Where I Receive And Throw in the Trash Promotional Pens

Got 4, count them 1,2,3,4 blue, promotional pens.  I will not tell you from who coz I don't want them to sue me for ruining their reputation.

Actually, my household got 4 blue, promotional pens.  Two of the members of my household are too young to be buyers of anything.  First strike.

But that's not the worst of it.  The worst of it is that these promotional pens are really cheap.  They don't write, they scratch.  So, I gave them to my daughters to play with.  That was around 1 o'clock.  At about 2, they gave them back to me: neither the dolls nor Teddy Bear nor Whiskers like them.

The whole thing has caused me grave emotional damage.  I think I shall sue them.  I want $40 million dollars for my hurt feelings.  I deserve better than cheap pens. 

I think someone should make it up to me.  Send me a personalized Ferrari, any Ferrari (as long as it's new) and I promise everybody in my world will see your logo.  Oh, heck, I'll take any promotional product as long as it's quality, even a promotional USB flash drive (which I will never use but always mean to).

Things Happen

First, the funnies.  Actually, not really funny.  Someone said, "Sweet justice!" But that's not it either.

Bank of America served foreclosure papers on a couple who did not have a mortgage with Bank of America.  The couple counter sued, won, foreclosed on Bank of America.  Yup.  They showed up with a sheriff and a moving van to a Bank of America branch to take desks and computers to the tune of the judgement against Bank of America.

Because, like so many other foreclosed upon, Bank of America had no money to pay!

Sunday Morning Work

You ever think about personalized water bottles?  I have to.  Right now.  I'm supposed to be working on a marketing campaign that involves personalized water bottles.  But it's Sunday morning and I don't feel like it, so I thought I'd take 3 minutes to create a post.  You know, recharge.

You, who have never thought about personalized water bottles don't know it, but they're a great thing.  If you own or run a business. 

Enough about bottles.  My daughters were looking forward to their favorite cousin's visit, scheduled for noon.  The cousin text me she can't make it: her sinuses are doing something they're not supposed to.

I've never head sinus problems, so I don't get it.  I know they can hurt, but till they hurt me it won't be the same.

Anyway, her non-presence forces me to do change plans for today, do something entertaining with my kids.  And they've started to be quite demanding when it comes to entertainment.

Backlinks vs Google Maps

You hear a lot about backlinks.  You hear that you need them. Which is true.  You hear that they need to be quality backlinks.  That's also true.  But how many quality backlinks do you need?  Take a look at the image below:

It's from Market Samurai, my favorite tool for finding out which keywords are too competitive, which ones are right for me.

BLP means backlinks to the page.  BLD means backlinks to the whole site (domain). 

Do you see how many #5, the Wikipedia has of both?  Yet it's not ranking #1.  If you look farther to the right, you see that the page from Wiki that shows on page 5 is not optimized for the keyword 'Chicago home insurance, " the keyword I asked Market Samurai to gather info for me.

But, the one that shows first on the page, is not optimized at all for this keyword, has no backlinks to the page that shows up, yet it shows up first.  How come?  For a lot of keywords, Google shows local businesses that have a map profile. 

So, one thing you can do for your business, if it's the kind where Google maps applies, is to get signed up with Google maps and be #1 there.  It's a lot easier to show up high in the ranks.

AC Dies, I Plug Along

A few days ago, I was on the Internet, looking at car insurance sites (here's one) when the air conditioning died.  Today we're having 70 degrees high.  My ac decided to die when we had 99.  Yup, 3 days does make that much difference in Chicagoland.

The AC people were prompt but not so good, took them 3 tries to get it going again.  In the mean time, I sweated like a pig (even though I went to work in a Barnes and Nobles coffee house, then a Starbucks.  By the way, Starbucks is better; Barnes and pal Nobles haven't figured out they need more than one outlet.)

Much has happened since my last post, like I got hired to do SEO for a couple of companies.  One of them is a promotional products company.  Quite an industry, promotional products, yet you don't hear about them unless you're in marketing.  Or running a company and someone sends you personalized coffee mugs or something to get you to buy from them.

I just started the seo work, so no ranking yet, so don't bust my balls.  Yet.

Furthermore, my 7-year old's decided I'm short and she'll be taller than me by the time she turns 10.  And I think she will.  Looks like she'll be a giant, she's taller than 95% of kids her age.  No, she's not interested in basketball.  She loves soccer and swimming pools.

