My Success Diary

Heart Marketing Challenge Part 1 – Do Some Housecleaning

February 26th, 2010 2 Comments

Before we really get started with our Heart Marketing Challenge, I think it’s important to do some housecleaning. We all have some projects in the works that we feel we must do for some reason or another but something feels “wrong” about it. It could be that the product you’re trying to promote stinks and you can’t find something good to say about it. Or, you could be in need of a change.

Things I “Should” Do – Just Let Go!

For the longest time, I thought I needed to promote Cash Crate. I watched Amy Bass of Niche Blogger fame have wonderful success with it. She REALLY believes in the company and it shows when she reviews it. People sign up right away. I know I signed up from her link – I wanted to experience that kind of success.

There was just one problem. I couldn’t seem to promote it very well because after a while, I realized I didn’t like it. The business model is set up so you make money (just pennies!) by completing surveys and doing offers. I don’t like completing surveys or answering product oriented questions about internet usage, soda, and candy bars. I’m sorry – I’d rather be using the internet, ignoring soda because I don’t like it, and eating candy bars.

You have no idea how good it felt to finally let it go. I can think of many examples like this, can you?

Simplify Your Life By Letting Go

To really have success with this challenge, it is essential to look at your online business and ask yourself these simple but important questions.

What’s working?

What isn’t working?

What do I like doing?

What do I dislike doing?

What are my dreams and goals?

Really spend some time thinking about them because the answers you come up with will shape the next few days.

Want to see my answers?

What’s working?

Squidoo, eHow, Niche Blogger, 7 Day Profits (more on this later… it has to do with Squidoo and I’ve been having success with the Method).

What isn’t working?

Writing content for clients, writing content for content sites, thinking I have to do absolutely everything for all my blogs. I need to start outsourcing!

What do I like doing?

I have a lot of hobbies – exercise, reading, music.

What don’t I like doing?

All the work myself, anything I don’t think is fun, like cleaning.

What are my dreams and goals?

To have an automated business that doesn’t constantly need my attention. Short term goal: to consistently make $3000 a month with internet marketing.

You see, I’m back to the drawing board with earnings. I completely cut out working for clients as an income stream and my earnings took a hit. I have to just focus and build my new income with blogs, which I love doing.

–

See what I mean? You can do a similar thing – but feel free to write more and spend more time on it than I did. I just wanted to type out some responses so you can get an idea. (Plus, they were 100% true!)

In the next part of the challenge, we’ll talk about what to do with this information.

Make Money Online Without Spending Any

February 25th, 2010 2 Comments

Do you want to make money online without spending any? Well, the upcoming Heart Marketing Challenge will not cost you a dime. It’s almost depressing how many internet marketing products I’ve purchased and they’ve all been helpful in some way. But I’m here to tell you that the most important thing for you when you’re learning how to make money through affiliate and internet marketing is

experience

In theory, you don’t need to spend any money in order to learn how to make money online because I am going to do my best to give you the basics.

Everything that I’ve suggested in the pages of this blog I’ve done because I genuinely thought it was helpful, such as Niche Blogger, Xomba, and UAW which have all been mentioned in the sidebar. Some are free to sign up for, such as Xomba (and also free to use) whereas Niche Blogger and UAW are things you need to pay for.

But I’m telling you, you don’t need to spend any money. And in coming days, I’ll show you what you need to do in order to use the principals of Heart Marketing to make a living online. You’ll learn the foundation here.

To get things started, I suggest you sign up for Squidoo if you haven’t already. This is going to be a big part of the strategy. I believe Squidoo to be the best free platform online for publishing worthwhile content. If you already have a Squidoo account you don’t need a new one.

In the coming lessons we’ll learn:

How to choose products to talk about.

Making a Squidoo lens the right way.

Choosing keywords but not being obsessed with them.

How to write from the heart and make helpful recommendations without “selling” anything.

Promoting your lens and getting backlinks.

Expanding the principals for other things such as blogs and websites.

Are you excited? I know I am! For now, give some thought about the products you really like. This will form the basis of deciding on what to promote.

Heart Marketing – Keep Integrity in your Business

February 21st, 2010 12 Comments

I think that in order to really get anywhere with affiliate and internet marketing your efforts really need to come from the heart. I had a sort of Ah Ha moment this week when I looked at my Squidoo stats. I had made yet another sale on one of my lenses – How to Fix Hardwood Floor Scratches.

