Sat, 19 Jul 2008
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Its been 2 years and 4 months since I was enlisted into the Singapore Armed Forces (Army) back in June 2002. Words can’t describe how I hated it and I am so grateful it is now over!
I wasn’t a combat soldier. I didn’t have to run around in the jungles with rifles doing all sorts of military exercises to prepare for war. I was considered by many to be "lucky" to be a clerk. But I still wasn’t happy about it because I never wanted to be in the army in the first place. Its compulsory military service in Singapore and I don’t think many guys look forward to it.
I had to learn to live with doing the work I hate and being around people that I didn’t particularly like and also being bossed around and yelled at by unreasonable officers which I didn’t have much respect for. I’m ok with all that because its part and parcel of being in the army. We all expect to be treated like dogs and get peanuts for it. Because I was "lucky" to escape the tough work of combat soldiers, I didn’t get paid like SGD $500 - 700 + a month like them. Instead I received the lowest "allowance" of SGD $350 - $440 a month. They don’t expect you to be paid, this is just a token sum for you to spend.
Apart from all the things I hated about my time in the army. It also reminded me why I had to learn to stop relying on a JOB to earn a living. In the army its pretty extreme in the way they dictate your life on what to wear, what to eat, where to sleep, what time to sleep, what to eat, when you can take a break etc. So I think I experienced a great amount of pain of letting someone else control my life that I hit a "pain threshold". Its a point where "enough is enough" and you can’t take it anymore!
That’s the best lesson I got out of my time in the army. You have to take responsibility for your own life and not abdicate that responsibility to someone else because the chances are they are going to screw it up for you.
Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »
This is a follow up to the previous post about the ads on Clickbank’s login page. I received a reply from Clickbank saying that "Ads on our marketplace cost $1800 per month and ads on our login page cost $800 per month". That seems like an awful amount of money for me but I don’t know what $800 or $1800 means to the merchants?
I’ve been reading some posts in the Clickbank Success Forum…. Some people claim to be making money with software products like DVD copiers and Spyware products. I tried to promote a Spyware earlier on but just couldn’t get enough clicks becauase all the spyware related product keywords were all very expensive. Now its time to think "out of the box"?
What I can think of right now is that a lot of people go to download.com to search for these software. Other places include tucows.com, shareware.com. These could be potential keywords. Anything outside of the usual "spyware" keywords would be cheap.
I am still skeptical about this spyware software because you can get free spyware software and I have tested 1 or 2 of them. Seems like I don’t have any spyware on my PC! So I probably don’t need it. The only way to track if someone purchased is through a cookie. There is a free download link from the Spyware web sites that doesn’t seem to have any tracking link? What if the user deletes all his cookies with the Spyware software? Does that mean you can’t trace the affiliate link to me?
Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | No Comments »
I made another discovery today. I’m still banging my head because it is so obvious yet I must have missed it over 50 times already. Take a look at the Clickbank Login page and you’ll see three boxes with a list of 9 affiliate programs in each box.
Here’s what I see (This list will change with time):
At the bottom the the page, Clickbank says “Put your site in front of thousands of successful web business owners every day. Contact sal...@clickbank.com for advertising rates as low as $35/day.“
I was curious so I emailed Clickbank asking them:
If the merchants are paying $35 a day to get a 1 line ad at the Clickbank login page, they must have a lot of money because they’re making lots of sales with their Clickbank products or they must be idiots.
Or maybe the list at the login page was generated by the Clickbank system? I highly doubt so because Clickbank blatantly asks for $35 a day to list your ad there.
These products are quite similar to the products I was speculating in my previous post. The usual surveys, used cars, mystery shopping, mp3 / movie sharing software, spyware software, other programs that teach you to make money. I’ve heard about people making money in all these categories and if you click on the links of these products on that page, they’re all top ranking products at Clickbank….. Hmmmmm…. Very interesting indeed.
Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | No Comments »
This morning I was staring at piece of paper I printed from the web site 10 Steps To Freedom. There is a picture of the author’s Clickbank statement that reads “$287.18″ for 21 June 2004. I printed and pasted that picture on my “dream board”, a large piece of paper with all sorts of pictures of the things I want to have in my life. I hate the self-help books advice to visualize and repeat affirmations but I quite like this “dream board” where you simply make a collage of all the things you want in your life and look at it every now and then.
