All of the points I stated in that post are indeed true, except one, which I must have written when I was half asleep (#6) it was “knowledge” and boy was I wrong!!

With time and experience comes knowledge of what’s true and what’s false and after marketing online for over 4 years now, it amazes me how much false information is spit out in Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum.

Most of this crap is provided by “forum guru’s.” Please understand there is a BIG difference between a forum guru and a knowledgeable guru! Forum gurus are those who you’ve NEVER heard of outside of the forum! It’s the guy who has thousands of posts and seems to have an answer for everything. You look at his links in his signature and you wonder how he makes any money with these crappy sites. Most likely he doesn’t!

Is everyone at the Warrior Forum and other forums full of crap? Of course not, but a good deal of them are!

9 out of 10 times those who go out of their way to answer your questions and give advice in forums are 1 of 3 things:

1. A newbie making little to no money trying to make a name for him or herself “fake it till you make it” telling you crap that sounds good, but they have no idea whether it’s true or not!
2. Someone who’s been at it for years, but has yet to make a full-time income online, so they hang out at forums giving old, regurgitated advice that they’ve never put into practice themselves!
3. Someone who is trying to increase their post count, so people will think they’ve been around a while and so they can make more sales when they release their next worthless report in the Warrior Special Offers forum, or similar marketplace in other forums.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a bunch of really good people just trying to learn the ropes and make it. Unfortunately there are also many people who haven’t been able to make it and cause those who are trying to make a legitimate extra income to waste time and money concentrating on things they shouldn’t be concentrating on!

You’ll notice I do have somewhere around 3,000 posts in the Warrior Forum and hundreds in other forums as well. That’s because they are an excellent way to help build your brand and build your list! Unfortunately there are very few legitimate marketers out there giving solid advice in forums like I do.

My advice is this: Participate in Internet Marketing Forums for the branding, link building and list building aspects, but be VERY selective of who you accept information from whether it’s free or paid! Get your advice from a trusted source and if you’re going to use forums for information join a legitimate forum where your time and money will not be wasted!

If the forum you’re in is the only place you’ve ever heard of this person, there’s probably a good reason why! If the sites the person links to in his or her signature looks like something a 12 yo created, there’s probably a reason why! I could go on and on, but believe me when I say, if you’re not very selective of who you accept information from, Internet Marketing Forums can be VERY counterproductive!

img credit: phauly

It’s been a fun, exciting and successful 2008 for me after getting out of the Army last year and I couldn’t have done it without you! So Thank You for the support and if I’ve been able to earn your trust, Thank you for allowing me!

Whether you had a similar 2008 or not, here’s to new beginnings and a successful 2008!

I like showing you this site because it’s proven several SEO myths that are taught by so-called SEO experts wrong. One of them is that manual linking is no longer effective! 98% of the links pointing to that site are a result of some form of manual linking! If you do a link check, you’ll see that most of the links are from:

- web directories
- article directories
- Reciprocal Linking
- forums and blogs
- my own sites

And what’s really cool about this is that I haven’t touched that Website for over a year! I haven’t built links, added content, nothing! Some of the content on the site is duplicate content too. The only thing I have done is something most SEO “Experts” will tell you is a bad idea and that is changing the template of the whole site. I changed the template of the entire site, so it looks better, several months ago and the typical traffic pattern stayed the same.

So does manual link building still work? 5,000 unique visitors per month tell me it does

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later addition
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Just to be clear, when I say “manual linking” I’m referring to anything you do manually, which results in an incoming link. The opposite of manual linking is natural linking, which is when others link to your sites and pages because they simply like it.

I’m not saying natural linking is not effective. Natural linking is the best kind of linking!! BUT, for some sites you just need to give them a push and I want to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with doing this, as long as it’s in moderation!

I’ve actually been playing around with PPC for several years. The problem for the longest time was that I couldn’t get my ads to compete with the top competitors without paying a crap load of money to get them up there.

I was reading alot of PPC blogs and forums and I was looking for all the answers… I never found them and figured PPC was just too hard to figure out, but I’ve always seen the ENORMOUS profit potential in it!

Recently I decided to start playing with it once again, but this time I decided to just forget all of the advice I’d been given and just use common sense and what I realized was PPC is much like SEO.

* The PPC networks (Adwords, YPN, Live etc.) want to serve the most relevant, helpful ad to their visitors. So, my ad needs to be relevant to the phrase that it’s served for and it needs to be helpful.

