MARKET ASSOCIATE

For the past 3 months I have been trying out a new wordpress plugin called the OIOpublisher that allows you the publisher to sale banner ads, text ads, manage a affiliate program as well as set up a add server for non wordpress sites.  I have been very impressed with the results of this plugin to say the least.  But one main feature that really attracted me to this plugin was that all proceeds would go directly into my pocket.  I am talking about 100% of the proceeds.  Yes, their is no middle man used.  What also impressed me was that I could set this plugin up on all my blog and websites and not have to worry if the ad network was going to approve of the site or not.  Getting approval on a few of my sites has been a great concern, especially for sites that don’t have a very distinct following yet.

But their is one drawback from using this system.  The publisher will have to advertise.  Usually this aspect is handled by the middle man.  I can’t say that I have found an answer for this as of yet.  The only thing that I can say is to make your service a focal point on your website or blog.  In the header make sure you have a tab or menu item that say specifically that you allow for advertising.  If you have a large amount of traffic and you can attract big named advertiser give away 15 to 20 days to allow that advertiser to get acquainted with you traffic and if they are satisfied book them in for the next 30 days at regular prices.  Now lets get into some of the features.

Ad Server – Set up ads in this plugin and through java-scripting add the ad to websites that don’t have a back-end of wordpress.  What a great feature.  The javascript works just like plugin code on a wordpress blog.  That means you can drop in either a text ad and banner ads or both and sale both of these site wide for any website that you would feel would benefit from this feature.  You can also set your own price for each ad per site.

Google and the <no follow> tag.  If you afraid for Google pinging you site for selling page rank, don’t worry about that with this plugin.  You can set it up so that each link sold automatically has the <no follow> link.  You can also charge a premium to turn off this feature.

Affiliate programs – Do you have a in house affiliate program that you run.  This plugin will can take care or payments and tracking for you affiliate program also.

All of these features and plenty of other features are all automated and does not require any interaction once set up.  Just set everything up in the beginning and let it do its thing.

All payments are real time and are credited to a paypal account that is set up in the plugin in the beginning.

If you or anyone else is serious about selling text links and banner space on a website or blog then this plugin is what you need.  It is powerful enough for a small website that may only get 20 to 30 clicks a day to a blog or website that get 10,000 to 30,000 clicks a day.  It is that powerful.  Learn more about the OIOpublisher..

Today I did not have to much to say about making money online.  Not that I am not making any money online but I like to look at other opportunities to make money offline also.  If you have not thought about this, then I would urge you to look into other sources of income and diversify you portfolio of income opportunities.  My lastest diversification is in the area of mobile home.  Most people would not think that their is significant money to be made with mobile home.  Most people just think that they are trash and are not worth the trouble.  But I have to say that single wide mobile homes are some of the best investments out their.  And if you buy them correctly, you can make 100% to 150% or more on your investment.

Some people may say no way…  100%  on an investment.  That can’t be right.  Well, I was a little skeptical also when I stumbled onto this investment stategy, but I found that it was true.

How do you make money with single wide mobile homes for sale by owner?

First buy a book named deals on wheels by Lonnie Scruggs. I brought this book 4 years ago and turned over a $4000 dollar mobile home that made me about $7000 dollars.

After buying the book look for single wide mobile homes in your areas.  This will involve driving the local mobile home lots.  Find a single wide mobile home that is between $3000 and $5000 dollars.  Once you find a unit that you like and can get the price needed put a down payment down to hold the property and a contract for purchase for 30 days.  Lonne explains all of this in his book.  Then you want to talk with the mobile home manager to see if they will allow you to purchase the home in their park.  If you can great continue on with the deal.  If not walk away from the deal.

Once you get the deal list the mobile home in your local paper as is.  Don’t do any work to the mobile home and have the present owners to show the mobile home for you.  Once you find someone interested set up a note for that person to buy the mobile home from you on payments.  Setup the payment plan and interest and collect a down payment.  Personally, I like to get done payments that are near or the same of my purchase price.  Set the remainer up on payments and have them move in as soon as the present owners leave.  Hopefully, you can do all of this within the 30 day period before paying the present owner.  That is all to this system.  Well, their is a little more that you will need to read once you purchase the book.

