I just found this free keyword tool that is by far the best I have seen for generating lots of combinations. Visit the Keyword Tool Kit and you’ll see 3 options:

1. Keyword Linker - Combines mutiple keyword lists to generate massive amounts of highly targeted phrases in seconds.
2. Keyword Jumbler - Jumbles your keyword phrase into every permutation a surfer could enter into a search engine.
3. Keyword Wrapper - Wraps your keyword lists in quotes and brackets for use in AdWords campaigns. (Keyword Linker and Keyword Jumbler have built in wrappers).

You may use the Keyword Linker to add "Action Words" to your bunch of keywords. For example you may gave list of keywords like:

red shoes
blue shoes
orange shoes

By adding a few words in front or behind that list, you can get this in a few seconds:

buy red shoes
buy blue shoes
buy orange shoes
red shoes cheapest
blue shoes cheapest
orange shoes cheapest

My favourite tool is the Keyword Jumbler. On the web site, it has an example with the initial keyword phrase:

cheap european holidays

The Keyword Jumbler automatically "jumbled" them up into all possible variations. This works best for 3 or more keywords in 1 phrase. The result was:

cheap european holidays
european cheap holidays
holidays cheap european
cheap holidays european
european holidays cheap
holidays european cheap

The Keyword Wrapper is pretty much the same as Hudson Scripting Scripts. I still use Hudson Scripting’s Typo Generator to get a list of typos without using any of my brain power to brainstorm all the possible typos. There is so much I can think of… All these scripts make it possible for you to get more keywords than your brain can churn out!

To put it all together, here are the free tools I use almost everyday to expand my keywords:

1. Keyword Linker
2. Keyword Jumbler
3. Keyword Wrapper
4. Hudson Scripting’s Typo Generator

To get my initial list of keywords, I usually pick the keywords that can give me 3000 searches a month of more, that’s my own criteria for selecting keywords. I find that these keywords are worth my time to add into my Ad Groups and they usually give more clicks than the ones with lower searches. Then again if you have a very targetted keyword for a certain product like "Canon EOS XXX" and the search number is lower than 3000, use it anyway because that phrase is very targetted for someone searching for that particular camera.

If you’re on a budget, you could use free tools like:

1. Overture’s Suggestion Tool (This is an enhanced version with the bid prices on the left)
2. Google AdWords Keyword Suggustion Tool

If you’re willing pay for software, there are quite a few of them in the market right now. They cost $60 and above. I’m not sure which one is the best right now because a lot of new ones are entering the market. Now its even possible to see the number of ads in Google, Overture, FindWhat and Enhance at the same time and also the exact headline and position of the ads!

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | 3 Comments »

I was so excited when I saw a Clickbank envelope in my mailbox yesterday. That was my first ever Clickbank commission check. $442.53 for last month or pay period I think? Its not a lot of money to brag about but its a nice start. I don’t want to get carried away with this because I only made $289.48 in net profit from my Google AdWords campaigns. A little short from my $300 milestone. Revenue isn’t revenue until I see it in my bank account. Expenses are expenses because money has left my bank account for my Google AdWords expenses!

I was probably wrong about my previous post about Singapore banks ripping me off for USD checks. I called my bank today and they confirmed that the bank will charge me SGD $25 plus SGD $3 for postage. No conversion fees because I have a USD savings account. So I expect to receive UDS $425.53 minus USD $17 for my bank fees. Clickbank were pretty punctual in mailing out my check. They mailed it out on 15 November and I got it on 22 November. Just 7 days via air mail. My bank promised me that they will clear the check in 2 weeks or less but sometimes it might take longer. I hope its less than 1 month before the check clears!

This month’s sales has been going down a bit. I hope the sales in the last few days of November will pick up. Maybe its because some of my keywords got disabled and I received less traffic from my ads. Maybe I’m spending too much money on some of the useless keywords.

