Fast Internet Profits

Ok, not really.  I really don’t want to get into the Internet Marketing niche, but I had this cool domain going to waste and found this nifty theme, so here it is.  I figured, what the heck, I’ve purchased a lot of IM products and probably can offer a fair opinion on a lot of the stuff out there, why not put it out there for you?  It’s not my main thing, so if it’s slow developing, sorry, but there’s only so much time to go around, right?

Anyway, I’ll try to share some of my favorite internet marketing products and software with you, and maybe warn you of a few things I was not so happy with, but remember, it’s just my opinion, what do I know?  Sometimes it’s actually all about the timing anyway.  Remember the adage, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear?”  I’ve found that to be true sometimes in this business.  If the timing is wrong, some probably perfectly good products seem completely useless, but once in a while, I stumble across exactly what I’m looking for, whether I know it or not, at just the right time.

On this site you will find links to products, some of which I own, some of which look pretty good to me, but the timing is not right for me to buy at the moment (I’ve learned to just get what I need when I need it, not every shiny new object that catches my eye).  Yes, they are affiliate links (duh!), so if you buy something after seeing it on my site, there’s a good chance I’m going to get a commission for having referred you to the vendor.  That’s up to you, where you want to shop.  Like I said, I don’t really have strong intentions to monetize this site, it’s more of an experiment, but if I turn you on to something you like and you want to buy it, hey, I’ll take the commission, thank you.  I am working on a couple incentive bonuses, just in case you are on the fence though, to make it worth your while to shop here.

Well enough about me.  If you have any questions, just post a comment or use the contact form and I’ll give you my two cents, for what it’s worth.  Eventually, little by little, I imagine I’ll actually have some pretty decent info here for you.  Thanks for visiting!

I just found a new keyword research tool put out by Brad Callen called Niche Finder.  It grabs Google keywords and runs it through an algorithm to calculate competition, taking into account things like first page results page rank, backlinks and other factors, according to Brad, and displays results with a red/yellow/green icon (like a couple other tools I am familiar with) denoting the likely difficulty in ranking for the keyword using SEO.

Then you can expand the list by selecting a keyword you would like to use, and it pulls in longtail variations from Google suggest.

It reminds me of James Jones’ MicroNiche Finder but with a simpler interface, and is priced about the same.  MicroNiche Finder has a lot of cool extra features, but I think I will check out Brad’s Niche Finder based on a lot of positive feedback from WF and other users.  The most important thing, to me, is how much you can rely on the accuracy of the algorithms used by these tools.  Accuracy and simplicity are good.  This is a new tool, so I suspect it will have some additional functionality added – - the one thing I would like to see is it pull in and display CPC data too, but that’s not critical.

Check out the video demo on the Niche Finder sales page and see if it might not be something you are interested in too.  Thankfully, it is a one time payment, I actually had a couple similar tools that I like, but they were on a subscription basis, so I canceled those for the time being while I try out this one – - I hate paying for things indefinitely if I can help it, though some things are worth it and have to be that way, still, if I can pay for something and be done with it, I’d rather do it that way.

I was doing some more window shopping and found some more stuff that looks pretty cool to me.  Please let me know if you have any of these and what you think of them.  I might just pick up a couple of these myself!

Insane Article Marketing $24.95 I saw this when it was a WSO but didn’t pick it up at the time because I’m not doing a lot of article marketing yet, but it looks pretty good (there was more info on the WSO page).  Proposes to not only tell you how to get your articles ranked well in search, but especially how to double or triple your click thru rates.  I might have to check this out when I start publishing more articles.  If I’m going to publish for the backlinks, might as well do it right and get the direct traffic too, right?