Shutting Down The Government

No, I'm not going to go into politics.  I'm merely going to mention that I saw part of an interview with a congressman.  He happened to be a Republican, but I've seen the other side do the same.  He said that the Government doesn't have to be shut down.  All that's required is for Democrats to accept what he and other Republicans were proposing.  He did not seem to be aware that the opposite holds true, that all that's needed is that Republicans accept what the Democrats want.

And now to my request: can we elect people who at least have a modicum of self-awareness?

And that reminded me, don't ask how, of part of an interview I saw about a year ago.  Some congressman was asking some 4 star general about US putting 20 thousand soldiers on the west side of some 8 miles wide island.  The Congressman asked, honest to goodness, if the island wasn't going to capsize with that many soldiers on one side of the island.

The general answered with a straight face.

I'm done now.

Internet Marketing Tools

Haven't been here in a while.  I've learned a lot about internet marketing and affiliate marketing since then.  Particularly that tools like Market Samurai (good Market Samurai review) save a lot of time.  Market Samurai is great for finding keywords and figuring how hard it would be to make it on page 1 in Google for them.

Particularly that I know a heck more about internet marketing than all the small business owners, managers, presidents, chief financial this and chief executive that.  So, of course, I've started to propose my Chicago SEO services to them.  And they're saying, yes, man.

But some of them aren't working with.  Anyway, that's not what this post is about.

I've had reasons to look at a bunch of sites.  Accounting sites, mortgage sites, insurance sites, marketing sites.  Many are gorgeous and useless, many are ugly and useless.  But they're very much alike in what they say.  Check it out for yourself: a ton of small business owners have sites that say: We are great.  We love you.  We'll take good care of you.  Then there's a long list of services.

Not all of them.

Here are some of the sites I looked at today (including some good and some that need work):

http://www.swias.com
http://eurobankmortgage.com
http://www.callero.com
http://www.myadvanceddentistry.com

But the way to do it, is to look at all accountant sites, all dentist sites, etc. 

Earning Extra Money Online With Article Marketing

A while back I bought a course on writing articles for article marketing.  I'm pretty good at writing, so why would I want to do that?  Because being good at writing is not the same as being good at earning money online with article marketing.  I found that out the hard way.

The hard way, by the way, was me writing articles that few people read.

Let me amend that. The hard way was me spending tons of time to write an article that few people read, an article that got few to no people to visit the site I recommended.

Turns out psychology is important here. Buyer psychology. You can't tell a fat bride-bride-to-be she's fat even though she's online looking for a way to lose 30 LBs in the next 5 weeks so she could fit in that size 18 wedding dressed she chose a year and 2,000 Boston creme donuts ago.

Then there's the little tricks you can use to get them to start moving their eyes down the page, towards your bio, where you have them links you put too much hoping into.

And, of course, the bio.

So, I bought. And learned. And the first thing I did was to write a Squidoo lens to promote that course, it was so good.

Here's the link to that lens. It's a fine lens, especially since I put some nice photos there.

Of course, maybe it's not my lens, how would you know, right? But it's still a fine lens.

By now you surely know I know a good lens when I see one.

http://www.squidoo.com/earning-money-online-with-article-marketing

Lenses and Blogs

I became interested in lenses and blogs in January 2010. Started with a Squidoo.com lens on Vizio TVs. I was going to make money with it from Amazon.com. Of course, I did not become one of Amazon.com’s fine affiliates nor did I use one of Squidoo’s Amazon.com modules. Yup, I’m bright.

I Move On

After a the Squidoo lenses, I built a site on mortgages. This one made me extra cash regularly, but little. I built it with SiteRubix, which is a bitch. So I looked for an easier way. Blogger.com is what I found. It’s easy to build a site, easy to monetize (with Google Adsense or Amazon.com ads, otherwise it’s just like Squidoo lenses).

Easy to monetize, turns out, doesn’t help my pocket all that much. The trick’s in getting traffic. And not just any traffic. Traffic from a hungry crowd. (Go west, young man, and find yourself a hungry crowd, are words I’ve heard a lot lately. Wise words too. The internet is full, nay, chuck-full, of wise words.

Well, maybe the trick is getting traffic and how you monetize.

Anyhow, I moved to the next phase: find hungry crowd, coral hungry crowd… somewhere. You do that, it turns out, by creating heaps, loads, tons and numerous lenses and blogs and hubpages. Oops. I forgot to tell you, I also found hubpages.com. Easier to set up than a squidoo lens, but with a few limitations. On the other hand, mortgages is not a banned topic.

