A Dog’s Life

Sometimes my progress in this internet marketing game seems to come at a glacial pace, but at least it comes, eh? I’m making significantly more now than I was a year ago, so I am happy about that. But I’m still nowhere near my goal of supporting myself entirely from internet income and so I get impatient.

Anyway, the good news is that March finished with three good days and I ended up with my best month ever. I hope every month is my best month ever. Car Police Auctions continues to be my star property with the most traffic and by far the most in earnings. My ACRU’s from that site are paying $28 and that’s a nice little chunk that drops in from time to time.

Right now I’m concentrating on site building and getting all my current domains up and running. Once that is done, I will go back and work at promoting all my sites with quality back links and new content and then I’ll be ready for another round of keyword research and new domains. And so it goes for the foreseeable future…

Richard Internet Marketing

There is a new site in the stable of my phpbay sites and I’m announcing it here. ArcheryHunting-Equipment.com is, as the name implies, a shopping site for bow hunting and archery equipment. Just got it whipped into opening day shape and hit it with some social bookmarks and made page three of Google in about an hour. Cool.

If you’re looking for the best deals in Archery Hunting Equipment, then you’ve found the place: Archery Hunting Equipment.

Richard Internet Marketing

Phase one of the Makeup-Discounters site expansion is finished. I’ve redone the main page to reflect all of the main categories in the Makeup section of Health and Beauty. Then I created The Stila Store, The MAC Store, The Philosophy Store and The Bath and Body Store in separate subdirectories.

I’m going to promote these new expansions in the usual ways and then I’m going to ket it sit and see if I can pick up some traffic while I work on my other sites. Eventually, I am going to expand the site to take advantage of all the top Health and Beauty search keywords and also all the higher level categories like Bath and Body.

So January was my best ever month in total eBay affiliate sales and then February sucked but so far this month I am on track for another good month. As soon as I get to the point where my bad months will cover my monthy nut, I’m going to quit the day job and do the Internet Marketing thing full time. I can’t wait!

Richard Internet Marketing

I keep having these small victories. It’s very cool.

The latest is that I finally started building out my site camping-discounters.com on Saturday. I finished it late Saturday night and went to bed. The next morning around 9:00 AM I did the social bookmarking thing and then moved on to other projects.

This morning, when I checked my stats, I had nine visitors to the site. What blew me away is that seven of them came in on Google “natural” searches. That means in less than one day I was ranking on Google. That’s insane!

What is even crazier is that the site earned $1.30 in sales! On the first freaking day with only nine visitors! That blows my mind.

It is a total confirmation of the process.

Lather, rinse, repeat…

Richard Internet Marketing

I sold my first car!

I happened Friday, Jan 24th and I made $74.40

This is huge.

My first car also makes my first $100 month!

It is still small potatoes, but I am fucking stoked!

It is very cool to be in the car business.

It is also very cool to make money selling a car I didn’t own.

It is even more cool to “automatically” sell a car I didn’t own while I was asleep.

Richard Internet Marketing

Made major changes to my Make A Resume site.

Actually, I just decided to “sell” my free reports the same way most information products are sold. The change that took the most time was creating the pictures of the product. One of the cool things that came out of that process was that I learned how to use a function in Paint Shop Pro I’ve never used before. I stumbled on how to do it by bashing away, so that was cool.

It occurs to me that all of life is like that. You can come back to things you thought you knew and discover new depths, if you look for them.

I had planned to work on the new eBay deal this weekend, but as I was reading about how to do it, I realized that I needed to apply the same principals to my existing sites and since Make A Resume gets the most traffic, it made sense to try the changes to it first.

I also need to catch up on the Stomper Formula Five videos and apply all of that stuff to my existing sites.

I wish I could work at this stuff full time.

Richard Internet Marketing

I remember the first time I tried to play tennis. It was awful. I had no experience at all with the racket, and I wasn’t able to hit the ball and make it go where I wanted. I couldn’t volly and what made it worse was that I knew my lack of skill was also keeping my partner from having any fun.

But that is the way a lot of things work.

In the beginning, they’re no fun, because you suck at it.

So tennis is one of those things that you have to work at for quite a while before it gets to be fun.  Surfing is the same way.

Basically anything that requires skill is like that. You have to work at it until you get enough skill to have some fun.

That’s where motivation and desire come into the picture. Because if you don’t have the motivation and desire to work through the pain of being bad at something, you’ll never get the skills to be good at it.

For me it isn’t just that I’m not having fun in the beginning, it’s the shame I feel for being clueless. I’m ashamed of being a tool. Sometimes that shame is a motivator to keep trying and sometimes it is a motivator to walk away from whatever it is that’s not working.

But I’ve been keeping at this marketing thing and I’m finally at the point where it is just now starting to be fun. Not because I am making a ton of money, but because I’m starting to no longer feel like a tool.

So here’s a great new year of fun and motivation!

In the end, it’s all very Tony Robbins. The only thing keeping you from achieving anything you want is… you. It’s easy to understand that. It’s hard to do something about it.

Anyway……

I did another site today. I basically got it going in half a day. So the goal now is two new sites a week, working evenings and weekends. If I can keep that pace, then by this time next year I should have one hundred sites and I can only imagine how much that will have taught me.

Onward and upward!

Richard Internet Marketing, Random Thoughts

I’ve been an eBay affiliate for over a year, but I’ve really never done much with it. That is about to change… big time!

I just got this new software, the phpBay plugin for Wordpress, and man, it is slick. Using it, I’ll be able to crank out eBay affiliate sites like there is no tomorrow. I’ve already used it to revamp Sterling Silver Boxes and I’ll be redoing MakeUp Discounters tonight.

The more I think about the ways to use this software, the more excited I get about the possibilites.

Onward and Upward!

Richard Internet Marketing

Find More Keywords – Now that we have a blog optimized for a keyword phrase, it’s time to add more keywords and get more rankings and get more traffic. It’s all about keywords and traffic because traffic = money!

What I’ve discovered on my own is that you can use the Google Webmaster Tools to find new keywords and then run them through Market Samurai to analyze the SEO traffic and even more related keywords.

Unfortunately, this video is not currently available on YouTube, but you will be able to find it on the Thirty Day Challenge site.

The second video for the day is Ed telling us how to correctly use the Automated Posting function of WordPress Direct to flesh out our blogs. Very cool feature that I’m going to have to play with and explore the possibilities.

Here’s Ed:

Richard Internet Marketing

Today’s video is about monetizing our blogs using Adsense. This is definitely something I’m going to do for all my blogs (except this one) inthe near future. However, they all need reworking given what I’ve learned this time around so I’ll be doing that first and then I’ll add the Adsense campaigns.

Here’s GuruBob:

Richard Internet Marketing