There are two things I want to cover in this post  the new Adsense for Domains program and Internet Marketers who show their class. First up lets deal with the dark side of internet marketing.

I subscribe to several marketers mailing lists especially those who products I promote or those that have products that I feel may compliament the stuff I am doing.  As with all marketers they send regular emails I don’t mind this and expect it. I have several rules which help me to determine whose lists I stay on. One of those rules is that If I get more than 3 emails in 3 days I’ll unsubscribe.

Over the weekend I got 3 emails from Mike Hill one of which was a repeat of the one I got a few hours earlier and apologising for misspelling a word in the title..he still managed to include the links again.  I unsubscribed from his list and he had a form to ask my why..so i told him that he was sending to many emails hyping stuff and not enough good info.. 3 emails in a couple of days is way too much hype.

Guess what?  He replied to me in a really classy style..

Hey D^%$ H@#$ I have given more info than anyone else… Not my fault you cannot attend my training seminars. Then I give you good free info and you don’t do a dam thing with it… just look at your desk top and you’ll see all that free content sitting there and you haven’t taken action on anything…

So anyway Mike, here I am sat on my Balcony overlooking the mediteranean having breakfast and writing this, all of this paid for by adsense , clickbank and eBay. Damn I really do wish I had taken action! <===Mike,  this last bit is scarcasm just in case you have totally lost your connection with the real world.

So guys If you are on Mike Hills mailing list and don’t want to recieve abusive emails then don’t unsubscribe…

Right Back to the serious stuff.

Google have just released a new program called Adsense for Domains.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/12/extending-adsense-for-domains-to-all.html

I have two contrasting views on this.. firstly it’s great if you park domains as many parking companies take a big cut in your income so cutting out the middle man will be a good thing. It is also great that you can buy a domain and put adsense on it before you do anything with the domain.

My other view is that Google have always said that sites that have adsense should have good quality content and not be MFA (made For Adsense) sites. Obviously the Adsense for Domains program will mean that this fundamental pronciple is being ignored.

Overall I think it’s a good thing and I’ll probably grab 50 or so domains next year and test it out.(once they release it to european customers..you North Americans get all the googd stuff before we do!) This really could make Domain Parking worthwhile again.

One of the most common questions I get asked I what affiliate martketing program is the best.  The first thing to keep in mind is that there are thousands of affiliate programs and hundreds of affiliate networks. They all have their pro’s and cons.

For the purposes of this post I will focus on the big 3 programs , Clickbank, eBay and Amazon. Between those 3 there is nothing you can’t sell and personally i much prefer to have my comissions spread among a number of large programs than several small ones .  In the past I have lost commissions because I promoted a program and didn’t make the $100 minimum for payment.

First up Clickbank.

Over the past year clickbank have been making lots of changes that have made them a much more viable proposition for internet marketers. Weekly payments, Direct deposits and multi language products mean that affiliate in most countries can enjoy regular payments.

Income from clickbank tends to be steady unless you start a sucessful campaign the sales will stay similar month after month.

There are a few things that go against Clickbank, they only sell digital products and they are very quick to issue refunds. They actually issued a refund to someone who claimed that their credit card was stoled despite the fact that i provided them with a full list of IP addresses and email conversations that proved they were lying.

eBay, I have to declare now that I love eBays affiliate program. Yes there are occasional tracking problems and they can make stupud decisions like expiring loads of accounts for no aparrant reason but if you can accept these as just teething problems with a new network the results are excellent.  I recently switched a site from adsense which was making about $50 per month , It immediatly started earning me around $300 a month with EPN (ebay partner network).

In the past month i’ve had simple sites with just an article or two and a few eBay listings earning me over $150 a day.. Unlike Clickbank eBay can be seasonal, I know that in November or December I’ll earn 5 times as much than I will in April, but I quite like that as it comes at an expensive time of the year.  Last years Christmas eBbay earnings bought me a Jeep Grand Cherokee, This years should pay my Housing costs for a year.

I am currently working on a new system to help me produce good quality profitable ebay affiliate sites and I fully intend to build an extra 20 or 30 eBay sites and make it my major income stream in the coming year.