Squidoo’s got a lot of banned topics on account that Google slapped it silly in 2009 for having crappy content. Long story, so

Back to locating hungry crowds and converting them in traffic to my blogs and lenses and such. The trick is not to create them, the blogs and lenses and such, that is, but to optimized them. Or is it in choosing the domain name? Nah, turns out a domain name that's a keyword with little competition is gold but gold alone is not good enough; you need keywords and to know what to do with them.

So, the new trick. Keywords have to have a decent amount of traffic. And not be competitive. The ones with lots of traffic are too competitive. Some of those with puny amounts of traffic are also very competitive.

Problem, the wise people on the internet can’t agree on what’s decent or competitive. Another problem, analyzing keyword’s is a bitch. Takes forever and is boring as hell. My eyes actually rolled back in my head, so disgusted were they with keywords.

So I got help. I got me an SEO analyzing tool. It's done wonders for me. Which I, then, compounded by ignoring the internet wise men. Very empowering. Whooey!

About the same time I discovered wordpress blogs. I love 'em. Both the .com and .org ones.

I Keep Moving On

So now I have some wordpress blogs that are built around keywords for which I'm number 1 in Google. I am a happy camper, right?

Not really. I'm ambitious. Or is it greedy? Doesn’t matter. Thing is, I’m something.

I kept looking and found more ways of pushing my sites up in the Google ranking games. I found me some other blogging platforms and created blogs there too. That kind of activity takes some getting used to and some time. Some of the blogging platform/sites let you create for free, some want money. Some have odd fee arrangements. Because ‘It takes all kinds’ is a saying that must always be taken into account. Even if you’re a blogging platform.

Anyway, some have restrictions on how you can monetize. I.e., they want money to let you do it at all. If you’ve mastered the finding-hungry-crowds and the building-a-landing-page-that-converts-trick and the keyword-picking trick, and the get-them-hungry-crowds-to-your-site, no problem, you’re in business. Otherwise, you got yourself yet another hobby your significant other’s gonna be pissed at you for.

There’s an even better way to cajole the hungry crowds to visit your sites: article marketing. Yep, you write an article, publish it in Ezinearticles.com & Co. (with an artfully crafted bio at the end, a bio that has links to your site(s) and you get easy-as-pie-internet-marketing. Except for the easy as pie part.

See, you have to learn how to write so they click on your article, so they read all the way to your bio, so they click on your links. Which, it turns out, they don’t teach you in high-school. Or, for that matter, in college or grad school.

Having mastered, if I say so myself, all the above tricks, I find myself still with not so much money coming in from my efforts. I must revisit the monetization part of this internet life. What you promote’s quite another bag of tricks. For, you see, $1000 a month from 2 sales is the same as $1,000 a month from 1,000 sales. However, 2 sales you can find just walking around one internet block, a thousand takes many blocks.

But allow me to digress:

Here's some of my wonders (all on the same topic and with the same article on them, for, after all, I'm a lazy bum):
my webs.com blog
my my.opera.com blog
my blog.com blog
my tumblr.com blog
my other tumblr.com blog. Don't know how I got to have 2.
my wordpress.com blog
my blogger.com blog

Lenses and Blogs

I find lenses to be harder to put up than they should be. A bit more effort and you get a small blog going. And blogs let you add pages or posts. Which means you don’t have to index every single one of them. Some internal linking will do that trick.

Besides, if you pay for hosting you make the rules, not Squidoo.com et al. So, I'm not nuts about lenses. I have about a bit more than a dozen. Which in my world makes me an expert on what I think about them. And I think they annoy the hell out of me.

That said, they do have a place in my marketing strategy. And they’re still a bitch to make compared to the rest of the things I’ve tried.

There’s more to this story but, you know, you can’t tell big stories in half-hour episodes. And, did I mention that I’m but a lazy bum?

By the way, you can read the very same thing you've been reading at  http://www.squidoo.com/lenses-and-blogs.
Why would you do that?
You're a masochist, of course. At this point, you should be here, to see my impish smile and fully understand the import of my fine, wise words.

Squidoo.com Doesn't Let Me Do What I Want. Whah!

I want to put a widget on one of my squidoo.com lenses, the one for flat screen Samsung TVs and the image won't show up, only the text "Amazon.com widget" does. It's clickable but that's not what I want.

I want what I want and I want it now. Why doesn't Squdioo get that?

I feel much better now.