If there’s one improvement I made this month is that I have made sales in at least 3 more affiliate programs. But only 2 of them seem promising, 1 of them has been dropped. I need to take my affiliate income to the next level and I believe that would mean:

1. Keyword Tracking of Clickbank sales - I need to know which keywords resulted in the sale. Right now I am absolutely clueless! If it makes a sale I simply keep whatever Ad Groups and keywords I have at that moment and work on improving the ads.
2. Split Testing of multiple affiliate programs - This would double my speed in finding profitable affiliate programs. I have doing this for 1 week plus now and I’m still learning about it. I put 2 affiliate programs through my split testing script and see which makes more sales within 200 clicks. I drop the loser and keep the winner.
3. Expanding my reach beyond Google AdWords - I have opened a FindWhat account but I must tell you the interface put me off so much that I just got too lazy to work on it. Furthermore all 4 of my ads got disabled. They are very strict and if you thought Google was strict, wait till you see FindWhat. Other PPC search engines would include Overture and Enhance. Google, Overture, FindWhat and Enhance seem like the top PPC search engines.
4. Become a value added affiliate - I might be losing some sales just by sending traffic to the merchants. Maybe I could build mini sites for my profitable affiliate programs and give them a bonus or something in return for buying through my affiliate link. I could set up autoresponders to “pre-sell” or educate them about the affiliate program or related information, set up a newsletter sign up form etc.
5. Find a mentor! This is hard….. I was disappointed with the AdWord mentor forum. I didn’t feel like they wanted to mentor me. I’m wondering who would be so kind as to “hold my hand”, show me all their insider secrets, doesn’t mind me becoming better than them without charging outrageous fees that would make me bankrupt!

If you’re new to my blog and you’re wondering what this is all about. Read my previous posts and you’ll understand more. And also please check out the ebook Google AdWords 1 2 3. I received the above check because of the techniques I learnt from that book. Cheers!

Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »

I’m changing my web host right now. Just migrated everything from Vincent-Rich.com to VincentRich.com. In 1 - 2 more days, I will configure Vincent-Rich.com to point to VincentRich.com. I’m now paying only $1.80 per month for my Web Hosting fees. My new Web Host is DailyHosting.net. If you’re paying by PayPal, you get a 10% discount off the normal price. The Web Hosting fees was supposed to be $2.00 per month! Its amazingly cheap and I’ll be testing it for a few months to see if its reliable and fast.

DailyHosting.net is having a November special. According to their web site, “There will be 2 different specials for November and we are happy to announce that they will benefit all packages.

We are please to announce that the 50% OFF offer is set to stay for the month of November, who know when that will finish.

Check out this extra offer. For all new clients that sign-up in November and choose Yearly Payment, we will give you extra bandwidth for the LIFE of your account. Details below:

For Resellers, we will DOUBLE your bandwidth for LIFE

For Shared Customers, we will give you an extra 10GB of Bandwidth for LIFE

This offer applies to Annually paid packages and new customers only, and will finish on the 30th November 2004. Grab them quick!!!”

I’ll be coming up with my affiliate link cloaking web site soon with my new Web Host. It even allows you to host multiple domains for a monthly price of my lunch today!

Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »

I visited ShrinkMyLink.com today and here’s a snippet of the message left by their CEO.

"On November 5th our entire network was temporarily taken offline for over 8 hours because a ShrinkMyLink user has posted a link to an illegal and very offensive website.

For several hours we were working with the FBI and our upstream providers to ensure that the relevant information pertaining to this criminal activity was successfully extracted, archived and secured. Unfortunately, due to government policies and the importance of preserving the evidence intact, our servers had to be temporarily disconnected from the Internet.

As you can imagine, this outage — while completely out of our control — has cost us thousands of dollars in lost revenue, not to mention losses that cannot be interpreted monetarily (i.e. our customers’ confidence, frustration of their users)."

I feel its better to pay money to have your own redirection service with cheap web hosting a few free scripts.