Believe me this is very easy and anyone with a little effort can do this.  Google Lonnie Scruggs if you need more explaination of the system.

If you have not found out yet, some of the best money to be made now is through European affiliate marketing programs.  I say this because Europeans market has not been saturated as of yet with affiliate marketers trying to make a buck.  Their are still plenty of opportunities for visionary affiliate marketers to build large sites that can attract large amounts of traffic.  But enough about that.  Lets talk about my 3 best European affiliate marketing programs.

1.  eBay.co.uk

eBay continues to surprise me with the depth of markets that they are involved in.  Did you know that they have a auction site in almost all continents and you as an affiliate marketer can build sites to incorporate eBay as a money stream.  And with all the tools that eBay provides they make it easy to put up sites that potentially can make significant money the first day of use.  Payment wise eBay has put together a very unique program that has built in bonuses and significant payout for new bidders to the eBay system.  Currently their payout looks like this:

GBP 0.00 – GBP 999.99 30.00%
GBP 1,000.00 – GBP 4,999.99 32.50%
GBP 5,000.00 – GBP 24,999.99 35.00%
GBP 25,000.00 – GBP 49,999.99 40.00%
GBP 50,000.00 – GBP 99,999.99 45.00%
GBP 100,000.00 – GBP 499,999.99 50.00%
GBP 500,000.00+ 60.00%

These are the percentages that will be received for bidders that you send to eBay for winning bids.  Of course this is in pounds so just put this into a translation program and you will see the power of this system.  As for new bidders that you send to eBay here is the break down of those payouts:

0 – 24 GBP 8.00
25 – 249 GBP 9.00
250 – 499 GBP 10.00
500+ GBP 11.00

So, for each new ACRU that you send to eBay between 1 to 24 you could receive approx. 15.85 US dollars.  And that is just on the first tier.  That makes me very excited.  That I could participate in an international market and make good money sitting here in the US.  To sign up just go to www.ebaypartnernetwork.com and follow their online instructions.  I will probably take a couple of days to get a response back so be a little patient.  In that time start researching some keywords or something.

2.  Amazon.co.uk

Amazon has not missed out on the european action either.  They have a fully functional and decked out site that is just as powerful as their US site.  And all the tools that are accessible from the US affiliate program are also accessible to the UK affiliate program also.  Payout with this program varies.  You can with opt to have a percent per product or you can opt to participate on the tier bases were you have to produce volume to make more money.  I personally like the volume systems because you only have to get 10 products sold under your affiliate account to move up to the 2nd tier.  You start out with 4% return for anything that you sell on this program.  Their are no bonuses but amazon has a large array of products so you should be able to incorporate their affiliate program into any website that you could think of.  And if you can get the traffic up you definiatly will make some money.  To signup just go to amazon.co.uk and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on join Join Associates.  Follow the instructions once you get their.

3.  Neverblueads.com

I just started using this affiliate network but they have a lot that you can recommend to european citizens.  And the great thing about most of the programs on neverblueads are that they free programs.  That means that you can recommend a program and just ask people to try a program free.  If people sign up you get paid.  These are called freebee programs and they have a lot of them to choose from.  Neverblueads also has a lot of other affiliate programs that could make any other site that you are thinking of starting.  Payout for these programs vary from program to program.

These are my top 3 European Affiliate Marketing Programs

One key for business success using eBay is sourcing products to sell. The first questions eBay sellers should ask themselves are: “What can I sell?” and “Where can I buy?”

There are two kinds of sellers on eBay, garage sellers and business sellers. Garage sellers are people who sell products they are not going to use any more and that are usually not new. Garage sellers are not profit driven, their main objective is usually to get rid of some stuff they don’t need. They will be happy to make some money by selling something that is no longer useful to them. On the other hand, business sellers are people who will buy and sell products for profit, they consider eBay a business and need to earn profit on the products they sell.

The first key to success for business sellers is an old marketing rule, RESEARCH. The products you need to sell are products that eBay buyers will want to buy. Apart from being a massive market place, eBay offers you a cheap source of research that you can conduct without moving from your computer.

