Not Big On Reading? You Can Find The Solution I’m Using Here

In the past rank tracking was done using their cloud infrastructure but it looks like this can no longer happen, nor is it likely that this functionality will be back anytime soon either. The workaround of using your local internet connection works OK if you’re only checking a few keywords but it soon baulks if you have more than a couple of websites. Then there is the problem of if you do go over a limit you’re going to end up with your Google access temporarily suspended, not a disaster from home but imagine doing that from a work network!

My Market Samurai Rank Tracking Solution

What I’m thinking is you need something that makes you anonymous to Google (people worry about being associated with certain search phrases and having their sites penalised), has enough bandwidth to handle the requests in as speedy a fashion as possible and eliminates the possibility of getting Google’s suspended service notice. The answer is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). So I did a bit of research and found a company that offers an anonymous VPN service. It basically encrypts any data and uses one of over 23,000 IPs for requests (all traffic really), that “should” be a viable solution then. I’ve only been testing for a day but all seems OK, you don’t even need to configure anything in Market Samurai to use it, and at less than $80 a year for unlimited access it is very affordable for anybody looking at checking lots of rankings. I’ll let you know if anything changes but it looks like I’ll be sticking with it. If you want to give it a go you can find them here, it’s only $12 for a 1 month subscription to try it out.

The Other MS Ranking Solution I Looked At

The only other thing I could think off was looking at alternative software and the one that keeps on cropping up is something called Rank Tracker. It’s only $99.75 and it works well but my grudge with this is that in order to keep up to date with search engine format changes there is a subscription model for updates. If I was going to do that I could go back to WebCEO which offers the same. What I love about Market Samurai and what makes me so loyal to them has been the enormous amount of regular updates they’ve made to their software, it’s obviously a passion of theirs, being a software developer I can appreciate that. The added bonus of what I’m doing is that I can use the VPN service with other things as well so in terms of value for money I think I prefer my solution that lets me still use Market Samurai.

Once you get the big secret out of the way what you’re actually left with is a couple of programs for creating and automatically submitting files to document sharing websites. At best these are 2 amateurish programs, as much as I love the .net framework it hasn’t half increased the amount of knock it up and flog it for $x7 merchants out there. Whenever a guru gets a brain fart you can guarantee there will be something for you to pay for and download in a matter of weeks. Anyhoo, I’m going off topic here.

Better Alternative To Commission Autopilot

First of all, did you know that you can get free add-ons for Microsoft office that allow you to save files in PDF format? You can, here is an example for Office 2007. There are also 1001 other free ways of creating PDF files. OK so that and you searching article websites for relevant content just about does away with your PDF creation, the first of the 2 pieces of software in Commission Autopilot. If you wanted to do things a better way you may want to consider submitting unique quality content but heh that’s just me, and not what Commission Autopilot is about.

Now for the submission part. Buy Magic Submitter. NO really, buy Magic Submitter instead of Commission Autopilot. In terms of service count CA comes out on top of MS for the time being (18 versus 8 ) BUT Magic Submitter is being constantly updated and you can easily add the extra 10,20 or even 50 (if you find them) document storage services yourself. More importantly not only will Magic Submitter handle the whole signing up with each service process automatically (CA doesn’t) but it also allows you to spin titles and descriptions for your file submissions. Add in the fact you can submit using random profiles (it literally takes 2 minutes to create a whole new set of profiles for each service) and proxy support and you can see that what you’re left with is a very quick way of submitting PDFs without any sort of a foot print. Don’t like manually completing Captcha’s? Commission Autopilot offers support for Decaptcher, Magic Submitter on the other hand supports 3 seperate services. I haven’t even mentioned that Magic Submitter isn’t just for PDF submission to document storage websites, it’ll also let you automatically submit content to Article Directories, WordPress Blogs, Bookmarking Services, RSS sites, Video sites, Press Release websites and about half a dozen other things some of which I’m not even sure what they are!

New Doesn’t Mean Better

Here is the internet marketing timeline :-

New Product Comes Out > Everybody (Affiliates) Says It’s The Best Thing Ever > 1 Month Later It’s Never Mentioned Again > New Product Comes Out > Everybody (Affiliates) Says It’s The Best Thing Ever etc etc etc

New doesn’t always mean best or even good for that matter. There is very little software out there that stands the test of time. There are 2 I swear by and they are Market Samuari and Magic Submitter. Almost everything else I’ve tried since has just been a rehashed, cheapo, outsourced to god only knows where version of them made by marketers to cash in on an idea. Don’t fall for it.

