Internet Business Blog

It’s strange why people place value in the website rankings from a statistical tool that inherently collects skewed data.

Alexa, a part of the mighty Amazon (the book store, not the rain forest), is well-known throughout the Web for their ranking and traffic measurement tools, but just how useful are they?

To answer that question, I suppose we need to first determine exactly what service or product it is Alexa provides.  The title of the Alexa home page tells us that they’re the Web Information Company.  Well, I’m not quite sure whether or not they could have been any more generic than that, but then they do have lots of interesting graphs and distracting button ads to avoid.

Playing around on Alexa.com gives me an indication of how popular other websites are and how mine fare against them, but the measurements only include those people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their active web browsers.  There was talk of other Alexa gadgets installed on websites helping to boost their figures, but I can’t say conclusively whether or not they actually do.

Okay, so you and everyone else can see how popular websites are with the users of the Alexa toolbar.  Since I don’t know a single person with it installed, I can’t really say whether there’s anything other than bragging rights on offer.

Alexa hates me.  The reason why I say this is because this blog has been stuck at over 250,000 for the past few months.

Why and what can I do to increase my Alexa figures? Should I even care?  I suppose one way in which I could lose out from a lower Alexa value is when it comes to advertising.  Advertisters might use Alexa to garner some visitor counts in order to help them decide whether a website is worth the fee.

I guess as a consolation, I could look towards this Alexa alternative as it shows this blog get an increasing amount of traffic on a month-by-month basis.

Not so long ago, article directory scripts were sprouting up all over the Internet marketing scene along with promises of AdSense riches using nothing but other people’s content. Adopters had seen the success of the likes of EzineArticles, ArticleCity and GoArticles to name just a few and now was their chance to sit back for an easy ride on semi-autopilot.

What these adopters didn’t realise was that maintaining the type of article directory that authors and publishers would visit again and again took hard work.

First there was the set-up. Unless the directory was customised, it would look and function just like any of the hundreds of other directory based upon the same script.

Then there were the bugs. The people who had sold them their article directory systems were marketers and not programmers who appreciated the importance of concepts such as testing and maintenance. Their primary concern was to get their scripts developed as cheap as possible and ready to market as soon as possible. The signs were that the pent-up demand was about to be met by a wave of similar scripts so time was of the essence. Thorough testing would have only slowed things down and the rush was about to begin.

Of course, this eventually led to the inevitable; exploits. Like dominoes, the directories succumbed to the will of the web hosts who pulled down directory after directory as they were being compromised through the same weaknesses. Instead of distributing syndicated content they were sending out masses of spam and consuming large amounts of server resources in a runaway fashion. The fact that so many directories hadn’t been customised and so could be searched for by the default text made it almost too easy for the crackers.

Those who were determined enough to get their systems fixed or to seek out better supported systems were then faced with another hurdle; the articles! With so many people wanting to syndicate their content, owners of directories with even a whisker of PageRank would quickly become swamped with an endless number of submissions.

At first, the novelty of reviewing articles was enough to keep them going. Once this had worn off, the process of reviewing would become a chore that would ultimately culminate in a number of choices:

1. Open the flood gates and accept articles without a thorough review.
2. Abandon the directory for something less time consuming.
3. Stick with it. Perhaps even hire some people to carry out the review process.

It’s my opinion that most people who rushed into the directory business settled for the first two options. Those were the easiest choices, but also the ones that would sound the death knell for the directory. Publishers weren’t interested in empty directories or those filled with articles spun so many times over that they read like they were composed by soul-less machines. And genuine authors didn’t want to submit content to sites which wouldn’t result in their work being read and so all that was left was the automated, spun content submissions.

So, if you ever feel like complaining about article directories having quality requirements that are draconian, remember that maintaining an article directory isn’t easy and that maintaining a directory where people will keep coming back is even harder.

If the review processes are keeping your articles out then perhaps they’re doing their job as they were meant to!

I’ve read suggestions from many Internet marketers that the best way to make money as someone selling their own products or as an affiliate is through a mailing list. That said, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make any money without a list. It just means you have to take a different approach.

The benefit of having a list is that you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a subscriber and perhaps even an existing customer. By opting into your list, they’re literally giving you permission to send them emails and who is to say those emails can’t sometimes ask for money in exchange for goods and services?

The process is simple, you send subscribers interesting and useful newsletters to read and occasionally recommend a product you think the reader will find beneficial. Rather than report your email as spam, your reader might just snatch your affiliate link right out of your hand and run towards the checkout with their credit card in their hand.

Make no mistake, an established mailing list can prove to be a very valuable resource. They aren’t bottomless wells of gold, though. They need nurturing and they can take time to build. Send too few emails and they might forget who you are. Send too many and you’ll just drive them away. That all seems like hard work. Maybe even the kind of work that holds no interest for you. After all, not everyone wants to build a relationship with their prospects through direct email.

Fortunately, there are other ways of making lots of money as an affiliate; ways that don’t have to involve mailing lists.