Categories: Web Development | No Comments »

I think the idea is really workable and cheap to do because I found this cheap web host that charges only $2 per month. That’s like the cost of my lunch! I can afford to pay that!

I’m getting pretty upset with Doteasy because I keep getting problems posting to this blog! I click on submit and it keeps giving me this “FTP error” from time to time and i’m hitting that threshold where enough is enough.

Here’s what I plan to do:

1. Purchase a generic URL that doesn’t really relate to any product or service
2. Create cloaked affiliate link HTML files with free cloacking software and upload to the web site. The files would look like www.URL.com/GoogleBook.html. I don’t really care about the file structure there, I’ll just dump my files in.
3. Install a free split tester script to alternate between 2 URLS. I can now scientifically test between 2 rather similar affiliate programs at once. For example I could redirect people towww.URL.com/GoogleBook.html and this page will redirect them to Google Cash or Google AdWords 1 2 3. That way I can test which affiliate program converts better with the same keywords, ads and period of displaying the ad.

Total cost: $8 for domain name + $24 for 1 year’s worth of hosting fees = $32! Because of the its rather cheap to set up, I believe you’ll see mine up and running pretty soon!

Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »

I ordered a free 30 day trial about 2 weeks ago and I watched all 3 DVDs plus a bonus interview DVD with a 20 year old American kid of the web site HearandPlay.com. I thought the sales copy was so compelling and I was actually sold on one of the promises to write sales copy that really sells but I missed out on the line that said it was a software and after watching the DVDs I realised I had to buy more stuff from him.

Have you ever bought into a seminar, book or any info-product that promised you something and when you find out the truth is YOU’VE BEEN BOUGHT TO BUY MORE! I hate that feeling and I must say I feel a little misled. It is true that the videos give great information but not specific and detailed enough to make a lot of money really. If you really follow through on Corey Rudl’s advice, you’ll be spending thousands of dollars on his products just to implement all those ideas of his. You could really save a lot of money by taking the time to look for cheaper and better alternatives.

Its supposed to "RISK FREE" but there is always risk involved when you get these deals. What about the time, effort and money involved to review this information to see if its for you? Corey’s a smart marketer. All his physical products are not light to ship and he uses Fed Ex. It cost me USD $30 to ship the 4 DVDs plus a booklet to Singapore and an additional USD $14.50 to ship it back to him. Total cost $44.50! Then I discovered a better product by Yanik Silver called the "Instant Sales Letters" for $39.95. Its full of templates and sample sales letters for all types of uses, not just for online sales letters.

Actually when I was watching the DVDs I thought I would just return the interview DVD which costs $47 and keep the 3 other DVDs that would cost me $97. There was this video by Corey Rudl explaining to us how to use Alexa and he read out good comments about his web site "yadadada its great" but I only saw 3 stars out of 5 stars in the video. I got suspicious and I wanted to know why.

At Alexa.com, you’ll see that they have 3/5 star reviews. A few days ago I swear to heaven I saw quite a number of negative reviews about him saying how bad the service is, and how over-prices and over-hyped his courses are. Right now at the time of this posting, ZERO reviews but the score is still 3/5.

Some people might say I am a loser for not even applying the stuff and getting a refund. The reason why I wanted to get a refund was simple. I wanted to learn how to write killer sales copy to create a sales letter for my business with tested headlines, words that sell and all. But I didn’t get that from the videos. I need to spend even more money buying his sales letter software to do that which I wasn’t interested in because I felt misled already.

Knowing what I now know, I would do my due diligence next time when I decide to even test a "free trial" offer. I would ask myself:

1. Are there better and cheaper alternatives?
2. What are people saying about this product or author?
3. Does the sales copy sound too good to be true?
4. What is the real cost of reviewing this product (time and money)?
5. If I really decide to purchase this product, can I get a better deal for it?

