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Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

I estimate that 99% of Californians do not understand the implications of the new small business tax that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday. This law would mandates online sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to start collecting sales taxes on items shipped to California if they have some sort of relationship with an affiliate. [...]

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You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

The first part of email marketing is to get your visitor to opt-in your email list. Once they opt-in, the visitor becomes a prospect. The second part of email marketing is to move the prospect along your marketing funnel towards them becoming a customer. An important element of that is relationship marketing done via trust. [...]

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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

There was a time when Linkedin was cool. Well, maybe “cool” is too strong of a word for this early social networking site. Let’s just say that Linkedin was *the* place to network as a business professional. You sign up for Linkedin, you make connections with people you work with, you ask for a recommendation, [...]

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A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Let’s assume you’ve already set up your own Facebook profile and a separate Facebook Page for your business. Maybe you’ve also created a Facebook Group that relates to a type of product or service that your business provides. What are some ways that you can promote the special events your business sponsors? One way is [...]

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How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Marketing online is fraught with risks. One category is business risk. The other category is technical risk. Business risk is when you try to execute a digital marketing strategy and it fails. Technical risk includes the risk of not implementing your websites and/or scripts correctly. But technical risk also includes the risk from cyber-attacks. One of the most common form is viruses pretending to be a friendly program ... like a trojan horse. This blog is about how to remove Antispyware Soft. … Read More...

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Adsense Secrets Revealed by Google???

June 6, 2010 By Alex Tran 1 Comment

Google’s Adsense program has been around since the early part of this decade. In that time, Adsense has generated millions in revenue for advertisers and much, much more for Google. Adsense gave Google both money and branding. Every time a web publisher hosts an Adsense ad, Google shows the sign, “Ads by Google” and gets paid by the advertiser per click or impression. The publisher also gets paid so it’s a win-win situation.

But just how much of a win has it been for the publisher? As an advertiser, I have an accounting of how much I pay Google per click or per impression on their content network. It used to be that you could advertise on Google’s content network for a little as a penny per click. Now a days, those penny clicks are all but gone — much like the penny arcades. Expect to pay 50 cents to several dollars per click now in order to get impressions on their content network.

So if I pay Google $1 per click, how much do they pay their publishers for hosting that ad? Up until a few days ago, nobody knew this information outside of Google. It was one of those Adsense secrets along with a great many other secrets that Google held closely like how they do their search algorithm.

I tried to guess the Adsense payout percentage. I have a size-able network of websites with Adsense Ads. Evey time someone clicks on the ads, I noted the payout amount in my Adsense account. The numbers varied according to the competition for that keyword at that moment in time. The numbers that I saw swung widely, even on the same website. For example, a click may pay 3 cents one day, and $3 per click on another day.

I tried to compare what I paid on Google Adwords for similar keywords, but without having access to Google’s data, my guesstimate was that they paid about 50% per click to me as the publisher. Alas, in the spirit of greater “transparency” according to the big G, I now know the answer to one of Google’s Adsense secrets … They pay 68% to the publisher.

Wow. That number is much higher than my guesstimate of 50%. I’m not complaining. I’m just surprised.

So should we all rush to build more Adsense sites? Not so fast. It’s curious that Google would choose to share this information right after they updated their ranking algorithm. The new algorithm would no longer rank “thin” websites optimized for long tail keywords so highly. If you know anything about another Adsense secret, it was to try and rank for the long tail. Hmmm…

If you are an Adsense publisher, let me know your thoughts on why Google would reveal one of their Adsense secrets at this time.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: ,

Cost Per Action Advertising Guide

March 28, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

Cost per action advertising is getting a lot of attention from online marketers lately. Despite the economic downturn, this form of advertising seems to be holding steady. As a brief background, cost per action or CPA is a way for advertisers to get leads.

Let’s say your company sells perfumes online. You open an ecommerce store and hope that the traffic will come. Since hoping doesn’t work, you try writing articles and building links to your website. You get some traffic, but not the avalanche of visitors that you had hoped for. You then try advertising on paid search sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You get visitors but the clicks are costing you a lot of money. Sometimes you break even. Eventually, you figure out what your conversion rates are and your earnings per click and cost per click. Now you have metrics.

At this point, you can scale your traffic acquisition by inserting your product offer into cost per action networks like Hydra or Affiliate.com or Neverblue Ads or many others. The “complete” list of CPA networks is available for free at http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising.