SimplyPLR $67/mo  Much as I hate subscriptions, some products, like software that requires constant maintenance and fresh content services, need to be on a subscription basis for the vendor to be able to keep delivering.  Simply PLR delivers 225 fresh, keyword optimized, limited distribution articles across 15 niches (that would be 15 articles on each topic) each month.  The really cool thing is, you get the base article, but you also get a spin ready version of each article, and from the sample material I’ve seen, they are well spun.  I don’t know about you, but I hate seeing poorly spun content where the synonyms chosen were never reviewed by the person and the articles look and sound like crap – - and I see a lot of that.  I always check my synonyms and grammar meticulously so that my spun articles read very well, but I’ll tell you, it is very time consuming producing one decent article.  That’s why I think a subscription to this service would be a huge time saver, assuming you have a few sites that you could use articles on a variety of topics on, or submit to directories and 2.0 sites and whatnot.  And, there apparently is some sort of dashboard where you can go in and directly schedule spun posts to your blogs.  Anyway, just thought I’d let you know, if you have a use for lots of fresh content to multipurpose, you might want to check this one out.

WP Easy Article Uploader $37  I checked out a few plugins for scheduling mass articles to post over time, and this one seems to have the best features and options.  Some of the others are a little cheaper, but the flexibility of this one makes it worth the extra few bucks.  That’s all I’m gonna say, if you have a need to schedule a bunch of PLR or outsourced articles to WordPress, check it out.

Weekly Spin Ready Articles $39.95/mo  Similar idea to the Simply PLR subscription, but this is a little cheaper, you only get 5 articles a week (20 a month) but they are all in the IM niche (various sub-categories of course) and super spinnable, meaning they can be spun more times and still spit out unique articles.  A good deal if you need mostly IM oriented articles to work with (that’s what, $2 per spinnable article?).

3.A.I Method – Automatic Adsense and Article Income $47  Intriguing. I wouldn’t give it a second thought except the reviews are very positive.  Too bad I didn’t see it when it was a WSO, but, oh well.

Article Submit Auto $27/mo  An awesome article submitter.  Submits to the directories that really count, instead of the hundreds or thousands of garbage directories that most of the other submitters submit to.  I will definitely be subscribing to this one soon.

Link Racer $17/mo  I was one of the first subscribers to this service when if first came out, but the vendor had a lot of problems and I eventually just said, screw it.  It looks like he finally fixed most of the things that turned me off.  I might just have to start submitting to his private network once again!

Alright, that’s the cool stuff for today.  I picked up a couple things I really like (Adsense related), I’ll let you know about them soon (assuming I’m willing to share).

Well, I’m finally making some sales on one of my affiliate promotion sites, but since most of the purchases are paid via PayPal, I’m still not “eligible” to get paid by ClickBank. Even though I have a couple hundred dollars in commissions sitting there, you have to have sales on at least 5 different credit cards for ClickBank to send you a check, and of course PayPal doesn’t count towards those 5 purchases.

I understand their reasoning, they don’t want to make it too easy for people to sign up as “affiliates” just to get a rebate on one of their products, thereby screwing the real affiliates, who are actually working hard promoting products for sale, out of earning commissions for their hard work. Still, it is frustrating.

So, my ingenious plan is to have a few people who keep asking me what I want for Christmas, to which I typically answer “nothing,” buy me an inexpensive Christmas gift from ClickBank through my affiliate link, using a credit card. It’s a win-win-win-win situation. I get something I want for Christmas, which I might not necessarily buy for myself but I certainly could use (and is better than a Chia pet), those who want to buy me something have a cheap wish list to choose from, and give me the gift of money besides, Clickbank gets a couple more sales, and the vendors get a couple more sales. Damn, I’m brilliant!

So, here’s my cheap wish list:

Social Networking Business Plan $27  This looks pretty cool, especially since I am looking into doing some marketing for local businesses, and the social marketing thing is a weak spot for me.  The course is written by a guy who put it together for local live theater groups to promote their shows and such, so I could see that it would be an adaptable strategy for promoting any local business.  It also focuses on linking up many social sites (you know – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc) in such a way that you only update your content in one place and it publishes to all of them, which would be an invaluable time saver for someone promoting several businesses at once.