Anyway back to the what I wanted to talk about. I was looking at the numbers of his statement and I found a repeated pattern! If you click on the screenshot on the left, you’ll see that I have colour coded his Clickbank statement.
Here are my findings:
Where did I get my guesses from? I used the software Affiliates Alert (see screenshot on the left) and did a check on the category “Money & Employment” and just by looking at the column “Earn $”, you will see that survey web sites typically pay $23.50, Shopping web sites typicall pay $16.59 ++, Google Cash pays $22.60 and CBMall pays $44.36. I have no way to guarantee if these are the products he is promoting but it is a good guess because Greg Heslin, the author of Google AdWords 1 2 3 recommends this category for money making products. You can simply visit Clickbank or use the Pro version of Affiliates Alert.
Have you heard of the saying “Success Leaves Clues”, in this case I believe the author has indirectly given us clues on what affiliate products he promotes to make that kind of income but its funny how in their ebooks they only talk about generic affiliate products or other affiliate products. I’ve also heard of the saying “Magicians Never Tell Their Secrets” something like that and I also believe affiliate marketers also have a written credo that goes like “Affiliate Marketers Never Reveal Their Affiliate Programs!”. Ok, that’s just a joke! But I think there is really some truth in this.
Before I made a profit I was wondering why affiliate marketers never reveal their affiliate programs. Well there is this feeling that if I do, someone will steal my idea of niche and I will lose money. To be honest I am feeling that now so I understand how it feels to be unwilling to reveal the actual affiliate program I am promoting. But rest assured once I have a firm grasp of selecting winning affiliate programs, I will demonstrate my whole process of how I did it with screenshots, keywords and everything else that goes into it for FREE. Its my way of giving back to people and hopefully someone gets lucky enough to find it on this blog!
Here’s another example of a Clickbank statement I got from Wade Winger, the author of Google Profits. He has a very long list of sales over 4 days from 22 February 2004 to 26 February 2004. The sales are a staggering $1400.37! Greg Heslin makes about $1400 a day according to the sales letter at Google AdWords 1 2 3. I did the same thing as the previous example and here are my observations:
What I learnt from all these Clickbank sales statements are that these guys promote a similar type of affiliate products. Namely surveys, mystery shopping, Google Cash all of which are like work at home kind of affiliate programs that teach you how to make money. I still have some question marks over what those products are in the 2nd Clickbank example. I will need to do more searches to find out.
I hope I’ve brought a new perspective on marketing products from Clickbank. This could be what you’re looking for. I’ve been wasting so much time looking at weird affiliate programs because I thought I couldn’t compete with the big players with these profitable affiliate programs in the “Money & Employment” category. To your success, and to mine as well!
Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | No Comments »
Things seem to be going my way finally…. This just proves that “Persistence pays off; Integrity is paramountl Hard work and committment are synonymous with Accomplishment!” - A quote I stick to my PC’s monitor to remind myself everyday!
I made 2 sales on Thursday and 1 sale is for the Google AdWords 1 2 3 ebook someone purchased through my affiliate link at this blog. Thank you whoever you are! Its the first book that I have read that really teaches you something that made me money with Google AdWords! Its quite a new book and I don’t think a lot of people know about it so grab it before other people do.
Looking at my sales record, I made a $115 in gross sales since Monday but as you know I spent about $90 ++ with my expenses as mentioned in my early post. At least I am making a profit now and not a loss. If the sales keep up, I should be able to make at least $100 net profit this month to end a topsy turvy weird month for me.
I changed my minimum payout at Clickbank to $250 because I don’t want them to send me tiny checks. The tinier the check, the more the banks will rip me off of the service fees they charge in Singapore. It would be worth my money if I deposit a bigger check. You see all this money I made is just “profit on paper” till I cash in the check and see the numbers in my bank account! I predict that will take another 2 months at least before I see it in my bank account! So if you’re living in the USA, count yourself very blessed!
On the other hand, the almighty US dollar is 1.7 times larger than the puny Singapore dollar. What that means for me is that I get more for same amount of money you guys earn if you’re staying in USA. It doesn’t mean that the cost of living in Singapore is cheap but I manage to get by now because I have no wife, no kids, no car and not much committments that suck my money dry every month. Furthermore, I am still living with my mum so no rent to pay. Most of my expenses are for myself only!