I’ve fallen victim of this, as has just about everybody I know who does any sort of volume with the Amazon Associates program. In the last 3 months and (since October really) people have been seeing that they’re earning less money from approximately the same amount of traffic. In my case at least this isn’t because of any Amazon commission changes, it just seems that the sales aren’t there, which is strange. I’m not suggesting for one minute that there’s anything dodgy going on in the background here, if anything maybe the popularity of Amazon as peoples all in one stop for online retailing is waining?

What it does show once again is that people shouldn’t rely on only one source of income if they are looking to make a living online. Like I’ve said previously there are other online retailers who offer better terms than Amazon and it’s very rare these days not to be able to find a product on one of several alternative sites running affiliate programs. It’s just a bit of a pain to have to swap out all those links

7Search PPC Affiliate Marketing

Is it really nearly 3 years since I wrote this post about making your first money with affiliate marketing, wow!

Being totally honest it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything much with paid traffic, I hated the way that so many rules were introduced regarding landing pages, then just when you got your head around that you’d find offers being taken down all the time. The industry has gone through some large changes and it appears as if it’s finally starting to settle down again. So when I got my usual account balance reminder from 7Search (I’ve had $100+ sat in it for ages doing nothing) I decided why not give one of the old methods another blast and see how I got on. The short story is that it still works fine.

To start off with I went in to Peerfly and picked an E-mail/Zip Submit offer at random. I literally just picked the first one that was at the top of the list for that day, it ended up being something to do with Scrapbooking. Once I had the offer I went into Market Samurai, put in the keyword “scrapbooking” and created a list of keyword possibilities, these were then filtered to create the list (100-150) with the most traffic.

Once I had my offer and my keywords I created a simple campaign in 7Search, the actual ad itself came courtesy of mish mashing a couple of Adwords ads, I direct linked to the offers landing page and other than 3 more competitive phrases I left every keyword at the default $0.05 bid. All of this work in total took a lot less than 20 minutes. So how did I get on?

Drum roll please….well I’ve made $10.80

from a total advertising spend of $6.03

That’s a healthy 55% profit margin. Yeah I know the figures are small but you have to remember I put virtually no work into this. There are people who spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of their time and never see a single dollars PROFIT from running PPC campaigns. In this case there are over 200 similar E-mail/Zip Submit offers I could have (and may) promote doing this on Peerfly alone. I haven’t even looked at slpit testing ad copy, or optimising bid amounts, or looking for better paying similar offers or anything in fact. I just chucked it up as quickly as possible to see if it still works and to get rid of some of my balance with 7Search. If PPC was your thing you could easily adapt this to making significant amounts of money.

LinxBoss Still Works As Of January 2012

Have you noticed plenty of movement with the search results lately? Have you noticed the traffic tanking on your blogs? It seems that Google is mixing things up again but the good news is that LinxBoss has been just as effective for me in the last 2 months as it always has. The great joy with LinxBoss is it either absolutely works for what you’re targetting or it doesn’t, for the vast majority of keywords I’ve been after it has worked. When it works you just see a relentless march up the search results.

You’ll see from that image (click for larger version) that I’ve broadened the number of keywords I’m targetting using LinxBoss for that domain, you’ll also see that I’m not exactly cherry picking low competition keywords. It’s not cheap but it works, and when you can rank for decent traffic keywords that are attracting $5+ Adwords bids it doesn’t take long to get your money back and then some.

I have learnt a very valuable lesson here, you just never know how other people are managing their websites (or who they may have pissed off) so buying one is always going to be a hell of a risk. It’s a risk that has to be factored into what you are prepared to pay for something. It’s the brick and mortar equivalent of buying a business only to discover that there’s scummers coming around and breaking the windows once a month. Anyhoo….never again.

InfoLinks To The Rescue

I’d tried several alternatives including writing my own code to offer up links to various affiliate programs I was associated with but none of them could give a fraction of the return that Adsense Link Units were giving me. The main problem was one of targetting, relevancy is everything when it comes to contextually targetting visitors with ads and even though I made sure what I was serving up was relevant to the page it just didn’t seem to be effective enough to convert. I really needed a PPC source of income for those ad spots.

Example:-

Fortunately for me I lucked out, one day when checking my InfoLinks account I noticed that they offered something called Related Tags (Doesn’t sound very Link Unity I know). To the lamen they looked like lists of links that had a striking similarity to the Adsense Link Units. Integration only required very simple code changes and I was testing in less than an hour,even on a manually created website and even using the manual placement option instead of the automatic checkbox. It took about a week for me to realise that these were giving by far and away the closest performance to Link Units of everything I’d tried.