Fast RSS Submitter $12.95  There’s a lot of RSS submitters out there, but this looks decent for a very inexpensive price.  Submits a feed to over 100 RSS directories, pings 150 sites, has a built in feed creator, supports proxies, proxy rotation and captcha solving, and comes with a bonus Press Release submitter.  Not a bad deal for $12.95 – - I’d use it.

Uncommon AdSense $10  I’ve been working on some sites to be monetized with Adsense.  I wouldn’t buy another general Adsense course, because I already have a few really good ones I’m working with, but this guy covers some more advanced/technical  details that could really be helpful to know, and for $10, I think it is a really good buy.  Visit the sales page and check out the things he covers – - if you’re doing Adsense, I think you’ll agree.  Also, the page is nice and simple and devoid of hype, which earns my respect even more.

Google Juice $9.95  Kind of cool.  Written more for the small business owner directly, rather than an SEO, I’m sure it covers a lot of stuff I’m already aware of.  However, he covers a lot of material including using social media effectively and efficiently, particular websites to post on to improve rankings, and press releases, as well as the standard keyword research and SEO fare.  Being that it is focused on the small business owner in a non-techie format, for $9.95 I think it would be a great resource for a beginning SEO (like myself) to have a baseline education of what I should at least know, as a starting point, if I am going to provide service to business owners.  Then I can add my own personal areas of  expertise gathered through experience on top of that to provide a more valuable service.  I like it.

Google Sandbox Effect – ‘How To Avoid The Google Sandbox’ $17  Still thinking about this one.  While I personally haven’t experienced “sandbox” problems yet, it would probably be handy to know exactly what to avoid and what to do to build authority and “trust” in the eyes of Google as quickly as possible.  At $17, I won’t rush out and buy it (a little cheaper I might), but if someone bought it for me for Christmas, I’d be tickled pink.

Adsense CTR Booster WordPress Theme $19.99  Ok, the sales page is terrible, but look at the demo sites.  Ignore the scraped, spun, awful content, but notice how the ads are formatted and placed to blend in nicely with the content.  Very clever!  I’m buying this one myself if I have to.  Hopefully it doesn’t really go up to $39.99 before I get a chance to.  I think a site with decent content could do well using this theme.  For $20, I’ll take the chance and hope that it has the kinds of options I would want in a theme.  If not, I’ll just have to mess with the coding until I get it to do what I want it to.

Update:  I had a chance to play with the CTR Booster theme.  While it is a nice looking theme, and probably effective for CTR, I do not recommend it unless you are very good at editing code.  I played with it for a couple days and found a lot of hidden links in the code, and some general bugginess, and a lack of the flexibility that I prefer in a theme.  I’m not saying it is necessarily not right for you, there are some things I really like about it, but after 2 days of tweaking it, I still wasn’t happy with the end result, so, for me, I will not be buying it for my own use.

Well, there you have it.  My cheap picks for the internet marketing junkie in your life.  I’m sure there’s other deals out there, but I was focusing on the areas I am currently working more on, which is Adsense and local SEO for now.  Merry Christmas*, and God* bless us, everyone.

*No offense. I am an atheist actually, but gotta respect the traditions you are raised in, right?  Happy <insert your traditional Winter holiday here> to all.

If you’ve been doing this for a while, you already know what I’m talking about, but if you are relatively new to internet marketing, you will soon discover that in your quest for knowledge of how to make money on the internet, you will often be asked to enter your email to receive free information.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I do it all the time, but you need to be aware that once your email is collected, you will be on that marketer’s mailing list.  Some of these marketers will send you great information, and occasionally send you offers on internet marketing related products that they think may help you out in your business.

Many more, however, will promote any new product that is launching, as long as they feel the sales copy is strong enough to be likely to convince you to buy the product, and they stand to make a good commission from the sale.

The problem is that these marketers really do not care whether the product is a good value, or whether the product is truly likely to help you out, they just want a sale, period.