Obviously, I didn’t ask these questions earlier. If you’re really looking to get Corey Rudl’s material cheap, search on eBay for the keywords "Corey Rudl" and you’ll find some of his Insider Secrets 200X products for a fraction of the full retail price and look out for this "Rudl Report" because the author reveals ways to get a discount on all his products. The "Rudl Report" can also be accessed at RudlReport.com.

Categories: Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

In one of my recent used car campaign for Clickbank’s number 1 used car affiliate program, I enabled "content network" and I received a larger than normal number of visitors of over 160 + clicks that cost me over $10 in 1 ad group in less than 24 hours! Ouch! How many sales did I get? Nothing!

When I read the the stats I couldn’t even see the exact keywords that made that 160 + clicks! I got very suspicious and I emailed Google asking for an explanation on the discrepancy of the stats in the keyword clicks and the total ad group’s clicks. This is the first time such a thing happend to me and I got to be careful now with the "content network" turned on.

I usually turn it off for most of my campaigns if I get enough clicks. Sometimes I turn it on to see if I get more clicks and to see if those clicks helped me get any sales. Some people say it helps to make more sales for them but it doesn’t seem to be happening for me.

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | No Comments »

I recommended Shrink My Link in September in this post of mine. But it seems like they have folded in the past few days or something. I grew very dependent on their service for cloaking my affiliate links on my blog and Google AdWords. Lucky for me, I was left with 1 affiliate program on Google AdWords with a Shrink My Link cloaked URL. But I still lost 1 day’s worth of sales on my Survey campaign!

I believe it would be better to purchase a cheap web host service and install a split tester script and an affiliate cloaking script to store my affiliate links. I would need a generic URL like link.com or something more specific to a particular niche like SurveyWebSite.com. This could then be used for Overture PPC listings.

You may test out one of my new cloacked affiliate links of Google AdWords 1 2 3. Its hidden in a frame with an encrypted URL link. You won’t even see the Clickbank “?hop=myusername” code on the URL!

Categories: Web Development | No Comments »

I believe most people in the US are now off to vote for their new president. Because most of my customers are Americans, I didn’t get a sale yesterday! I don’t really understand how the elections work in the US but after reading the CNN Election 2004 web site, I now know that each candidate needs 270 electorial votes to win. I hope this election ends soon with John Kerry winning. Anyone other than Bush would be better for the world.

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | No Comments »

Its been quite a heck of a time for me in the last 2 weeks. I have finally made some profit. Not a lot of money but I managed to cover my losses in September of $123.40 by making a profit of $235.25 in October. I am still calculating my profit / loss from early this year till October 2004. Hopefully I will be able to cover all of my expenses.

I am not too far away from my 1st milestone goal of a net profit of $300 per month. I believe I will be able to hit that amount next month. Its very exciting to wake up and see the sales coming in. Right now if I don’t see at least 1 sale a day, I get pretty upset! My maximum number of sales per day was 4! I am sure I will be able to break that record very soon.

Building on my success with my survey affiliate program, I decided to dabble in this DVD Wizard Pro software which is ranked among the top 10 affiliate programs in Clickbank’s fun and entertainment category. I left it running throughout last weekend with the search and content network on and I made 2 sales of $21.26 for a total sales of $42.52 but I spent $26.01 for 327 clicks. Therefore the conversion rate turned out to be only 0.61%. I might have to turn off this campaign if it doesn’t sell in the next few days but I will turn it on during the weekends to see if it sells on Saturdays and Sundays like the previous week.

I think its time I expand to other Pay Per Click search engines. My natural choice would Overture but I decided to go with FindWhat first because it would be cheaper for me in the short term. I will join Overture after I cash in my checks which I have yet to receive! All my profit is only on paper but my losses are real! It will take a few months to get it going.

My next campaign would be on Spyware software. Using the techniques in Google AdWords 1 2 3 has helped me a lot so far with 2 affiliate programs. I’m sure I will be able to find a unique angle for these Spyware products.

Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »