Thirty Day Challenge - It’s Never Too Late

If you’ve never heard of the 30 Day Challenge before let me explain briefly. It’s a 30 day step by step guide to how to make money online. It’s run by a couple of successful Australian internet marketers (led by Ed Dale) and has been successful in launching several well known affiliate marketers careers. If you were following the Top Affiliate Challenge hoping to learn something and were left disappointed then this could be for you.

The course assumes no knowledge of internet marketing, websites, blogs or anything else and takes you through the whole process in your own time. Each day is accompanied by one or more videos, which deserve special mention of their own. In terms of production quality these are right up there with anything else that is available in e-tutoring. Besides the video lessons they have a few basic online tools that you can use as part of the learning process and one real gem, Market Samurai. This keyword research, content sourcing application is brilliant. Whilst it is still in early Beta by joining the 30 Day Challenge you get a 40 day free trial of all the features that will eventually be in the final paid software. I will be adding this to my webmaster software collection.

So in summary that’s excellent course material (genuinely there are some tips that I’d never seen before), top quality production and access to exclusive IM tools. How much you ask? Nothing. Nada. Nill. Zip. It’s 100% free. Create an account over at Thirty Day Challenge and login and that’s it, you’re good to go. You’ll not get spammed offers or anything else, there is no scam involved at all here. It’s just a very well put together 30 day course for teaching you how to go from nothing to earning “something” online. If you’re not already signed up at the 30 day challenge then I suggest you get over there now and do it. Trust me, it’s worth it just for 40 days free access to Market Samurai.

I Haven’t Forgot

About the blog that is. Just a lot going on at the moment, family commitments, car crashes, just the usual.

Plus I had the fun challenge today of creating an excel spreadsheet that can reconcile a large list of payments to a total. It had to find every combination of amounts that could satisfy any given total. Easy enough to do, but getting it to do it quickly is another matter! My head hurts.

Should be back in the hot seat soon.

Organic Affiliate Marketing Tip

I had a bumper weekend, a lot of traffic and a lot of money (well for my level anyway). With the extra traffic it gave me the chance to run a few very simple, quick experiments and I ended up hitting on a little tip that anybody who is trying affiliate marketing with organic traffic might enjoy.

My tactic with this type of affiliate marketing is to just embed links into the page copy. Highlighting any key phrases and using an affiliate link. It works reasonably well, it’s not like the traffic costs anything so any income is a bonus. Click and conversion rates tend to be low. It’s a much more subtle method than the heavy sell landing pages of PPC affiliate marketing. I was reading something last week though and it was going on about the “average” web browser and how stupid they are. Do you believe that? They were hinting that subtle may not be the best policy, so I changed things around on a couple of pages.

Instead of linking some text I decided to put a small 1 or 2 sentence “You can find out more etc etc by visiting…” at the top and bottom of the page with a link like this www.themakemoneyonline.net. The link text shows the URL of the home page but the link contains my referral ID. I’m not sure why but using the URL instead of the name of the site or any other text to link to gave a much better click through rate. Long story short my new top and bottom non subtle links immediately improved conversions by around 25%.

It was an interesting lesson, as webmasters I think that we sometimes assume that all visitors are looking for the same things as us. Maybe it’s time to stop being so subtle with your affiliate links and get them in people’s faces.

TFI Friday (Episode 1)

Life can get a little stressful and a little serious at times so I’m going to start a new series of Friday posts, i’ll do it after every hard week I have. This has been a very hard week. This is just me writing down a couple of good things that have happened over the last 7 days, as much for myself as anybody else. Besides it’s Friday and tomorrow is the weekend, I might even treat myself to a sleep in.

GBP - USD Exchange Rate Swings The Right Way

I asked for this from Santa, so it’s 8 months late, who cares! After 18 months of a low value dollar things have finally started to move in the right direction for us Brits earning dollars. What started of at the beginning of the month of an exchange rate of nearly 2 dollars to the pound is now (as I type) $1.87. That’s should be worth a couple of hundred pounds extra to me this month. If that isn’t something to be happy about then I don’t know what is.

Zac Johnson - For Showing These Stats

A big thank you to Super Affiliate Zac Johnson for this post. But why you ask? Look at how low those click through rates are from advertising with FaceBook. As you may or may not know I’ve burnt quite a lot of money with FaceBook and always had what I thought were appalling click throughs. Maybe it’s my ad copy? Maybe I’m just crap? I split tested to the nth degree. It’s really nice to know that even some of the best guys in the business can top out at around 0.1% as well! From the way some people write you’d think that all they have to do is sneeze to get a 4%CTR and conversions coming out of their nose. Zac may have made a killing on that campaign I don’t know, he didn’t mention it, but just publicizing that CTR was enough to put a smile on my face.

I Make Money Online, I’m Not A Drug Dealer!

I started a heavy exercise routine the beginning of this year. I was hitting the gym at least once every day, I kept this up for several months. In that time I lost over 24 pounds of weight and took my body fat percentage down from around 30% to 12%. To be fair it wasn’t that much of a challenge, I was always very fit in my younger years and deep down there is a natural athlete somewhere inside me, it just took the actual decision to do it! I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I hadn’t discovered beer at search an early age, but heh ho.

The gym I’m going to I’ve been a member of for 7 years now. Over that time in the early years I’d go 2-3 lunch times a week. That’s the problem with working 9-5, you go when you can, it kept me roughly on the level but all it took was to miss a few sessions and I’d put on a bit of weight. Seeing as how I work for myself now, and with my fitness goals in mind I’ve been able to go in the mornings instead, I normally do 10:30 till mid day each day. This has caused some problems though. For a start the gym manager has serious problems with me. You’d never guess I was a paying customer.

He greets everybody else with a hello and a chat. I’m lucky if I get a grunt. The majority of his staff, especially the young lads are just as bad. What the hell is their problem? OK, so I’m a jeans and t-shirt type of person, I also don’t shave everyday but then again why should I, I didn’t start my own business to get suited and booted and scrape my face of moisture every day? I’ve come to the conclusion that I think they think I’m either unemployed and putting my benefits into a gym membership (although I don’t think this would cause the level of hate in their eyes) or more likely they actually think I’M A DRUG DEALER! WTF! Has anybody else ever had this? Ever been mistaken for a crim? If I’ve got bags under my eyes and am looking a little down trodden it’s probably because I’ve been putting in 15 hour days! I’ve got no idea how to resolve the situation, go in and sit him down and try and explain what I do for a living? Then again is it really any of his business? I dunno, but either way I know it’s no fun going somewhere every day where you’re just not welcome. It’s not like I’ve got a lot of gym choices either so if I want to carry on hitting the gym I guess I’ve just got to put up with it.

The only person in there who ever straight up asked what I do (fuelled I imagine by my strange gym hours) was cool when I told him. He’d make a point of chatting, he was genuinely interested even to the point of maybe trying to do something online himself. Unfortunately for me he’s left, a couple of the girls he was friendly with are still smiley and chatty but the others, they’ve got some serious issues.