I hope the money I make in the next 12 months will let me pay my mum enough money so she doesn’t need a job. And also let me live without needing income from a job so that I can concentrate on all my online business ventures that I am passionate about. Cheers!
Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »
Continuing from where I left off. I made 2 more sales from the same affiliate program. I was a bit nervous when I didn’t make any money on the 2nd day and I was shocked to find that I made 2 sales on the 3rd day of this campaign! That is the first time in my life that I have made 3 sales for 1 Clickbank affiliate product and 2 sales in 1 day!
Now I am glad I somehow managed to get a grip of myself to create my 51st campaign before I take my break…. I have a feeling I don’t want to take a break anymore! Damn! What a difference 1 little campaign makes!
I have read almost all the ebooks that teach you how to make money with affiliate programs with Google AdWords but none of them have made me very satisfied with my purchase. However, there is only 1 ebook that I can truly recommend to you, my precious and valued reader….
Google AdWords 1 2 3 is the ebook that helped me go from a “loser” with 50 rather unprofitable campaigns to creating my 1st profitable campaign in over 6 months! I was in the verge of giving up this Google AdWords game many times but I always found that little something in me to go on and I am grateful to Greg Heslin for teaching me how to find keywords that focus on the CONSUMER and not the PRODUCT because its the consumer that buys the product in the end so it makes more sense to target the consumer keywords than the product keywords if their too expensive to bid on!
Now I am bursting with ideas on how to target the people who would benefit from the product I am promoting rather than focusing on the keywords that people may use to find the product. That’s quite a radical shift from what I was doing before I read Google AdWords 1 2 3. Now I even have the balls to compete with the people who have lots of money in the highly competitive and profitable niches like the “Money & Employment” category of Clickbank.
I’ve read conflicting views on how this category is too expensive for beginners to go into but nowI know better. You can’t compete on price alone for the CPC but if you target the consumers, you will get a better chance because most people are targetting all the expensive keywords!
I hope this pattern continues for me. Right now I am looking at other affiliate products in the “Money & Employment” category of Clickbank. Next to surveys are the mystery shopping affiliate programs. I must say I am now very interested in these survey affiliate programs because they also pay non-US residents for surveys through PayPal or checks! It just might be worth my time taking the surveys to see if they are for real and to understand why people are buying into it?
Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »
Its funny how I felt like taking a break yesterday after creating my “last” campaign. I made 1 sale when I checked out my Clickbank stats today. Something “strange” happened yesterday. I was feeling down and comtemplating taking a break…. which I still do but I stumbled upon this Tony Robbins interview by Mike Litman. Its an MP3 file about 30 minutes long.
I’ve heard Tony Robbins speak about all the stuff about the “stories you tell yourself”, “physiology”, “emotions” but yesterday listening to all that stuff was kick up my arse. I’ve been telling “stories” and asking lousy questions like “Why can’t I get this right?”, “Why do I always screw this up?” and my mind gives me an answer “Because you’re crap!”.
One of the things Tony mentioned in that interview was that if “You ask better questions, you’ll get better answers”. So I asked myself “How can I make a profit of $300 with Google AdWords by spending $50?”. In other words how do I make 6 times my money by using Google AdWords?
A few days ago I bought and read the ebook Google AdWords 1 2 3, and I say this from the bottom of my heart that I applied the information about targetting consumers instead of targetting keywords for the Survey affiliate program and I made 1 sale in 50 clicks yesterday. I tweaked the campaign further to see if I get more sales today! My cost per click is about $0.05 to $0.07 because they are not related to “work at home”, “home business” and all the other expensive keywords people use to target these survey affiliate programs. Its a great idea and the next few days would be exciting to see where this will take me.
I haven’t made sales in 2 weeks I think I made this tiny change and made 1 sale. I must be doing something right here. I hope this continues.
Categories: Vincent's Updates | 2 Comments »
I believe I’ve reached the breaking point of how much money I wish to "invest" in Google AdWords. I planned to spend about USD $100 a month but last month’s bill was about $180 and this month’s bill for the 1st 17 days is USD $93.81! Profit is still negative from the mediocre number of sales I received.
Even though I do not wish to quit the Google AdWords game, I hace to take a break before I go bust. Going at this rate, my money will sucked dry from my bank account and I need the money for other ventures that I know I can make money with. For example, eBay selling. I’m comfortable with it, I enjoy it and I make profit from it which is the most important thing right now.