If you are a business seller, it is fundamental that you spend some time researching before you decide which products you want to sell. Follow these research guidelines:

1. Search for the categories that are most popular. The first index is the number of listings that exist under each category. In addition, you need to look at how many bids the products have.

2. Look at the ratings of the sellers who are listing products in each category and study their profiles. See how many products they are selling and how many products they have sold in the past.

3. Analyze prices. You need to become an expert in your category and you need to know at which price a product is worth buying as well as the expected final winning price of your auction.

4. Select no more than one or two categories. “Specialization” is another basic rule of marketing. It is better to become an expert on something, as this will inspire confidence and trust in your potential customers. Online marketing is all about trust.

For conducting good research, you need time and organization. There are different software programs in the market that can help you save time as well as optimize your research.

Now that you are becoming an eBay expert and have conducted a proper search, you are almost ready to start your business. Before starting to sell, you need to buy! Here are some ideas from where you can source products:

1. Write your own e-book and sell it. If you have any passion or are an expert on a subject for which you can find a niche in eBay, do not hesitate to spend some time on writing your own book. The advantage of this is that after your initial time investment, you can sell and sell copies of the book without having any additional costs. Selling information products is one of the most profitable businesses. Even if you are not an expert writer, you can find other people who can write the book for you.

2. Use drop-shipping. There are wholesalers that will sell you products and send them to the address that you tell them. The advantage of this source is that you do not need to carry inventories, so your investments are minimized. After your auction is finished, you send them your customers address and they will do all the shipping. If you decide to use this kind of source, you need to make sure that your auctions winning price can be higher than the price you will pay for the articles. At minimum you should expect to double your costs.

3. Buy from eBay. Many eBayers success comes from knowing how to buy well on eBay and sell the same products at a higher price. If you know your category very well, you can easily find opportunities that will allow you to buy and resell making profit. Again, solid research is fundamental.

4. Buy Asiatic products. If you are willing to carry some inventories, you can invest on Asiatic products and buy them for a very cheap price. You can easily start importing Asiatic products from the Internet at www.alibaba.com.

5. Sell local products. If you live in an area that produces local products which can be bought at a cheap price and shipped to other areas where people would pay more, you should take advantage of the situation.

Have you ever had those days that you just have writers block. Well, I am having one of those days. I just have not thought of anything to pass along. Even though I have ran into some very interesting information. For example, the guys over at 45n5.com are in the middle of a discussion as to what a newbie should do first. Create 100 sites that product $30 dollars each or one big site that produces $3000 dollars. I left my opinion on the subject with them. But, I am a little split on the subject.

Yes, I have the mindset of creating multiple sites as seen by my goals posts, but who wants to maintain 100 sites day after day. I guess if they are all making the desired money I would…

How about one $3000 dollar site. Well, it is possible. Check out How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months! from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson and For Sale: Profitable Adsense Templates Business from johncow.com. Both of these sites are run by super affiliates. Super affilaites are affiliate marketers that make six figures or more a year. They have burst the bubble of making a great site and hitting the goal of $3000 dollars per month many times over and these are just a few examples of how it could be done.

But the websites that they created were fabulous ideas. Most newbies will not have these kind of ideas coming out of the gate. So, for a newbie to make $3000 with all of his/her eggs in one site, it is possible but very unlikly..

So which way is best? Would you make one $3000 site or 100 $39 dollar sites?

If it were me as a newbie, I would say invent one $3000 site a year and use the rest of your time on the 100 niche sites. Your eggs are not in one project and you still will accomplish the goal one way or another.

Are you using squidoo yet. Have you had a chance to take my advise and try squidoo with one or two keywords. If not, I hope that the title of this post gets your attention. Because I want to hammer into your mind what you are missing. Quite frankly, if your not using squidoo, then in my opinion you are not very serious about affiliate marketing. I say that because Squidoo has put together a system that is FREE, and gets you in the organic serps fast. Let me show you how I use them.