Relevance - So, if I’m bidding on “Red Nike Shoes” I’m going to start an ad group using “Red Nike Shoes” as the title of the ad, insert “red Nike shoes” within the ad as well and bid on ONLY “red Nike shoes” and a few more extremely relevant keywords with that ad! So my keywords would be something like

“red nike shoes”
“red nike shoe”
“hot red nike shoes”
“hot red nike shoe”

Then I start a new ad group in the same campaign, but this time I’ll change the ad to target a different, yet similar term like “red nike shoe store” or whatever I come up with during my keyword research. I do that over and over, so I’ll have a different ad group for basically every ad variation I find with a decent amount of search volume.

Helpfulness - Being online for several years now I probably have somewhat of an advantage because I have several sites in various niches that are established. Do you think an ad network is going to give preference to an ad for a site that has been around for a little while or a site that is brand new?

I also include links on my landing pages to pages that any credible site would have, like contact, about, privacy/legal etc.

By using common sense and doing the things I mentioned above my adverts have been served above 90% of the competition, 100% of the time… out of 10 campaigns I’ve been running for the last few days and I’m paying far less than I expected… the CPC is actually going down on many of my campaigns because the ads are performing well.

This is obviously not ground-breaking advice on PPC, but for those like me who have never really gotten into PPC, it’s useful information.

I’ll be working alot more with PPC in 2009, so you’ll most likely be seeing a few more blog posts on the subject in the coming months.

photo credit: Danard Vincente

So, I was speaking with my buddy, Mark Mason and he mentioned some software he had been using called “phpBay” to create stores on his sites. He sent over a few examples and I was sold. I bought a copy and set up my first store in no time flat at http://www.madcacher.com/shop/.

What is phpBay

phpBay is a very powerful PHP script, which allows anyone to create a shop, which contains various Ebay items targeted to your niche. After you install it you simply insert your Ebay affiliate ID then generate the code that will make your shop work by inserting a simple keyword or phrase. The script will generate a very professional, user friendly shop that will display only items that are related to the phrase you inserted! And of course, every sale that is generated through your shop equals money in your pocket, which is the best part!

If you want a shop on your WordPress blog you’re all set because phpBay offers an easy to use WP plugin, which is what I’m currently using on madcacher.com

But, it’s not specific to WordPress. You can use this script on any PHP based website. MOST servers are PHP based, so if you’re not sure, most likely your server can run this… the file extension just needs to end with .php instead of .html or other formats. This can be easily changed though.

How many shops can I create?

You can create an UNLIMITED amount of sites on an UNLIMITED number of sites! To me that’s very important! I don’t ant to spend money on something I’m using for a little niche site and not be able to use it on my other sites as well!

Is this only for U.S. based customers?

Nope, phpBay supports seventeen different Countries!

What I like

I really like the easy of use and the potential here. The WordPress plugin is as simple to install and integrate as any other plugin, which is incredibly easy. The income potential is great. Obviously traffic is key, but this is the easiest way I know of to get a shot up on any of your sites within minutes, with no additional work!

What I don’t like

I always try to find things I don’t like about products I’m promoting, because to be honest, it adds to credibility. What kind of a reviewer would I be if I loved everything I was reviewing? Well, this time I honestly haven’t seen anything I don’t like about phpBay. I’m sure I could find a few small things here and there, but I haven’t yet. It’s pretty cut and dry… install it, insert a few settings and your shop is up and running.

How much does it cost?

phpBay normally sells for $79, but I’ve worked out a special deal for my readers. You know I take care of you So, If you order through the link below and use the following coupon code, you’ll get a 20% discount, which is far less than what everyone else, including myself, is paying. However, after 100 orders this coupon code will no longer be valid. (If the coupon code is still there, the offer is still good)

coupon code: 6BC288DE3A
Order Link: http://ez-onlinemoney.com/recommends/phpBay

Whether you use phpBay or not, having a shop for each niche you target is an excellent idea, especially if you’re a niche marketer with several small, niche sites. A one-time investment can add a new monetization model to your entire business and unlike ads, it’s not intrusive and actually adds to the credibility of your site!

But, I know there are many people out there who still aren’t sure, so if you’re one of those people, I’d like to tell you the basics of a very cool and very popular technology… I felt like saying “new” technology, but RSS has been around for a while now.