I Have Discovered Wordpress

You'd think I'd have done it sooner, seeing how easy it is to get a site going with Wordpress. But, no, I had to do it the hard way longer than necessary. I think that rather than make one huge site about everything, I'm going to make small sites, just one post, on whatever's on my mind at the time. Kind of like http://currentmortgageinterestrate.blogspot.com

Obviously, I'm also going to monetize. Adsense is the easiest way to monetize, so, for now, anyway, I'm going to have adsense on everything.

This has nothing to do with the above, but yesterday my oldest daughter dressed up for school Halloween party. Looked like Wonder Woman but with more clothes on and a big S on her chest. The Superman S on a blue shirt. Could have been Superwoman, but I've never heard of. So, I yelled: Wonder Woman!

And got chastised. "Wonder Girl, Dad! Wonder Woman walked around in her underwear and bra. I've got a shirt, a cape, and a skirt." She almost said, "Sheeshe!" at me.

This has nothing to do with what came before. But my first Squidoo lenses suck to high heaven. Just so you know.

Learning to use amazon.com links

This is my first try: ab machines

Obviously, I have a site where I'm promoting ab machines.
A far cry from remortgages, ain't it?

This is my 2nd link: Hyper Extension Roman Chair

Obviously, I'm using this blog to test. Obviously, I'm moving up in the world of affiliate marketing. However, my main site, which is a marketing site, is still not ready. But I landed the first marketing job. I charged too little. Reasons: I'll get a kick ass testimonial, I got 8 referrals, I will get hired many times as the guy owns 2 restaurants and a service business and is keen on getting all kinds of consulting/coaching.

Of course, it might not work out as planned.

The good out of this: I now have proof I can sell my coaching services.

Oh, yeah. I also sold a copy of my book on marketing. Book's not finished. But I got $35. I am to charge $47. I assume when the book is finished, it will be possible.

mortgage

Article Marketing - or I Am Wise Beyond My Years

When I invested $29 dollars in that article marketing program, it's actually an article writing plus a 4-day squdioo campaign blueprint, I was very wise.  Surprisingly wise, if I say so myself.

Not only did I help me write better but since I'm promoting it, I've helped others too.  How do I know?  A few of the people who bought it emailed me to say, Thank you, oh wise one for telling me to buy that program.  Well, they don't have my way with words, so their thank you came off a lot more prosaic than my rendition of it.

Anyway, I was too busy with other stuff to write articles for http://www.squidoo.com/earning-money-online-with-article-marketing and, 2 days after indexing it, Google lost it, disappeared it and didn't reappear it yet. 

Anyway, tomorrow I start promoting it with some articles.

Tomorrow I also start another campaign, one in the sports area.  I'm going to promote some sports equipment and some exercise programs.  2 of the exercise programs I've used myself.  One of them we got for my wife, then she asked me to do it.  "It's really hard," she said.  At the time I was on a treadmill for one hour, three times a week, and also did weights.  I didn't think a bit of aerobically enhanced yoga was hard.

It didn't look hard when my wife was doing it.  And she has bum knees from a ski accident.  But it kicked my ass.

So I'll write 3 articles for the article marketing campaign and start a rather large website (wordpress) for the sports stuff.  Yay!

Squidoo Lenses - Made One I'm Proud of. It's About Making Money Online with Article Marketing of All Things

It's been a while since I posted anything about Squidoo.com lenses, been busy with article marketing. Also forum marketing.

I've been more successful at forum marketing than at article marketing. Till recently, when I invested $29 dollars in an article marketing program.

Now, that I've learned how to do articles so I have real article marketing campaigns, things are looking up for article marketing and me, we're getting to be pals, now.

My first lens, http://www.squidoo.com/earning-money-online-with-article-marketing, was fun to do. Hope you're seeing this if you visit. Yes, the article marketing program I'm promoting is great, taught me things I did not even dream of knowing about writing persuasive articles. But don't miss out on the fun I had. It's showing, honest to goodness, cross my heart too.

Now, let's index that puppy.

PS I know 3 times more ways to get the spiders to get my earning money online with article marketing lens indexed than the last time I mentioned a lens. But I'm 3 times lazier too.

Must be the late June air.

PPS Article marketing here I come! Got to write articles for this lens. Then a blog. Then... Ah, the busy life of an article marketing dude in the early part of the 21st century!

You Can Make Money Online With Article Marketing

Article marketing is a funny thing.  You can write great articles, from a readability point of view, that no one reads, because you messed up the title.  It can be #1 on Google for your chosen keyword, and you don't get one, not one, person to read.