If you jump forward to today they are still as effective. All things considered I’m probably getting somewhere around a 50%-60% return from them compared to what I was with Adsense but to be honest that’s about as good as I think it’s going to get. Nobody has the advertisers that Adsense has. If anybody has an Adsense Link Unit alternative that they think is better than that then I’d love to here about it? Until then though I’m sticking with Infolinks Related Tags as my best alternative to Adsense Link Units.

They don’t care if you don’t make money, they wan’t their banners in front of as many eyes as possible, whether relevant or not. Bad affiliate managers see the whole internet as nothing more than a giant billboard. One they can hopefully get for free. They don’t understand affiliate marketing, they certainly don’t understand that it could be somebody’s living. The vast majority I speak to seem to either be traditional marketing people who have been seconded to the affiliate management team or worse, kids straight from Uni who know how to “do” Google. It’s a shame because when a company invests in an affiliate department that actually understands the game from both points of view it can be a fantastic relationship. I love nothing more than getting an e-mail from my contact that starts with “you might want to try xxxx on your xxxx site, we’ve seen excellent conversion rates from this demographic”. You know, valuable information backed by some facts, not just “PUT OUR STUFF EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!”

This is part of the reason why I enjoy working with small local firms so much, it cuts out all the crap. A conversation that is as simple as “I’ll make you more money for a percentage of what I make you” seems to be far easier understood by a company owner. I can explain that there’s no point me advertising their services in front of people who have no interest in what they do. I’ve really struggled in the past to get that message through to some affiliate managers at some of the UKs biggest online companies. At the end of the day affiliate marketing is about making somebody else more money in return for something for yourself. If your affiliate manager can’t grasp that concept then just ignore them.

What Is Swagbucks?

Swagbucks acts as a reward system, in turn for performing certain actions you get rewarded with a certain number of swagbucks points. Don’t worry none of the actions involve taking your clothes off, or not that I’ve seen so far! Once you’ve got enough Swagbucks you can redeem them for prizes. Prizes can come in a number of forms from electrical goods, to posters, to gift vouchers to even a entry into a Swagbucks raffle where you can win even more points. To be honest a lot of the physical items aren’t available outside of North America so as somebody from the UK I’ve stuck to redeeming my points for vouchers for now.

Each one of the following vouchers is worth £5 (just under $8) to spend at Amazon.co.uk As you can see I’ve not done too bad out of minimal promotion and just doing the web searches I do everyday anyway:-

How Do I Promote Swagbucks?

You’re looking at it. No seriously, the only promotion I’ve ever done in order to get referrals is the couple of mentions on this website. I’ve never paid for traffic for it or done anything complicated. I’ve mentioned it here because I use it and I’ve had a few people sign up under me. Other than that I’ve just used them to do a percentage of the web searches I’d do anyway.

But Can I Make Real Money With Swagbucks?

You mean you’re not impressed with my free Amazon vouchers?! Another of the voucher prize options is a Paypal credit. If that’s not real money enough for you then I don’t know what it. I haven’t done it because I don’t need a few quid that much, I’m much happier using it to subsidise the crap I’d be buying on Amazon but it’s your choice.

I don’t want anybody to think that they’re going to get rich using Swagbucks, you’re not. It’s a very easy, zero effort way of getting rewarded for something you’d normally be doing anyway. However it is real, it does work, they do pay, so for people that wanted to see some proof of Swagbucks delivering there you go. If you’re interested you can sign up for Swagbucks by following this link.

Adf.ly works in a way similar to that which many download websites have used over the years. When somebody clicks on their link to get the free download you are first taken to an ads page where a timer counts down before your download starts. Adf.ly has done the same for shortened URLs. When you use the Adf.ly service to shorten a URL, instead of the visitor going straight to the destination page there are taken to an in-between advert page and you get paid. If you want an example here is a shortened URL that will take you to the BBC home page:-

The BBC Website

Where Would You Use Adf.ly?

Lets not make any bones about it, being taken to an advert instead of straight to the end point is an inconvenience and is going to piss some people off. I would never recommend using these shortened links on websites where you have built a community or loyal following. It’s also clear from what I’ve seen that you are getting paid a fraction of a cent for each view so it’s not worth replacing proper affiliate links with them unless you’ve had a 0% converion rate for months on end! However Adfl.ly has plenty of practical uses.