Using cost per action advertising, your offer is available for affiliate marketers to promote. If you have a landing page with high conversions, you will get plenty of “free” traffic from affiliates.

Now let’s look at CPA marketing from the affiliate point of view. Many online marketers start their business by promoting other people’s products. This makes sense because there is no product creation cycle, no customer support hassles, no inventory … just drive traffic to a converting offer and get paid a commission. It’s that easy … or is it?

I’ve been doing CPA marketing for about 2 years following the methods that I learned from Gauher Chaudhry using his Pay-Per-Click-Formula v1.0. The “formula” worked as long as I was diligent in launching and tracking my CPA campaigns. I reached $100 a day in profits within 3 months of trial and error. Yes, you still have to do trial and error in this business. The trick is to fail fast and learn from your mistakes.

Today, much of what Gauher taught in PPCF v1.0 is available for free in his 89 page report, titled, “The Insider’s Guide to CPA Marketing Profits.” Even though I have the original course, which I paid several hundred dollars for, I went through the 89 page report to see if I could pick up some new information. After reading through the report, much of it I already learned. However, there was a method that I tried again that netted me $500 in profit.

Here is what I did. I read page 65 in the report and tried it on a new government regulation regarding analog to digital TV broadcasting conversion. I found a CPA offer that paid $7 per lead from the network on page 86 in the free guide. Then I ran a PPC campaign using a 3rd tier network called Looksmart. I also ran the ad on Ask.com.

I bid around 7 cents per click. Try bidding that low of an amount on Google these days and your ad won’t be shown. I got traffic almost instantly. I ran the ad for 10 days and made about $100 a day gross or about $50 a day net. After 10 days, the cost per action advertiser decided to pull the offer. This was too bad because I was making around $50 a day on autopilot. But these things do happen when you play in the PPC to CPA game.

PPCF v1.0 has been off the market for many, many months. On March 31st, Gauher will launch PPCF v2.0. I suspect that the new course will have many updated and new techniques. It will also not be cheap. However, you can grab his 89 page free CPA guide and get started today. That way you can find out for yourself if this method of making money online suits your fancy.

Here is where you can grab your guide:

http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising

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Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Affiliate Marketing Basics

September 15, 2008 By Alex Tran 1 Comment

What is affiliate marketing?… It is simply the use of freelance sales representatives to sell a merchants product and/or service for a percentage of the product’s sales price. For the merchant, it is a relatively “safe” sales channel where they only pay a commission if the product is sold by the affiliate. For the affiliate marketer, the benefit is that they can make money online without having their own product and its associated support issues.

If you want to give affiliate marketing a try, how would you go about it so that you can maximize your chances of success?

Here are some key tips to consider:

* Choose your niche online carefully

One of the most important factors to consider when marketing as an affiliate is choosing the best products to market to the right audience. It can make or break your net earnings. If you have a certain field of interest, I would start there. This typically makes the process of deciding what affiliate program to join easier. Start by making a list of your interests and see what affiliate programs come up when you Google it.

Here is a sample –> muay thai kickboxing affiliate programs.

* Create a website as your marketing and tracking platform

One of the best ways to do affiliate marketing is to create a website that reviews the product that you are promoting. Make sure the landing page on your website has no “leaks” and directs the visitor straight down the page with minimal distractions. This will increase your chances for conversion. Choose several headlines and split-test them. Provide relevant content and finish it up with a clear call to action. Content can be a mixture of text, images, videos, and/or audio.

Try split-testing directing the visitor directly to the merchant’s sales page and one where you capture the lead first into your system before sending to the merchant’s site.

* Use the power of freebies

If you want people to give you something online like their name and email address, you must first offer them something. Use free reports with content that is relevant to what they are searching for when they land on your page. You can either write the free report yourself with all original content or use content that you gather from online article directories like ezinearticles.com or ideamarketers.com.

* Test different methods of getting targeted traffic to your website

No matter how good your website and landing page is, it is useless without traffic. More specifically, you want targeted traffic. Avoid the temptation to buy “10,000 free visitors for $99″ type offers. That would be untargeted or junk traffic. Rather, look for the type of demographic that would match the product offering. Do basic on page SEO to start with but avoid heavy SEO work until after you have tested to see which keywords actually attract your desired demographic. Use PPC to test.

Other forms of traffic can come from being active and social at Web 2.0 sites.

Does all the above sound like a lot of work? It is if you try to do it all at once. Start small, test, adjust, then grow from there.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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