Products to Believe In

The product in question is only a few dollars, and I honestly believe that my life wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t found it. In fact, the day that I found it, I repaired a stressful scratch and no one was the wiser. It took seconds. I really couldn’t live without this product and I think that everyone who has a wood floor should buy it.

You see what I mean? I could sing this product’s praises the whole day if I needed to. And the thing is, I’m genuine about my praise. I really, really love it. And it’s such a simple product. How can something so simple and so inexpensive work this great?

Blink.

It’s Natural to Talk About Products You Like

Anyway, I learned from that lens that it helps – no it’s essential – to really believe in the products you talk about. That’s exactly what I do here. I just share what works for me and what doesn’t. If I think something is a waste of time or money, I won’t even mention it.

You’ll notice that I took mostly everything off the sidebar here at this blog. The sidebar space will now be reserved for “mini-reviews” and “product showcases”. In other words, I want to make it clear to all of you which things out there are actually helpful.

I’ve spoken before about how much money I’ve spent on these products. I would LOVE to save you the trouble. And I’m not only talking about paid products, but free ones as well.

Introduction to Heart Marketing

In a recent post, Michele Tune at Healing with Juices talked about her recent partnership with OpenSky and how she can put products on there that she really believes in. I’ve decided to call that idea Heart Marketing and I’m developing a little challenge for all of us that goes along with it. I’ll share that with you in a few days once I finalize the details.

I remember once I tried to pitch a product that I hadn’t tried. The payouts were very good. I wrote a review where I just sort of highlighted the product information and not surprisingly, I didn’t sell one copy of it. Some marketers may be good at this – but for some reason I am not. I stand behind what I mention.

Stay tuned for that challenge – I’m really excited about it!

Make Money Online Bootcamp – But Don’t Forget the Rewards!

February 3rd, 2010 6 Comments

Thanks to the concepts outlined in 5 Bucks a Day I’ve determined that 2010 will be a year or focused success. In my last post I talked about my New Year’s goals. I know, I’m about a month behind the curve but oh well… I’ve been moving! Anyway, I’ve decided to call this adventure of focused attention and success my “Make Money Online Bootcamp”.

Each day I will work to complete one of the “projects” I have written down. Right now, I am working to finish a batch of eHow articles. I came up with a bunch of titles, now I just need to write the articles. I’ve written two so far. I think I may have eight left in the batch. Each project has the goal of building to my residual income.

But there are actually two parts to my plan.

Part 1 the serious part that lists the projects and my income goals. It also includes my investment plan. This is hard work and what I like to call my “boot camp”.
In addition to the serious stuff, I’ve also developed a system of rewards. Hey, even soldiers get R & R now and then, right?

My first goal is to make $3000 a month. Once I achieve that for two months straight, I’ve decided that as a reward I will take Rosemary Gladstar’s or Christopher Hobbs’ herbal course. See where I’m going with this? With each milestone I plan on doing something fun. I think this is an important part of goal setting that people often miss. I REALLY want to take another herbal course. I miss being a student and I enjoyed the time I spent getting my Diploma in Herbal Studies at ACHS. So… that is the first thing I’ll do.

I urge you to go back through your New Year’s goals and also think about how you will reward yourself when you reach a milestone. You can go on a vacation, buy something fun, take a class, go fishing… whatever you want! This will keep you motivated throughout the year and prevent you from getting bored with your own productivity. I know in my heart that this will help me have my best year ever.

Getting Back Into the Swing of Things – New Year’s Goals

February 2nd, 2010 Comments Off

Well, it’s been a long (but fun!) journey and I’m happy to report that things are settling down now. We moved again and also drove cross country before we ended up at our final destination. We visited Colorado, the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and visited our families on the East Coast. I pretty much put my work on hold … things were a little hectic (but it was a good kind of hectic). Now we’re settling into our new location slowly but surely.

What does all this mean for my online business? Well, I’ve created my yearly business plan which actually consists of a series of projects. I plan on completing one project before moving on to the next. Basically my plan consists of a mix of these things:

Pure freelance writing. I will write and submit to publications focusing on food writing, travel writing, herbal medicine writing, flash fiction, poetry, and Christian writing. I will have a total of 35 queries or submissions circulating at any given time.

Using Online Websites. My plan also consists of writing for other sites like eHow.com where I have a nice passive income set up and other sites like Xomba, Squidoo, and Hubpages.