If you are not careful, you will be besieged with offers promising you the world, and it will be hard to resist spending money over and over again on overpriced, relatively useless products, each time hoping that this is “the one” that truly will give you what you so desperately want and need, a real way to make money on the internet.

To help you avoid falling for these “too good to be true” offers, I am including a couple short videos here from Shane (the Backlink Battleplan guy) that will prepare you a little for this.  Check out Shane’s blog too, he is one of the good guys in this business.

How To Avoid The “Newbie Trap”:

A Perfect Example:

I don’t know about you, but a problem I’ve been having is that, although I “know” a lot about backlinking, how important backlinks are, and many strategies for getting backlinks, when it comes to sitting down and actually working on it, I don’t know where to begin or what I want to do next.  I’ve somehow managed to fumble my way through to some success, but, man, if I only had a clear, actionable plan!

I was recently referred to this Backlink Battleplan product and am working my way through it (and yes, I paid full price).  So far, I am impressed with the content, and it is precisely what I need right now, an actual plan (that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to implement).  If you are in the same boat, check out the link below.  (At this point, it is not an affiliate link, but once I confirm the value of the product first hand, it will be. Correction – - this is definitely a course I can recommend with a clear conscience, so, now it is my affiliate link!)

Get Free Backlinks with the Backlinks Battleplan

What is the “Backlink Battleplan”

Backlink Battleplan is an the newest product created by Shane Melaugh. It’s all about link-building, but with a very unique twist.

As you probably know, if you want to get a site of yours ranked in the number one spot in Google for a high-traffic keyword (meaning that a lot of people search for it and you’ll get lots of free traffic by being #1), it means that you need to beat some tough competition. The way to do this is to have reasonably good on-page optimization and then build backlinks. Tons of backlinks, for really valuable keywords.

As a rule of thumb, you need more and better backlinks than your competitors have. That’s what gets your site to outrank theirs.

And if you want lots of traffic, you’ll often have to build backlinks by the thousands.

Obviously, there’s no way you can do all that by hand, which is why most SEO’ers use different kinds of link-building tools that automate and speed up the process for them. And if you want to compete with these guys, you need similar tools.

Problem is, these tools are usually very expensive. Some of them will only cost you a one-off fee of maybe $100 or so, but most of them (most of the ones that are actually effective, anyway), will cost you anything between $70 and $170 each and every month!

Here’s where Backlink Battleplan comes in: What sets this system apart is that it teaches you how to build lots of backlinks, using automation tools, systems and “hacks”. And all of this automation costs you absolutely nothing.

That’s right: The system is about creating automatic backlinks without having to spend a penny on fancy tools.

This could be a game changer. But does it really work?

Well, while this is not one of those “create hundreds or thousands of backlinks with a few clicks of your mouse” claims, it is a very good plan of action, using free tools and services to manage your time more efficiently, for creating lots of those backlinks you need to be taken seriously by the search engines.  And the nice thing is, even though the search engines consider any intentional backlinking “grey hat”, the methods recommended in the plan are not particularly black hat, as some other products tend to venture into.

My experience with this is, you will have to be willing to commit some time to learning the strategies and doing some setup, but once you’ve gone through it, you will have a streamlined actionable plan to take your sites forward and start getting more traffic.  My one admonishment for you – - please make quality sites, websites that bring value to the visitor and that you would be proud to call your own.  Don’t fall for the “shortcuts” that encourage you to make garbage sites.  They won’t be very profitable, and they get trashed once they are discovered anyway.  That’s my little editorial for today.

Give it a look, depending where you are on building your business, this may be just the thing you are looking for.

If you decide to try it out (or already have), please come back and post a comment with your experiences for our other struggling readers to take into consideration.

p.s. I also like Shane’s low key, no hype, no fluff teaching method.  He doesn’t waste your time, and has a bit of a sense of humor that slips through now and then.  He also tosses in a couple decent bonuses.