Some people say that the period around Christmas tends to be slow for sales. Christmas a slow period for sales? The same time of year when the stores are packed with crazy shoppers hunting for the perfect gifts? People aren’t just crafting gifts from junk they find in their garages, they’re spending money!

Personally, over the past 2-weeks or so I’ve made over $600 in affiliate commissions alone and no lists of any kind were involved.

“How?” You might be wondering.

The exact methods I use don’t really matter. Most will be using methods you’re already familiar with or can read about on numerous websites and ebooks. The biggest influencing factor I’ve found to affect my affiliate income is the audience I target with my promotional efforts. Rather than trying to convert people into buyers, I like to target buyers who have already made that decision to purchase and are on the way to complete the transaction.

Think about that for a second. Instead of trying to make a buyer out of someone who may or may not want the product you’re promoting, why not find the people who are already wanting to buy the product you’re promoting and then help bring the product closer to them?

Here’s a digram showing you the concept of how to position yourself for really easy affiliate income,

It’s that simple.

There’s no need to build massive lists and try to convince them to spend money. If you’re better with search engines than you are with lists then this is a great way to make money. Your target audience have already got their minds set to shopping mode. All you need to do is guide them through your affiliate link on their way to make their purchase.

If you’re still wondering how to do this, let me give you just one example of how to position yourself in between the buyer and the product.

A lot of people who are on the cusp of buying a product will use the a search engine to carry out research and often they’ll just search for the product name. This is just one opportunity for you to position yourself in front of the buyer, by presenting something in those search results that will attract their attention. It could be a review of the product or it could be some information revealing a problem with the product, but then offering a solution to that problem.

Just use your creativity, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and ask yourself what you’d be looking for. Then promote your information so that it gets in front of the buyer using SEO, Pay Per Click, article marketing, etc. and that’s all there is to it.

Useful Tools

There are numerous tools that can help you as an affiliate and here is a shameless plug for one that’s helped me a lot; it’s my very own Affiliate Link Tracker; an affiliate link cloaker and tracker all-in-one that I developed after trying and deleting others on the market.

As well as the easy link management element, the tracking features are just as important in helping to improve promotional efforts and reducing costs on dead-end channels.

Some merchants provide more statistics than others. It’s important that you have some mechanism of tracking not only so you can determine which of your promotional campaigns are attracting clicks, but also to ensure the data provided by merchants is accurate. Without any form of measurement of your own, you’re left to rely on what they report and they may not necessarily always get it right.

Affiliate Link Tracker makes it easy for you to stay in control.

As we’re already well into 2008, now would seem a good time to reflect on the past 12 months and to start thinking about the year ahead…

2007

Whilst this blog is intended to be primarily centred around the topic of making money online, it’s difficult to skirt around major life events that take up a significant amount of time and energy. 2007 was the year I got married and even though I spent a lot less effort working on my online endeavours around the big day, my automated income streams continued to work hard relentlessly whilst I was busy getting on with life.

At some point during 2007, I came to the realisation that running a small web design business where everything centres around me was continual hard work with no real exit route other than to sell the business. There’s an element of residual, recurring income that comes from hosting, but otherwise you’re basically paid for your time and that’s something that Rich Dad has really put me off.

I’d already started moving away from having such a big slice of my online portfolio dependent upon Google AdSense and concentrated on developing my own products instead. In a bid to free up more of my time, I hired several different freelancers.  2007 was the year when I got really fed up with useless freelancers wasting my time so product development ended up taking up quite a lot of my time.

To make my money work harder for me, I started having a real stab at investing in stocks and even buying into the behemoth we all know and love as Google.

Oh, and of course, I did some decorating!

2008

Whilst I don’t believe in making new year resolutions (if you’re going to do something just do it), there are a few things I’d like to accomplish this year.

The first is to focus more on completing individual projects. The problem, I find, with trying to work on lots of different things at once is that you lose a lot of time in the overhead that comes with re-focussing on distinct projects as you try to regain mental momentum.

In order to help me achieve this, I’m going to put more effort into planning. I’m going to map out my process flows and keep track of progress.

My second goal is to spend less time on Internet distractions. Feed readers, emails, blogs and forums all have their uses, but they also cause my train of thought to derail.

Thirdly, and this goes well together with my first goal, is to make use of the gigabytes of material I have at my disposal that can be monetised. This includes all of the software and info-products I’ve obtained with rights. One of the reasons why I haven’t been able to make use of a lot of it is because:

• I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it sufficiently to decide what to do with it or
• I’m not happy with the material and decided it needs work or
• it’s trash and would take more time to fix than starting from scratch.

One of the problems I face is that I can be very fussy. I like things done to a certain standard and that often means the only way I’m happy is to do things myself and there just isn’t enough time in the world to allow me to do this whilst achieving all that I want to achieve. Unfortunately, this has meant that, sometimes, there are too many possible channels for my effort and I end up getting distracted instead. I’m not one to procrastinate and I’ve no problem with taking action, but having too many open doors means spreading myself too thin as I try to do everything at once.

So, my plan for 2008 is to knuckle-down, plan and focus!

What are your goals for 2008?