Affliliate Marketing. My plan for affiliate and internet marketing is this: I plan on setting up a series of test campaigns using Squidoo. When I find a campaign that pans out, I’ll start a niche blog. My goal is to have quite a few niche blogs set up by year’s end.

My first goal is to make a consistent $3000 per month. Remember that I stopped one of my income streams cold turkey (working for clients) so I’ve had to essentially start from scratch. I don’t regret doing that – I’ve just had to be patient while I essentially start from scratch with my business.

So that’s where I’m at. The first project I’m working on is to write more articles for eHow. My goal is to write ten articles a month with a focus on making them useful and fun. I believe that if I do that, the traffic will come. The strategy has panned out so far – over the course of these past two years my articles have gotten over a million views!

Learn how to make money with eHow.

Squidoo Case Study – Why is This Lens Successful?

January 19th, 2010 5 Comments

I have one lens that’s been really successfully and that’s my Make Money Writing page. Why is this the one that I’ve had the best results with? I thought I’d take the time to analyze it to see if I could figure it out. This will help all of us, right?

It Started Out Small

This is the first lens I created on Squidoo. It was pitifully short and not very well written if I do say so myself. I mean, it was bad. I wish I took a screenshot of it. Unfortunately I didn’t know how to do that at the time.

But then I started to find good examples of lenses I liked and of ones that were successful and began to emulate what they were doing. I noticed that doing things like putting keywords in the module titles and optimizing it yielded good results. I also noticed that longer lenses performed better. So I did that too.

I built it up little by little

I didn’t worry about making the lens perfect at first. In the long run I think this helped me. Both Squidoo and Google like to see updated content. I worked on this lens off and on over time which means that Google saw a constant stream of updated content. In fact, I still update the lens at least once a month so the pattern continues.

I make recommendations based on experience.

I’ve had a lot of experience as a writer, blogger, and internet marketer and I think it shows in this lens. If I say something worked for me, it really did work for me! I’m not making it up, and I think the readers can tell. Also, if something doesn’t work for me I’ll tell people that as well. My main goal is to help people based on what works for me and what doesn’t. In other words, when I promote an affiliate program it’s because I really, really like it.

It’s optimized.

I get a lot of search engine traffic. I think part of it came naturally. I initially optimized for the keyword “make money writing” but it’s gone through so many updates, it looks like “writing for money” is getting a lot of traffic. This was completely by accident. If you write well, the search engines will reward you.

Now the goal is to apply this to my other lenses!

Are you making enough money online?

January 15th, 2010 2 Comments

Have you cracked the code on how to make money online? I’ve been dabbling in affiliate marketing off and on since 2007 or so but have not experienced the success I would have liked. To be fair, I also have not spent the time I needed in order to make it successful. Still, it can get frustrating.

Good thing I’m stubborn.

I have in place now a plan that is designed to finally make me the online income I know I’m capable of making. I talked about the plan in my last post on how to use squidoo to create a test IM campaign. My intent is to do this as many times as possible and build each successful campaign into something larger.

I realized that the reasons why I am not making money online are

not devoting enough time to my internet marketing efforts

not having a solid plan in place.

Now that I’ve eliminated doing work for clients as an income stream I have plenty of time. I have a solid plan in place too. I have roughly 15 test campaigns set up already and the new year is still in its infancy.

Now I ask you the question.

Are you making enough money online?

If the answer is no, think about why. Is it time? Is it lack of follow through or lack of a solid plan? Any problem you may be having is fixable. I learned with eHow that consistency is key. For two years I wrote 7 articles a month. I now make a consistent monthly income but I didn’t get to that point overnight.

Share with me your concerns. I’d love to hear them! We can work through it together.

My Quest to Making Giant Squid

January 12th, 2010 2 Comments

I tried to make Giant Squid on Squidoo a few months ago but got rejected. They said my lenses still needed work. Fair enough, they really did. I haphazardly threw my last lenses up there because the deadline was fast approaching. I’m going to try again but I’m not submitted my application this time until I feel ready. I thought I’d share with you my strategy.

My Existing Lenses

I’m going through the process of deleting, combining, and/or fixing up my existing lenses. I noticed that only about 1/3 of my lenses are getting any traffic – probably because the ones in the bottom aren’t that great. I also noticed that my lenses that are performing the best are the ones that are older and have been “cared for”. I’m constantly adding new content, keywords, and tags to them. Some of the ones that are doing poorly I’m keeping – they’re fairly new and have potential as long as I keep working on them.

