Pursuit of Profit

The profitable days are starting to come more often and the stress of starting an affiliate campaign is beginning to fade. I had a few $150+ profit days now which is really promising this early in the game.

To achieve this I followed some simple steps and stuck with them:

Found a killer product to promote on clickbank. I had heard from people that this product converts well, so I decided to give it a go. When researching a product to promote you want

Set up a targeted adwords campaign. I found one aspect of the product I am promoting and found as many keywords as possible in relation to this. For example if you were promoting a product such as a car there are a few different areas you can focus in on (obviously you don’t promote cars for clickbank but the example works):

Safety
Efficiency
Style
Performance
Price
Warrenty

For this example lets say you chose style, because it is a selling point. You would find every keyword imaginable related to the style of cars:
cool car
stylish automobile
sleek
etc..

Then you go on to google adwords keyword suggestion tool and put them in get suggestions, take those suggestions sort through them then take the ones that fit and put them right back in the adwords tool for more suggestions and continue doing this till you have 1500 or more keywords.

Next step is making sure your landing page relates to the keyword searches that people are looking for. Have images and phrases that relate directly to style and automobiles. With multiple calls to action ie: buy now, free trail, take a test drive.

Create targeted ads to display on adwords. Small ad groups of very similar keywords with equally targeted ads work best and will increase your quality score (more on this in future posts).

Check everything over and get it live. This will get you going, once the conversions start you will be able to identify which keywords sell and which keywords stink.

Adjust your bids accordingly to the performance of the keyword.
If you have a conversion ratio of 2% and your commission per sale is $50 you want to aim for an ROI of 100% so you would multiply your conversion rate by your desired cost per sale. So you want to pay $25 per sale ideally, this would be .02 x 25 which equals $0.50 bids.

Keep on adjusting and tweaking and you will soon have a profitable campaign.

As many of you know I was blogging about my journey to $10k a month on a Blogger blog for the first leg of this quest. I just switched over to my own Wordpress blog this week, and after some minor adjustments, that I like to call “hacking”, I feel settled in.

You’re probably asking “why switch from Blogger to Wordpress?”
Freedom: Blogger is an excellent, dynamic and free blog service that allows anyone to sign up and get posting within minutes. However is such an easy to use service there are drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is the lack of ability to customize. However with Wordpress, you can customize to your hearts content.
Ownership: At the end of the day Google owns Blogger and Blogger owns your blog. I wanted to have my own blog that I owned, and all the content associated with it is solely mine. Plus having your own domain name is nice, it’s so much more personal and you feel like you do own it.

Okay so now that I’ve convinced you to switch over to the wonderful world of Wordpress you probably want to know how! At first I was hesitant to switch, because I imagined the switch including 2 pots of coffee, 1 popped blood vessel and more f-bombs than the movie Scarface. Thankfully this wasn’t the case! After finding the Blogger to Wordpress plugin the whole site was transferred over in about 5 minutes. Here is how I did it:

1. Download/ unzip/ upload plugin to my server
2. Activate plugin by clicking on the activate button in your new Wordpress backend
3. Enter your Blogger domain ie yourdomain.blogspot.com and select the options you would like to take advantage of
4. Click “Import”, make sure you leave this window open while you are importing and you do not surf away from this site. The script is working on pulling all your posts and comments over to your new blog and this can take a moment.

Voila you now have your very own Wordpress blog, loaded up with all your posts.

After 3 days I am now at my first goal of $5! This is a baby step in the long journey ahead of me, but it feels good completing a goal regardless of how small. One major discouragement with fresh to the game internet marketers, including myself, is having one far off lofty goal that is impossible to attain. You probably think 10k a month is one of these goals, and I can see where you’re coming from! However I’ve broken this goal down in to little goals, baby steps, because you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you run!

Meeting little goals encourages me to keep going and gets me even more committed and focused on the next goal.

Step 1. If you are new to internet marketing, sit down and figure out how much you want to make. Realistic thought is definitely your friend at this point, don’t say a million a month unless you think you have the determination and bag of tricks to get to this point.

Step 2. Once you have a goal, break it down to mini milestones. Some good mini milestones are:

• Traffic goals: I will have 500 unique visitors this month!
• Backlink goals: I will get at least 4 links a day for the next 30 days!
• Site development goals: I will write at least 10 posts a week on my blog!

Step 3. Write your goals down! This is huge, it’s so easy to dismiss a thought or a will that has never entered in to reality. Writing a goal down makes it REAL, it makes you feel like REAL shit looking at goals from the past and realizing that you haven’t accomplished them. Staying away from feeling like shit is a good motivator, but so is the success that comes with reaching your goals. Tell someone or post on your blog about your new goals, this takes writing it down one step further! This step also makes you adjust your dreamy goals so they are more attuned to reality.

Step 4. Start completing the goals! Completing goals gives you a sense of satisfaction and boosts your motivation to continue. Look at me, I made $5 and I’m feeling on top of the world because I am one step closer to my end goal! I am 1/11th of the way down my path to $10k a month.

You can use this motivation technique for anything as well. Hope this helps you out, but remember, you gotta do it to make it work!

Ok so I have the blogspot blog up and hosted (for free), I chose the name grassroots marketing because that’s what this whole thing is about. Starting with nothing, and making it into something! So let’s break down what I’ve done so far:

1. Found a free blog host
2. Chose my blog name and design
3. Installed Google Analytics (more info below)
4. Pinged a few blog services with my link (I use Pingoat to send out my ping)

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that Google offers. All you do is sign up and add a simple snippet of code to your website. You can paste this snippet in your template file or html or whatever. It allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, what keywords and search engines they are finding your site with and a whole lot more. If you aren’t using a stats service yet I would recommend Analytics, it really gives you a clear picture of how your site performs and what efforts are working for you!