I’ve been marketing online for several years now, but I didn’t get started blogging until about 3 years into all of this. When I started my first blog I had no idea what RSS was and to be honest, I barely knew what a blog was

But I started reading other blogs, got mine established and learned the basics… now I’ve been successfully blogging for a couple years.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” although other say it’s “Rich Site Summary.” I’m not sure if there is a different between the 2, but for myself and other basic “users” it really doesn’t matter.

I’ll explain with an example. You find a good feed reader, like Google Reader or Bloglines (free.) Then you get the RSS feed from your favorite blogs and/or news sites and add the RSS feed URL to the feed reader and you can keep up with your favorite blogs all in one spot (within the feed reader.) You will be alerted only when there is a new post, instead of manually visiting each site to check for updates.

There are other uses and RSS isn’t specific to blogs and news sites, but they are the main 2 types. An RSS feed is simply a URL and if the site has an RSS feed (almost ALL blogs and news sites do) they’ll have an image, link or both somewhere on their pages for you to grab.

How to Subscribe to a Blog’s RSS Feed

There are a few different ways to subscribe to an RSS feed; an easy way and a REALLY easy way.

The Easy Way - The process is very simple. Just visit the blog you would like to subscribe to and locate their RSS feed. In the case of this blog you’ll see it in the right navigation menu toward the top… a big, orange button that says “RSS.”

In FireFox you can right-click that image/link and select “Copy Link Location” from the drop down menu. If you use another browser and you’re not sure how to copy a URL, just click on the RSS image/link and when it opens a new window, just copy the entire URL in the address bar of your browser. In the case of this blog, you would be copying:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ez-onlinemoney/KVBf

Once you’ve copied the URL you just need to add it to your feed reader. There are many different feed readers out there, but probably the 2 most popular are Google Reader and Bloglines… both are very easy and straight forward in regards to adding a feed.

The REALLY Easy Way - This is your best option if you don’t want to mess with a feed reader, but unfortunately not all blogs and news sites offer this option. Many blogs do though, including this blog. I’m talking about subscribing to a feed via email. Instead of the feed being sent to your feedreader account, it’s sent to your email.

To subscribe to a feed via email, the site must offer it and it will be a simple form asking for your email. On this blog you’ll see that to the right of my orange RSS image… it says “Email Updates.” You just enter your email address and updates will be sent to your email every time a new blog post is published and you’ll also have the option to click the link in the email to visit the actually blog post.

That’s basically it. RSS is a big time saver especially for those who read a bunch of different blogs and/or regularly keep up with the news. Now go ahead and give it a shot

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Image credit: Matt Forsythe’s RSS Icons… for more cool RSS icons see the Ultimate list of Free RSS Feed Icons.

Believe it or not I made that website to honestly help tourists in Germany, so I wanted good info. So I turned to Wikipedia. Although there is no guarantee the info is 100% accurate, it’s typically relatively good stuff.

So I created a new page about Mountains in Germany, copied a bunch of content entirely from Wikipedia onto the new page and published it.

A few months later, not only is the page ranking, it’s OUTRANKING Wikipedia, from which it was copied for “mountains in Germany” and “German mountains” (without quotes) and holding a top 10 ranking for “Germany mountains” along with several other phrases.

Many of these phrases are also holding a top 10 ranking in Yahoo as well.

Granted, these phrases aren’t extremely competitive, but most people would take 592 unique visitors each and every month from a page they just copied and pasted I believe

Why is this Duplicate Content Ranking so Well?

Simple - Optimization! If you type the phrase “mountains in Germany” or “German mountains” into Wikipedia, you’ll get a page saying “No page with that title exists.” But if you type in the names of each of the different German mountains, you’ll find a page with content that is the same as the content for that particular mountain on my page… I created a page full of duplicate content that was targeting keywords that Wikipedia wasn’t, and still isn’t, targeting. In other words, I filled a gap in the market and it worked to my advantage.

The Bottom Line

Google cares about 1 thing, user experience! They want to give searchers what they’re looking for, whether it’s duplicate content or not. If you need to use some content from Wikipedia on your site(s) use it! But, don’t go overboard! If your entire site is full of duplicate content Google probably isn’t going to reward you with top 10 rankings, but if you have a page or two of duplicate content from an authoritative source, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!

photo credit: im.idea

After several years of hard times, one of my sisters got her act together, began to stay out of trouble, live a healthy life and she’s been doing it for a few years now. She’s been managing a furniture store and although the pay could be worse, it could be ALOT better too.

She asked me how she could make some money online for some extra money, so I got an article writing service going for her. She wrote a bunch of articles for a bunch of people and did well, but wasn’t really enthused about it.