Found that the hard way, with a hard to manipulate keyword: remortgage bad. Can't have a great title with that. And without a great title you don't have readers. Without readers, you don't have article marketing.

So far, forum marketing, not article marketing is making me the most money.  But recently I got me a program (course?) to teach myself proper article writing for proper article marketing.

It's an awesome program, works for me, it's got my article marketing where it's earning money online for me.

Remortgage Blog

The word does make sense, however, I spent over 45 years never hearing it.   Obviously now I come across it often, but never in conversations that I do not initiate on the subject.  I started a remortgage blog.  You know, because I take an interest in Chicago mortgage stuff.

How many new words must enter your active vocabulary before you're a different person?

In other news, it's hot in Chicago, too hot for my taste already.  My oldest daughter has a field trip today, at the zoo.  She told me she doesn't want to go but she wants to go.  Life is hard when you're six.

Writing Successful Proifles - Interesting Writing Niche

I found this by accident.  Never thought of this niche before.  Maybe I'll go into it myself.

Professional personal ad and dating profile writer Felicity Fairport reveals secrets for hacking the ultimate self-marketing challenge: the online dating profile. Her Squidoo lens, "Learn to Write Successful Profiles" (http://www.squidoo.com/writing-successful-profiles ), shows how to break the task into manageable bites--how to come up with a riveting headline, an intriguing user name, an unforgettable photo, and an irresistible self-description. Her advice is hard to argue with: You're throwing your monthly dating subscription fee down the drain if your profile isn't working for you--so learn to write successful profiles!

Remortgage Web Site

I finished the site a couple of days agoa and got Google Adsense.  I copied the codes and pasted.  I had codes at the top.  It did not work.  The codes disappeared. I did it again.  This time it still did not work.  I went online and found out that many people have the same problem. So ciao world.  I was putting the top codes directly at the top.

When I say it did not work, I mean the codes actually disappeared from my pages. 

I took a break, figured I do it one more time, then leave it alone.  So I did.  Except, this time I put the codes not at the top but below the title on each page.  It worked on 2 pages.  Pumped up, I figured, I'd add codes to the bottom.  That screwed everything up.

Way to go!

I took a break, put the codes at the top, right below the title and called it a day.

I let it be for till the following morning.  Lo and behold, without me doing anything, there were Google Adsense Ads except on the home page and  www.RemortgagesBadCreditOrNot.com/RemortgageAdvice .  In addition, on www.RemortgagesBadCreditOrNot.com/OnlineRemortgages the ads were in Russian.  I'm in the Chicago area, so I said, "Huh?" 

I looked at some of the other ads more carefully: not exactly the kind of ads I was aiming to get.

So I proceeded to Google Adsense, copied and pasted codes again.  Results did not improve.  I copied and pasted and checked and copied and pasted and checked.  Ads did not match, the ads in Russian were still in Russian, and www.RemortgagesBadCreditOrNot.com/RemortgageAdvice was still ad-less.

I figured I'd let it be till this morning.  This morning, I only touched the ad-less page and the home page.  And, magically, everything is woring fine.  Some of the ads are a bit of stretch, if you ask me, but my wife's siding with Google Adsense, so, overwhelmed, I decide to enjoy the results of my toils.

Google Doesn't Like My Lenses

I pinged my lenses.  I wrote about them in 3 long-established ezines.  I blogged about them.  I used was active on Squidoo.com. I commented on some forums and linked back to them.  And Google still hasn't indexed me.

And I'm ready with my next site (http://www.remortgagesbadcreditornot.com/ ). 

The first time I published a lens, Google indexed it in 7 days.  The second time, in 1 day.  This time I did exactly the same things I did as when it indexed my lens in 1 day.  So why isn't it working.

I could rant some more but my daughter needs to go to school and she's not getting up.  She's too tired, she says.

When school is on, she doesn't want to go to school, she hates school.  When she was on vacation, she wanted to go to school.  The grass is greener sydnrome?

Inner Thighs Workouts

I made two lenses www.Squidoo.com/InnerThighsWorkout.com and www.Squidoo.com/InnerThighsWorkouts.com  .  Interesting strategy or waste of a lens?

Because both lenses are about the same thing, selling the same product.

I think a very useful strategy.  If both are well-optimized for 'inner thighs workouts' they'd presumably show up as number 1 and number 2 in a Google search.  Choose either one and you're chosing the same.

Inner thighs workouts!