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.