1. Linking to pages that don’t have an affiliate program. For example you could rank high for keywords that relate to a brilliant Youtube video. When linking to the Youtube video use Adf.ly and you can get paid for that traffic.

2. Free e-books and downloads. Have you written an e-book that you’re giving away for free? Use Adf.ly to shorten the download URL and you’re at least getting something in return. Got a free piece of software that’s getting 5,000 free downloads a day…all of a sudden it’s not a bad little earner.

3. The News. Some of the biggest traffic spikes you’ll ever experience occur when people starting talking about current affairs and what’s new at news sites like the BBC and Yahoo. From celebrity gossip to the latest football scores, commenting with a link back to the source article can do very well. Of course Twitter and Face Book are prime for this as well and Adf.ly would help you make some money from all that traffic you’re pumping towards the news sites.

The Technical Bits

You are paid per impression with Adf.ly and the amounts vary depending on what advertisers are active on the system. When it comes time for you to be paid there are 2 options, Paypal and Alertpay. Full stats are provided although they appear to lag about an hour behind from my experience. The good news about payments are that they are allocated for payment automatically on the next available payment date (first Monday of the month) once you go over the $5 payment threshold. This means you don’t need to be constantly monitoring things and requesting payment. The system as a whole appears well written, responsive with a clean crisp layout. It is very easy to use.

Adf.ly Is For Lazy People

Like the difference between Adsense and running hand sourced affiliate links the more you put into something the greater the possible reward. Adf.ly is a very simple way of making “some” money online, it requires no technical knowledge, doesn’t need a website and the amount of time you have to put into it is the time it takes to shorten a URL and post it to Facebook, Twitter or whatever. It’s common sense then that the rewards are not going to be massive, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth while. A few years ago when I talked about Swag Bucks people moaned to me about how hard it was to make anything from it, I’m due to do an update soon showing just how much money Swag Bucks has made me – it’s not the sort of amount that 95%+ of people would sniff at for doing NO work. I see Adf.ly as similar, you’re not going to get rich but you might just surprise yourself…and it’s such little effort. Hell they even provide scripts for cenverting your whole website if you are that way inclined.

I’m still in early trials with Adf.ly but so far so good. It’s a very new service and one that I’m sure will prove to be popular amongst the MMO crowd. Get signed up early and get a few referrals under your belt and who knows what the future holds for Adf.ly

Sign Up With Adf.ly

We deliberately booked ourselves into accommodation that hat a Wifi zone because I knew I’d have to do some work over the period of a 2 week holiday. Shared internet PCs are fine for the teenage facebook crowd but not great when you’ve got to use FTP, may have to alter and rebuild software or more importantly when you are dealing with money online and need security. What I wasn’t expecting was that the Wifi would extend just far enough up the hotel to reach our room with a weak intermittent signal. It’s this signal that has helped me to be so productive, in one of the bedrooms I can use the internet fine and can research or check stats, look at emails, basically I can do everything I could ever want to do as if I’m working from home. On the balcony there is no wireless signal and during the day when I’ve had enough of the pool or beach this is where I like to sit with my feet up. It’s nothing to start up the laptop and with the sound of my daughter playing in the pool below, the sun beating down, tap away till my hearts content. It’s writing and getting a tan at the same time, it’s easy, enjoyable and I’m pumping out new articles like a machine. Right now as I write this I’m in a pair of shorts, sipping a beer and totally relaxed. I don’t have to worry about new mail notifications popping up, twitter alerts or any of the other million distractions that come along with having an internet connection. It’s the perfect environment in which to write. Having the best of both worlds within one apartment means I don’t need to travel down to the dedicated Wifi zone where I’d just spend all my time checking e-mails and counting money. Neither of which is really productive when it comes to making money online.

The question is what can I learn from this and bring home with me? For a start I’m going to schedule router downtime each day. For a couple of hours each afternoon I’m going to kill the internet connection and just concentrate on writing new content. If this works I might extend it to the whole afternoon and see if it also helps when writing software. That’s a little bit more difficult because a lot of software development involves research but I can only try. On the other hand it may not work from home at all. Maybe it’s only possible to be this relaxed and productive when you’re in a relaxing environment and home is anything but that at the moment. Each and every time I leave the damp drab island I call home there is an overriding niggle that I was born to live somewhere hot, happy and relaxed. I always wanted to retire somewhere hot and sunny, maybe it’s time to consider working somewhere hot and sunny instead.