an unexpected call last night. But a good one.
I answer the phone and on the other line is someone who found my number from a domain WHOIS site. First thing I thought of was ‘great, I’m infringing on a business trademark or something’. Well, this guy was actually interested in purchasing one of my oldest domain names. It’s been registered since 2001. One of the first domains I ever registered and that I’ve held onto for all of these years.
I told him I was unsure of a price and had to do some research. He decided to throw out a number and I thought it was good($1000). I wanted to check with a few friends who deal in domain resale and a couple said I should hold onto it and some others said I should sell. So, I decided to sell.
I’ve never sold any domains. So I am a little unsure of the process. I was able to find escrow.com and they only seem to charge about 3.25%. Not bad, I figure that since he contacted me, I should be a little skeptical on the sale. I think escrow.com may be the place to go through as far as protection for us both. He gets the domain and I get paid.
Has anyone else had this similar situation? If so did you use any type of escrow service?
