Lessons of the Day (cont)

On my Macbook, I was attempting to copy and paste from a window in Windows (running in VMWare Fusion) to a window on the Mac side. It was working perfectly and I had all the VMWare Fusion tools installed. It turns out there's a limit on the size of data you can copy and paste. So I had to split it up.

Lessons of the Day

I spent some time updating Adwords Editor and when it came time to post I kept getting this:

"AdWords Editor is unable to check or post some of your changes,
because doing so would cause you to exceed AdWords account limits. In
order to complete your request, please revert some of your unposted
changes or delete some items, then retry your request. For more
information about AdWords account limits, please contact AdWords
Support.

(Error number: 17)"

In my case it was because one of my Adgroups had more than 2000 keywords. Bleh! Hope that tips saves you some time.

Back from my hiatus..

I've stopped my affiliate marketing efforts for a few months. A few hiccups I encountered: my laptop broke and two of my websites got hacked into, which was a big discourager.

Okay, okay. Weak excuses. The important thing is I'm back. I'm sad that I missed the big holiday shopping rush.

I went to visit a friend who opened his own restaurant. We chatted about his experience with it. One thing he said to me that stood out, "It was hard. I worked 13-hour days everyday for a year...but now it's better, I get a day off" I don't really know what about that statement that made its impression on me. I guess it's just that knowing the road to success is a hard one. At any point you can give up, but it's the ones that stick with it that get there. I've always heard it, but this time it kind of stuck.

Perfect timing because I learned that Campaign Blasts is starting their next Blast Challenge on February 2nd.

This week, I've been brushing up on Blasting and installing necessary software in preparation of the challenge.


Here are my goals
100 blasts by March 4. 2009
$100 a month
$100 a week by May, 2009 (Since it's my one year mark)
$100 a day
$100 a day for 30 days

Back From Hawaii

One beauty of affiliate marketing is that I go off to Hawaii for a week, come back, and see that I have made another sale!

My trip to the beautiful state of Hawaii has reinforced my determination to do this.

Currently: Working on 100blasts over the next 5 weeks. Aaaggh..::stops and inhales:: I can do this. I'm ready.

I did it!

I made my first sale!

Making some progress..

I have three campaigns/blasts going on at the moment. After a couple days of an uneasy start, I got my first four clicks!

I am very excited.

First couple of days blasting..

I've started three blasts. I'm not getting that many impressions. I'm not getting any clicks. Is this normal?

I have a hunch about one of my blasts. It has a lot of impressions, and no clicks. I need a specific merchant to make it work, but they have not approved me yet.


Chugging along.

PPC

Launched my first campaign.

If I had a dollar for every time something didn't go according to plan, I would've already started making money ;)

Note to self: Before starting direct linking, make sure your merchant allows it.

Jumping in!

Starting my venture into pay per click..

Currently making a little progress.

Yay! My ezine article got approved!! It feels very exciting. It may be a small step, but it's definitely a nudge of encouragement =D

Currently working on social marketing..

My homework: http://www.socialposter.com/

Ezine Article

My landing page is ready. Not quite finished yet. I still need to add php code to test. (Still learning how to do that. I thought it was simple, but I can't get it to work.) Brad suggested I started generating traffic to it. So I decided to "launch" it. If I start getting traffic to it, I'll know where it came from anyway.

Just submitted my first Ezine article. Yay!

Currently: chugging along. Trying to generate traffic. Next stop: Squidoo!

Stop what you're doing right now..

and backup your work!

My laptop which has all my files (for my webpages) won't turn on. Luckily, I had already uploaded them to my webserver. (Whew!) Imagine, all that work.

It has served me very well since college. The once top of the line HP with its 50GB hardrive. Time to get a MacBook! Just kidding, I have to earn it first ;)

The .htaccess file

I just learned how the .htaccess file is more than just specifying error pages. Here is a great link. It's a great introduction also if you have no idea what the .htaccess file is and provides sample code:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

It shows you how to:

• Specify error pages
• Stop directory browsing on your website. So that if you have an images folder, you “hide” it so that if people go to yourwebsite.com/images, they wont’ see a list of all your images
• protect your .htaccess file
• Stop hotlinking: so that people won’t link to your files and images and eat up your bandwidth
• Ban bad bots that eat may crash you webserver!

This site has a few more sample codes/content for the .htaccess file: http://blog.dreamhosters.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3083

My status so far..

I created a website in the hopes of landing in the organic search results. I started creating a landing page, but still have not been approved for a very important merchant. I should’ve waited to be approved by the merchant first before spending so much time on it. I’m not going to toss this niche, but I have decided to start another related campaign in the mean time. This time I did it backwards, well backwards from the way I did it last time. I found the merchants I wanted to promote, created my landing page and then I also created some content for other parts of the website. It does get faster the second time around.

To do list
Add some php code to make the affiliate links more presentable
Add some php code to be able to test
Submit my articles to Ezine

Currently : Trying to keep it simple.

Overcoming that overwhelming feeling.

The past two weeks were a little challenging. I noticed I keep getting distracted.
After spending a couple days trying to create a catalog of products on my website and learning to upload datafeeds, I realized that I'm spending too much time creating a mirror of my merchants sites, but I want to focus on generating traffic to them.