After a while she got a raise at work and decided to stop writing articles for now, which I completely understood, nothing wrong with that.

However, I’ve told her several times in the past if she wanted to start a Website I’d help her do with it whatever she wants and help her make some money with it… I even registered her name domain. She never got excited about it and that domain is still empty, with it’s own account on my server.

She recently got tired of her boss and said she was ready to start doing what I’m doing online… I said, “no you’re not”

So, why won’t I help her? Simply because she doesn’t have the passion that it requires to do well online. It doesn’t take skill… it doesn’t take knowledge, that comes with time, it takes passion and determination. Those who are successful online (in business in general for that batter) are those who LOVE what they do!

People who are just happy to be building things that MAY or MAY NOT make them alot of money. People who understand that it will probably take a long time to make a good deal of money, but keep going because they just LOVE doing it!

Unfortunately MANY people who get into Internet Marketing, especially these days with the current economic conditions, aren’t getting into it because of their passion, they’re doing it because they think they can make some quick easy money and 99,999 times out of 100,000 that’s just not the case.

If my sister told me she completely understands that it may take YEARS to make good money online, although with my help it wouldn’t take that long at all ) and she just wants to do it because it just seems really exciting, I’d be helping her in every way possible! But it’s not a passion of hers… it’s simply something she sees me making good money with, so she figures she can make some easy money with it too.

So, if you don’t honestly enjoy this whole Internet Marketing thing, I highly recommend you find another occupation, because it’s very likely that you will fail.

On the other hand, if you honestly enjoy doing this, stick with it and NEVER give up! It takes time, but when you truly have a passion for something, you WILL succeed… some take longer than others, but eventually you will!

photo credit: Tracy O

Today I’d like to share with you the top 5 most profitable Internet Marketing Business Models. #1, #2 and #3 can all be nearly just as profitable depending on how they’re worked, but I believe the order I put them in is pretty accurate.

You’ll notice that blogging isn’t one of them. That’s because blogging should NEVER be a business model! It can be a valuable part of many different profitable business models, but blogging alone is NOT a business model!

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) - PPC and Email Marketing are both extremely profitable and although I’m not personally a PPC super affiliate, I see the EXTREME profit potential! The problem with PPC (the good thing for those who choose to get serious with it) is that since it takes money to make money and there is no guarantee of profiting, MANY people give up right away!

However, there are several super affiliates out there who make thousands and thousands of dollars each and every day! This is something I’ve toyed with over the years and I’m just now starting to get serious with. There is a fairly large learning curve and if you’re struggling to feed your family I don’t recommend getting into PPC. Only do this when you have some capital to invest on your PPC “education” ie. learning from your mistakes. You WILL lose money at first… how much depends on the spending limits and budgets you set.

2. Email Marketing - Email marketing is a close second to PPC although some people would argue that… I do believe PPC is a bit more profitable though when comparing the most successful people in both fields.

However, email marketing is something just about ANYONE can get started with and it can be VERY profitable if done correctly! This is my absolute favorite business model and as you may come to realize after reading the report I just released “New Age Email Marketing” Email marketing accounts for approximately 80% of my total income these days… there’s a good chance you came across this post through one of my emails… see what I mean?

3. Membership Sites - The profit potential with membership sites is absolutely obvious. Instead of a single, one-time payment, people send you money over and over again! The trick is to obviously give them something so valuable that they decide it’s worth it! Over-deliver and there’s a good chance you’ll make a bunch of money. Under-deliver and there’s a good chance you’ll make little to nothing.

I collect recurring payments with my coaching forum and although it will never account for a great deal of my income due to the increased work load for this type of system, it generates a little extra money and I get to truly help people at the same time, so the payoff is good for me.

How you decide to run your membership site is up to you… it could be a forum, a free content site etc. etc. There are no rules here… just provide something that people want and are willing to pay each and every month for access.

4. Electronic Product Creation and Marketing - Don’t think because I have product creation listed as #4 that it’s not profitable because it is indeed VERY profitable. When we’re dealing with electronic products the real power is in affiliate marketing.

Having OTHER people promote your product(s) is like a dream really. You do absolutely nothing and other people do the hard work. Of course it take some initial hard work, but it happens. I earn money every single day from affiliates promoting “AMD” and my other products.

The catch? Just like anything else you have to provide quality. No one wants to promote crap, but everyone wants to promote quality!