Making New Lenses

I have a new strategy for making lenses. For a while I had a ton of lenses about writing topics but they all said pretty much the same thing. I’ve since combined them into my Make Money Writing lens. My new strategy is to start a general lens on a topic and then put together an offshoot lens if the traffic potential is there. For example, I put together a lens on Christmas Greeting Cards and noticed that people were arriving to that lens looking for info on Christmas postcards. I set up a separate lens on the postcards and that one ended up performing even better than my original!

Separate Accounts?

NOPE! One of the reasons why I don’t buy into the idea that you need one Squidoo account per niche is because I feel that if people don’t believe I am qualified to share information about something, then I’m not a good writer. Besides, I don’t believe in flooding Squidoo with random keywords when all the lenses seem to be saying the same things. I’ve read so many eBooks on the topic of Squidoo. I’ve liked all of them but this is one thing I disagree with pretty much all of them on.

Make Them Fun

Fun lenses do the best. I don’t mean that each lens needs to be silly – but each one needs to show my personality and style while also telling stories. My How to Make Apple Pie lens is one such example. I’ve even started a section highlighting all my apple pie making adventures. My Make Money Writing lens is also filled with personal anecdotes because it basically establishes me as an authority on how to make money writing because that’s been my profession for the past seven years!

This is my strategy for making Giant Squid and is also one that I feel will make me successful on Squidoo itself in terms of boosting my income. My most successful lens makes $50-$150 a month. If I can get the other lenses to make a consistent income I’ll be happy.

How to Create a Test IM Campaign Using Squidoo

January 10th, 2010 4 Comments

The days of me starting a niche blog out of the blue are over. I’ve so far started two duds – and they were only really duds because I lost interest in them. I never even let them live up to their potential because I got tired of working on them.

So, new plan.

I’ve been putting together these test campaigns that is loosely based on Pot Pie Girl’s One Week Marketing (but it’s also a little different and a little more simplified).The purpose of the test is

To see if the topic interests me enough to write a lot of content. (I’ve started websites before and could only stomach writing 5-10 articles in the past).

Test to see if the topic gets enough traffic and that the campaign actually yields sales.

Since I’m a writer, I prefer at this stage to do my own content which is why being bored with the writing is such an issue. In fact, as my business progresses I’ll probably always do the writing and just outsource other things. And, if the traffic in the campaign isn’t converting into sales then I’ll know not to waste my time and resources setting up a blog or website because I know that they probably won’t do well.

In terms of the campaign itself, this is the process.

Come up with an idea for a lens and find affiliate products that go with it.
Research the keywords to find good ones to go in the lens. Choose one with high traffic for the main keyword and then choose 5-10 secondary keywords to use once in the lens itself.
Create the lens and promote it. When published submit the feed to www.feedagg.com and www.feedage.com. Post an article on Xomba, Stumble it, and announce that the lens exists on Twitter or plurk. Also post an article on Ezinearticles.
Monitor the stats. Check to see when it indexes, the keywords people are using to find the lens, and check the affiliate programs to see if they are converting. If you’ve gotten around 200 hits and have not seen a sale yet, something might be wrong. Try changing the program, see if it is optimized properly, or work on getting more backlinks.
If campaign is converting consider setting up a niche blog or a mini website for it. Also, update the lens every few days to keep the content fresh.

This is what my routine has been for the past few weeks and it is much simpler and less stressful to execute than straight blogging. I was getting overwhelmed with all the domains I’ve reserved then decided not to put together the website.

My Success Diary

Learn How to Succeed with Bloggng, Writng, and Internet Marketing

Heart Marketing Challenge Part 1 – Do Some Housecleaning

Make Money Online Without Spending Any

Heart Marketing – Keep Integrity in your Business

Make Money Online Bootcamp – But Don’t Forget the Rewards!

Getting Back Into the Swing of Things – New Year’s Goals

Squidoo Case Study – Why is This Lens Successful?

Are you making enough money online?

My Quest to Making Giant Squid

How to Create a Test IM Campaign Using Squidoo

Subscribe to the Feed

Recommended by Katherine

Explore pathtosuccessblog.com

Recommended Products

Best of Path to Success

Recent Posts

Like this blog? Make a donation!

Archives