I finally got some affiliate links on my site and added a more pictures to make it visually appealing. In creating my landing pages, I'm researching about creating effective landing pages, I come across PPC and split testing. For a few days, a lot of stuff go through my head: Do I want my landing pages to be a part of my Joomla content or just a basic web page? I hear Google wants better content. Generate traffic to my site. PPC or add more content for organic search? Split Test my pages. With each day, I spend time reseaching the new question. Then, this morning, I woke up and my head just yelled "STOOOOOOOOOP!!. Just create a landing page."

So the lesson is: it's important to stay focused.

CJ account

It's the end of the week and I got my website up! Thanks to Joomla. There are a few limitations of it, but I should be able to find some plug-ins that will help me work around it.
First of all, it doesn't have multiple categories. It does have this plugin called Virtuemart that will allow for multiple categories. I installed it on my localserver and it slowed down my Joomla admin a tad. I don't know if it's my computer, but I'm hesitating about installing Virtuemart on my webserver. I will eventually, but first I must decide between Virtuemart1.1 and Virtuemart1.0.
Second, it's not very SEO friendly. There are a few workarounds, but it's going to take some extra work.
Another thing, I didn't realize that Joomla 1.5 stable version was just released this past January (the Beta version in October 2006), so templates for Joomla!1.5 are still limited. I ended up just modifying the standard template myself.

I'm tempted to check out Drupal, but exploring that will delay my goal this week. Drupal will have to wait.

I submitted my website to Commission Junction and got approved for an account. Yay! I started working on putting links on my site, and I realized that I don't have a clue. Soo, I will be working on this for the next hour or two http://cju.cj.com/tutorials.html.

My goal this week: Get my website up with working affiliate links and at least 2 landing pages =).

Exploring Joomla!

Last week was an action week for TBIP. I was trying really hard to get my website up and running by the end of the week, but I was not able to. I wasn't going to have a full blown products website for my niche, but I was determined to have something more than just a landing page.

In the middle of last week, I started creating my website in Dreamweaver. The vision of my site is clear in my head, but I could not easily translate it onto screen. I started flipping through web templates online in hopes of finding a template I can just tweak. Somehow I came across Joomla! It's a content management system. So far it looks like it can deliver everything I'm looking for.

Now, Instead of having to learn SQL, CSS and PHP, I can just focus on learning Joomla! So the past few days I've taken a few tutorials on Joomla! and on the developer side of Joomla!. I'm so impressed. I've gotten installed on my pc and my webserver and made a sample site to see familiarize myself with how to use it. I really want to get my site up and running by the end of week!

Designing my site

The second week of TBIP was basically about creating a website. This week's workload grew a lot. Aside from keeping up with learning about affiliate marketing and keeping up with researching my niche, I have to learn about designing and creating websites! I've decided not to outsource just yet because I want to be able to really learn everything. It's taking up a lot of time, and I feel it's worth it.

Since my last update, I've registered myself at several forums for my niche. One site had me wait three days before I could start posting just to make sure I wasn't a spammer. I've done more reading about my niche at different websites.

I've also started designing my site. I chose the color scheme of my site. I chose based on color psychologhy:
www.sibagraphics.com/coulour.php

Today I created a sitemap. I was having trouble because I kept getting the urge to create a different site for each of my personas, but after several drafts I finally chose one that I think will work.

I also wanted to learn more about database driven sites. They separate content from design and provide an easy solution to being able to quickly update your sites. Are database driven sites the only solution? I must look into it. Anyway, here's the SQL/PHP tutorial I took:
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/ddws/index.html

TBIP Day 7 & Peer Discussions

This week's session for TBIP is about designing/creating your website. Today, was about designing a visually appealing site. I started brainstorming on how I want my site to look like. I was having trouble because I can't imagine my site to be anything but a macro site. There are many products to promote and many customer personas to target. Since this will be my first affiliate site, I know that a micro site should do for a couple of reasons: I don't expect my first site to be perfect the first time, I want to test the niche, I want to test the site, etc..

So I chatted with my buddy Brad for a little bit. He helped me realize that the microniche I have been working on is actually a niche. I still need to carve out a smaller niche. So I spent some more time today trying to carve out a smaller niche. He advised me to pick a smaller niche, become and expert in that tiny area and then expand.

I've now chosen my smaller niche. The workload lightened up a little bit and a lot of the work is becoming much more clearer and a lot less overwhelming compared to yesterday. I understand my customer personas better. I have a better idea of what the direction of my site should take.

It's good to have a trusted peer and/or mentor in affiliate marketing. I can get feedback on what I'm doing right and wrong. An outside perspective can provide some great insight. They can provide good resources and they are an excellent resource as well.

Getting to Know My Audience Action Guide

I did not get to complete all I wanted to do today. I barely just finished the TBIP action guide for Session 4. So that leaves the rest of my to do list unchecked.

Session 4 Action Guide was a little demanding:
1. Review product advertisements
2. Review company websites
3. Review company financial reports and news
4. Join community sites
5. Consumer review sites
6. Subscribe to newsletters and blogs
7. Buy books
8. Be the Customer
9. Create customer personas
10. Create niche keyword list
11. Categorize te keywords for each persona

I'm having a little trouble creating customer personas which means I can't categorize my keywords. So I still have to do that.

One thing about Session 4 Action Guide, is that it's not a one time thing. It's an ongoing process. Today I found a few forums and blogs for my niche. I'm very excited about all the resouces that I am finding.

It's a little overwhelming because now not only do I have to keep up with affiliate marketing blogs and news, I also have to keep up with blogs and news about my niche.