I’ll be sending out an email to my list in the very near future with a discount for an excellent ebook written by my buddy Mark Mason, on how to create a quality ebook and profit from it. Yeah, it’s an ebook on how to make an ebook Look for that on the 4th of November.

5. Niche Marketing - This can be defined in several different ways, after all, “Niche Marketing” is a very broad phrase. But the definition I’m referring to is building and promoting small, white-hat mini-sites monetized with Adsense and Affiliate programs.

I’ve made a good deal of money in the past doing this. You may have read my report “The $5 Mini-Site Formula,” which outlines my overall niche marketing formula.

You’re basically filling gaps in the Internet information world. There are millions of tiny, long-tail sub-niches that have little to no relevant pages in the SERPS… you simply find them and fill them with your articles and pages. The smart ones will only target high-paying niches. I’m talking niches that pay over $1 for each and every Adsense click!

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Are you using one or more of these models? I’d love to hear your feedback!

photo credit: joeltelling

I still own the website and you can take a look if you like (still as ugly as ever and goes against some of the most important SEO advice I provide) http://www.TheGermanTruth.com/ After developing that site I moved on and created a new site, which is basically the exact same type of site, but I integrated what I had learned into the new site. You can see it at http://www.EverythingAboutGermany.com/. Why am I telling you all of this and how does it relate to Adsense? You’ll see in a minute.

Most people, including myself, started off online with one monetization model: Adsense… generate clicks in any way possible (hopefully ethically and within their TOS though.)

So, we either learn how to put up a site with FrontPage or Dreamweaver or we start making free blogs etc. that allow you to run adsense ads or we do both. I personally learned the basics of Dreamweaver, with the help of a friend, and did it on my own.

We then start writing content for the site and put up some realllllllly ugly graphics that we made, which at the time we think are awesome. Every chance we get we capitalize words and center the content, because that will get the readers attention, right? lol

Somewhere along the way we hear about affiliate marketing too, but adsense seems so much easier… they click, you make money, so easy. So we just do both. We put adsense up and LOADS of affiliate banners allllll over the place, because the more ads there are, the more likely the visitors are to buy, right? uhhu ok

Then we learn a little bit about promotion. We learn that we need to build links and that we can exchange links with other Webmasters, but the best way is to write compelling content. However, we don’t believe these people… we think we have to manually do it all, because so far, noone has linked to your “compelling content” right?

If that sounds just about like your story when you started, or where you’re currently at, you can rest assured I, as well as just about everyone else in this business, went through the SAME THING!

Fortunately we learn as we go and we learn that we don’t need to capitalize everything or make everything bold to get people’s attention… we learn that things we’re not good at (graphic design in my case) should be outsourced or we’ll scare people away… we learn that the more banners you have DOESN’T necessarily mean the more sales you make (often times it’s opposite of that) etc. etc.

If you visit just about any Internet Marketing forum or read many blogs, you’ll notice that many of the newer Internet Marketers will frequently talk about Adsense, while the more experienced Internet Marketer will only speak about Adsense on occasion. Obviously there are several different business models out there and some advanced marketers do talk about Adsense quite a bit, but overall they don’t. Why? because they started diversifying their income years ago!

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about creating multiple sources of income, but it’s a bunch and I’m saying it again!

If you’re new to the business create some sites and put some effort toward adsense revenue, but DON’T spend all of your time on it or you’ll end up like I did and wait 2 years before you’re earning enough money to make a full-time income when you could have done it in under a year!

The website I spoke of at the beginning of this post (EverythingAboutGermany.com) now earns me a steady $200/month and while that’s an incredibly small portion of my income, it’s there and I do NO WORK AT ALL to keep it up. As a matter of fact, I haven’t added content to that site for over a year and it’s been even longer since I’ve manually built links! The only thing I’ve done to it is replaced the template with a better looking one (click here if you’d like the same template.) And oh by the way, it holds top 10 rankings in Google for many germany related phrases like “Germany Tourism” and “German Mountains” (without quotes) etc.

So, to answer the question, YES, “newbies” should be concentrating on Adsense starting out, but they DEFINITELY should NOT be concentrating solely on Adsense, as it’s not a quick money maker by any means!

One can see some very quick money through Adsense using a technique like my $5 Formula, but a raw newbie wouldn’t have a chance with it because it takes some experience and know-how to do proper keyword research etc.

Build an email list through the same sites you’re promoting for Adsense income. Learn the basics of Pay Per Click and test out an offer every now and then. Create a product as soon as you have a good amount of knowledge in any particular field…. but NEVER concentrate solely on Adsense income!