For those that know me they would attest that I dislike using PPC campaigns. I can’t fanthom spending thousands of dollars each month and by chance I find one or two keywords that make me significant money. Aside from that, these keywords may not even make money for me 5 to 10 years from now. By then Google probably would have force my campiagns out of the market. They are just to unpredictable for me. That is not the kind of mindset that I want to have. I want to build a strong business with websites that will make me money today, tomorrow and 5 to 10 years from now until I die. So, PPC marketing cannot be the way to go for me. This is just my opinion. Many other people may see it different. So, for me organic search is my best bet. The only problem with organic search is that it takes a while to get websites listed. Squidoo is the answer!!! Now you know I don’t use PPC, so you may ask how do you test keywords?

Well my technique is to create squidoo lenses and associate them with my keywords. These little lenses tend to get listed very quickly in Google. Like my most recent lense under the keyword “Dooney Burke Outlet Store”. This little lense I created 2 days ago and associated it with one of my fashion sites. Now, this little lense is on the first page of the google listing. Affiliate money will be made from eBay when people buy the purses. I am also hoping for some adsense money when people click over to my designer fashion site also.

How did I do this? My method of promotion of these lenses is very specific.

1. I link them into all my websites through a review or blogroll. Gets the google bot to the lense faster.
2. I stumble them. Social Marketing
3. I digg them. Social Marketing
4. I talk about and link to them on forums.
5. Article Marketing – I announce to the world by releasing a article or two and link to the lense.
6. Leave comments on other lense that have high PR and link back to my lense.

That is all I do. I try to do 1 to 2 lense a day with a lot of keyword research in between. Just a note about keyword research. I use wordtracker and I have found it to be very reliable. Test it out for free. I am sure you will love it.

Like I said before, that is it and you too WILL start gain 1 page Google organic search listings.

Buying Reviews is becoming a huge industry for bloggers and advertisers alike. Bloggers are using the resource as a means to get the word out about new and upcoming blogs as well as a means to make extra money on the side by reviewing other websites.

How much money can you make per review?

Well, I can’t give definite amount. The amount is contingent on the traffic and theme of your website. What I can say is that reviews could cost between $5 dollars and over a $1000 dollars. Wow.. Of course the websites that demand thousands of dollars has extreme amounts of traffic. With that in mind a thousand dollar review may be a bargain. Especially, since the link gained will be a permanent link that will last for the lifetime of the website.

Here is figure from a well known website that has been featured on entrepreneur.com. Congratulation john chow (johnchow.com). For the month of December 2007 his website made $5,400.00 with reviewme.com. He charges $400 dollars per review. So, the possibility of making substantial amounts of money monthly is possible.

Getting started in not such a big deal. First, you need a website or blog to complete reviews on. Second, the website needs to be approved by a intermediate website. This website works as the between middle man bringing the advertiser and the blogger together. Each website that you are approved to do business with gets a percentage of the money earned by all reviews. This percentage could be as much as %40. But this number could improve as more and more reviews are done. Once approved the advertising begins. Most of the review me websites have a database of companies that are in need of reviews. As the blogger it will be your responsibility to go out and bid on the jobs. If the company approves the bid, you the blogger will have a specified amount of time to complete the review and report back to the review me company with the web address of the review. If the company approves the review payment will follow.

As it stands today their are mainly three companies that are working in this industry.

1. Reviewme.com – This companies was start maybe over a year or two ago but it has been a total success. One of the partners of this venture in John chow of johnchow.com. I found it a little hard to find advertiser to do reviews on with this company. But, they also will recommend advertisers to you once someone signs up.
2. Sponsoredreviews.com – Sponsored reviews is a great company that pays every two weeks for any reviews done. They have a very large database of advertisers looking for reviews and the bidding system is very easy to use. Sponsored review will also add you to a email list that updates each blogger with new opportunities whenever there added to there database. I have had the greatest success with sponsoredreviews.com in generating review income.
3. BuyBlogReviews- BuyBlogReviews.com is fairly new and at this time does not have as many advertiser waiting for reviews. But, there system is fairly easy to use. Once you find an advertiser that your interested in doing a review on you pull up the advertiser and bid on the job. You will have to wait to see if the advertiser accepts your bid. If accepted the bid is valid for a certain amount of time.

Each site above is exceptional and I would recommend signing up your website for all of them. Then start shopping around to find opportunities. Also, advertise that you do reviews on your website and point them to the opportunity on either of the websites.