I think of my break from Google AdWords like an athlete who is out of action with an injury. I’ll be back again when I have more money to burn. I can’t get it right with 50 campaigns and it is very depressing. But I have to move on now for my own financial future’s sake! I need to look into areas which I know I can make money with.
For the past 6 months, I believe the real effort was about 4.5 months, and the other 1.5 months I was procrastinating and avoiding AdWords. Then I plucked up my courage to give it another go and it didn’t go as well as I planned.
Even though I have some sales, I will still run into cashflow problems because of the delays in receiving the checks and the time needed to clear and cash in the checks. Furthermore, my local banks take too much commission out of the checks to make it worth my effort. I estimate that if I make a sale this month in October, I can only see money in my bank in January 2005. I have to leave a 3 month delay for all that time delay. So you see I need to have a reserve of 3 month’s expenses for reserve before I can receive my 1st commission into my bank account.
Its one thing seeing sales on the affiliate network web sites and seeing money in the bank account. But if I get the process rolling into a predictable, consistent stream of income then after the 3 months, I will receive money in month after month!
Looking at other cheap alternatives to Google AdWords, I believe building affiliate mini web sites is a better option for me right now because a web domain costs only $7.99 per year, multiple web domain hosting costs about $6 a month and $72 a year. You can build as many web sites as you want as long as your web domain has enough disk space.
So if I build 20 mini sites. It would cost me $159.80 per year and add it to the web hosting fees would give me $231.80. So let’s make that $250 per year!
Building 20 mini web sites will only cost me $250 per year and if each of these web sites earn me $100 a month through sales and advertising revenue, that would be $2000 a year in gross sales. And a net profit of $1750 per year.
But I do have a few concerns before entering this new arena:
I asked this question at Phil Wiley’s forum. Let’s see if it gets any repsonse. I will keep a few of my Google AdWords campaigns running for now because they have not been fully tested for profit potential. I will create at the most 1 more campaign before I take my break.
I read these quotes everytime I sit in front of my PC. The 3 quotes are "What Are You Made Of?", a quote I cut out from the Tag **** (don’t know how to spell it) watch ad. The second quote is "Winners Never Quit While Quitters Never Win". The first 2 quotes remind me that I am a winner and what qualities I stand for to be a winner and also to remind that quitting is for losers. The last quote is by far the most important quote "Persistance Pays Off; Integrity Is Paramount; Hard Work And Committment Are Synonymous With Accomplishment".
I don’t expect an easy ride but I am willing to pay the price to achieve my dream of making a living online. Cheers!
Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »
I’ve heard it time and time again. “You’ve got to come up with creative keyword combinations to outsmart the competition!”. I don’t really know what that means. But I do know that most people are using AdWord Analyzer that essentially uses search results from Overture to mine for potentinal keywords.
I also use the Google Search Suggestion Tool to try to find more keywords that my competitors might not find. You can also use a thesaurus to find lateral keywords that are related to your initial number of keywords.
The problem is, this is by now common knowledge. I believe its written in almost all the Google AdWords ebooks I’ve read, free or those paid versions. They all say the same thing. Another trick is to add typos which you can find easily with this misspelling tool by hudsonscripting. Hudsonscripting is my favourite place to play around with my keywords. I love the combine keywords tool the most because I get to wrap all my keywords in broad, phrase and exact matching and all other combinations like keywords with no spaces, and reverse keywords.
My biggest question is “So what if you’ve done all the above for a keyword that is tightly related to your product?“, “Does it matter? Will it make a difference?”
From my research and studies, here are a few ways to pump up your keyword list with all sorts of combinations:
1. Add plurals
2. Add misspellings
3. Add variations of the main keyword (e.g. bike, motorcycle, motorbike)
4. Add action words like buy, discount, cheap, cheapest, low cost, inexpensive to the main keyword (e.g. cheap bike, cheapest bike) -> This could multiply your keyword list by many times
5. Add all phrase, broad and exact matching options and this could multiply your keyword list by 3 times
6. Add URL names like bike.com, www.bike.com
7. Add competitor names
Ok, I know this stuff above works. It helps to get a lot more potential keywords which “MIGHT” get clicked on. BUT, my biggest challenge so far is getting them clicked on. Its one thing to have a massive keyword list, and another to get the massive keyword list clicked on and another to get the clicks to convert to sales!
I believe the above works well only if you can get your keywords at the top 8 positions and get them relatively cheap. Cheap for me is below or equals to $0.15 per click.
I realise I can’t compete in this Adwords game with deep pockets full of money alone. I can generate “Creative” keywords with the above few techniques but I fear most people already know it so it isn’t “Creative” enough anymore. Its more like common knowledge now to do the above.
So what’s creative now? What is something very few people have thought about?
People have forgotten about the CONSUMERS! I’ve just read Google AdWords 1 2 3 by Greg Heslin. His way of doing AdWords is he targets the CONSUMERS more and less of the keywords relating to the product.
So instead of thinking “What keywords are people searching on for bikes?“, Greg recommends thinking “Who are the type of people who will buy these bike?” and “Where do they go to on the internet?” and “What do these people like?“.
Now this is very interesting indeed. He also recommends MONEY & EMPLOYMENT products on Clickbank. The same advice I got from Barry Stein. In fact I heard about this Google AdWords 1 2 3 from Barry Stein. He says its better than Google Cash.
Let’s take a look at the Top 20 Products In MONEY & EMPLOYMENT in Click Bank:
Take a look at this screenshot of Affiliates Alert I took or go to Clickbank’s web site to see it. You will find that over 6 of them are survey web sites. Greg and Barry both told me they make money with these programs but I don’t know how they compete with all the others.
It seems like you can’t win on price alone but you have to come up with rather broad keywords that don’t really relate to your product but relate to the target consumers of the product?
This is an interesting angle to explore. I will have to test it to find out if it works for me.
Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | No Comments »
I was just surfing around the internet for affiliate program forums and I found one at AssociateProgram.com. I was looking through the topics and 1 particular topic got me so engrossed because its about a young Singaporean kid like me!
His name is Joe Kumar. He sold this ebook "30 Days To Internet Marketing Success" and claimed to have made over USD $300,000 with just 1 ebook. It sold for $97 for a while till he started selling the resale rights and I bought it really cheap for about $20 on eBay earlier this year.
Its a really thick ebook with about 800 pages in 2 volumes. I only read the first one and gave up on reading the second volume because I didn’t want to write an ebook yet as I felt I don’t have enough credentials to do it. I didn’t want to come up with a scrappy ebook in 7 days and make money off people. Just wasn’t right to me. But in all, there are a lot of newbie tips in the ebook that I found useful. A while after I read that ebook, I found the Google Cash ebook and started with Google AdWords.
There seems to be a big "hoo hah" over this Joe Kumar saga. Some people claim that he conned them of a lot of money with the resale rights of his ebook. There is web site that offers a free download of the 30 Days…. ebook. And there is another web site that has all sorts of evidence of his crimes. Carlos Garcia, another young netpreneur has his story and an update to the story with a video of him checking his email box on the whole Joe Kumar story on how Joe tried to spread lies on his business.
Ok….. Why am I talking about all this?
First of all, I feel connected to this Joe Kumar guy because he’s about my age. Probably 1-2 years younger than me and he’s also a Singaporean. I thought what he did was inspirational and at one time I was talking to my Dad about how this kid pulled off such a money making idea.
Secondly, I was a subscriber to his newsletter and I remember very clearly his last email to us was that he has given up his Singapore citizenship and is now married to a young girl in India. And I thought to myself he must have skipped the 2.5 year military service that I am going through right now! Smart ass I thought back then. But after reading Carlos Garcia’s update to the story, Joe claims to be retiring from the Internet Marketing business and he’ll join the army for 3 years. This is the only inconsistent information I personally experienced of him.
Last but not least, this is a classic example of someone who doesn’t honour his words and looks only to the short term profit. His reputation is terrible right now, I have no proof whether he is guilty or not but its sad to hear that a fellow Singaporean could do such a thing. Its sad because there might be more people like him on the internet selling through hype and lies!
I’ll end this post with an article about "Telltale Signs of Hype", I hate hype and this article talks about all the bad things about hype. Let’s hope all marketer’s read this. Does hype really sell? Maybe… but I must put up my B.S. sensors so that I don’t get tricked by hype again…..
Categories: Internet Marketing | No Comments »