Who among you like and use eBay for an affiliate partner. Myself, eBay has been very good to me with concerns to affiliate marketing. They have been consistent and have proved themselves as being very reliable. The problem that I have found in using the program is that when using a blog format, they just did not have many tools that would transpose live auctions into a format that would fit into a blog post.

This kind of bugged me for a while, and a one time I thought about writing a plugin that would solve this problem. But as I have said many of times, I am very lazy when it comes to writing new code. I just don’t want to spend the time to code anything new. One of my downfalls….

So, for a long time I just linked directly to eBay pages in all my sites. Well, two weeks ago my prayers were answered with a slick little plugin called Bayrss. This little plugin allows the user to pull in live auctions into blog posts. The plugin works off of keywords that search eBay and pulls in auctions that fit the keyword criteria provided.

The plugin will create links to live auctions embedded with your eBay affiliate ID. When the links are clicked the customer is directed directly to the auction to buy. Pretty slick.. I Love This Little Plugin… I can create a blog and turn it into a website and create a bunch of keyword pages with just eBay live auctions. The plugin also allows for drilling into niche categories and it can pull in auctions from international eBay sites. This plugin covers everything.

One more note for this plugin. It also pulls in US amazon items with just one line of code…

Check out this Bayrss plugin..

This week I received a comment that peaked my interest and begged the question, When should I add Google AdSense to my website?  This was not the first time that I heard this question.  It always comes up when people launch websites and it is always in connection with generating traffic.  So is it good to add AdSense on the first day of launch or should AdSense be added when web traffic reaches a certain level.  Well, lets look at mindset and were you plan to promote your website.

Where you promote your website in the beginning will directly attribute to if you use AdSense in the beginning or not.  I am a believer that when you first start launch a website you should use directories as some of the first linking partners.  Directories like yahoo directories, DMOZ and Google directories are the perfect first starters.  More on directories to post to in a later post.  But because these directories are so hard to get in it has been said to NOT use Google AdSense until you have been accepted into these directories.  These directories frown on websites that are primarily affiliate marketing websites and tend to make money off of Google AdSense.  So, if these are the key resources that you use to promote your websites don’t use Google AdSense in the beginning.

If your are not going to use these directories are you main launching linking points then I would recommend adding Google AdSense in the beginning.  As for traffic, if due diligence has been done for keyword research then there is a certain expectation that traffic will come to a website.  As long as linking campaigns are done correctly and regular content is added to the site.  And there is always PPC campaigns.  Either one of these techniques will not warrant the removal of Google AdSense in the beginning.

Me myself I always stick to adding Google AdSense in the launch of any of my websites.  Like I said before, I expect with careful research of keywords and a rock solid foundation, I will have traffic come to a website.  And in some cases I could start earning AdSense money on the first day of launch.  That is my expectation and I definitely don’t want to miss out on that money.

Well, I am done with one of my latest case studies.  It involved trying out a traffic generation system that was supposed to generate instant traffic for product promotion.  I ran this program for a week and I was not impressed with the results nor with the toolbar install that ran on my browser.  It seams that every hour the instant buzz toolbar would fail and send a continuous ping to the instant buzz server to get reconnected.  The problem was that when this ping was initialized it froze my terminal and I could not type.  In the middle to putting up post I would have words that were missing letters.  After a while this becomes very annoying.  It was something that I could not tolerate, so I uninstalled the toolbar.

So, how does this end the case study?  It ends the case study because the whole traffic scheme was the more instant  buzz noticed that I was jumping from site to site the more ads they could put in my face.  That earned me credit to have my ads displayed to others in the system.  Now that I have uninstalled the toolbar they are unable to deliver ads to me and as a result my ads will not be displayed to others.  But I am glad I had a chance to check this system out.  And as a affiliate marketer, I must test, test and retest multiple products to see which are useful or not.  It just happens that in this case, instant buzz was not useful at this time to me.

I will send a email to instant buzz to see if they will be able to fix there system.  If so, I may reinstall the toolbar and continue the evaluation.  Otherwise, this one will go to the junk heap.