Finally Amazon, I have a love hate relationship with amazon. I love that a customer usually goes from my sites to amazon and not only buys the product that I was promoting but 3 or 4 others that are unrelated and I still get commission for them.  I also love the wide range of products available.

 I hate that the commission is so low 4% - 7% usually depending on how many products you sell each month, (mine is usually 6.5%) but the extra sales tends to make up for that. I hate that they won’t do direct deposits into my bank account as i don’t live in the US. I have to get a cheque/check sent to me and then paid in to my bank and wait 4 weeks for it to be credited to my account .

Lastly I hate that I have to wait so long for payment, I’ve just received septembers finalised details a few days ago.  Compare that to Clickbank and ebay who will both have paid me what I earned in November before Christmas. With Amazon i’ll be lucky to have a credit in my bank before April. If I lived within the US it would be much better I could also concentrate on Amazon UK which I do for some sites and many of the payment issues would disapear.

So thats a brief round up of the big 3 affiliate programs , I am sure you can tell that eBay is by far my favorite at the moment. Throught out next year I’ll be keeping you up to date with how my new ebay sites are going and if I make my targets.

Right I am now off to move house….

I want you to read this post then spend a few days thinking about what I am saying to you. Don’t immediately dismiss it as impractical consider it, weigh up the pros and cons and decide if it’s something you think you could do.

Before I discuss my idea with you lets consider the cost of a few things….

Eban Pagan Get altitude seminar..$10,000

Tony Robins Seminar $2595

Earn 1 K a day Seminar $595

This is My idea…

Imagine living in an community where all around you had fellow internet marketers who were spending a year living and breathing internet marketing. sharing ideas and knowledge , working on collaborative projects, outsourcing work to each other, brainstorming, creating businesses and motivating each other.  How much of an income would you be able to generate in that environment?

But don’t forget you need the  lifestyle elements  tennis, golf, swimming pool, gym and sauna, mountains, sea breathtaking views and great weather most of the year great restaurants and the shopping rocks.. .  The perfect life work balance.

Sounds like an expensive dream doesn’t it, what if I said you could live this dream for around $1000 - $1500 per month. When I say live I mean just that. Apartment costs are included food is good and cheap as it eating out.

Next month I am moving close to Marbella in Southern Spain a penthouse apartment is going to cost me €700 per month. The apartment is on a gated community with all the facilities I mentioned above. There are several Apartments available in the same development.  For a while I’ve been thinking about the possibility of an Internet Marketing Community (no not like Waco!) Just like minded marketers living in close proximity sharing ideas,  resources and supporting each other and their families…..

Spend sometime thinking about the possibilities and the lifestyle

Like the Idea???  Want more Info? email me at admin {@} income-academy.com

In mid december last year I wrote a report called the $6000 blog post in which I showed how to create an income by selling physical products. As the name suggests at that point I had made $6000 from a blog post and a couple of articles. As you can imagine, I was happy.  By the end of January that income had climed to almost $20,000. I was very happy!

At the time of writing the initial report I thought that would be where things finished but I had such great feedback from the people who bought it that I expanded the idea and included all the ways I make money from Wordpress. This was released earlier this yeat as Wordpress Goldmine.

As it’s got closer to christmas the site I built and promoted last year has started to increase it’s income so as of today between Amazon, ebay and adsense it’s earning me in excess of $100 per day. This will increase as we get closer to christmas.

I have now rewritten the report and you can grab it for free, you don’t need to subscribe to receive it just grab a copy from: HERE . All you need to do is right click and download it.

If it sparks your interest and you want to know more and you are prepared to take action, Then grab a copy of Wordpress Goldmine , come into the free WPG forum and I will try everything I can to make sure that this year you have a profitable Christmas. Thats my promise to you.

If you have friends who you feel could benefit from this report feel free to distirbute it. If you would like to send it out to your customers then please email me at admin {@} income-academy.com and I will be happy to personalise a copy with your own affiliate link for you.

One of my favorite marketers Chris Remple has recently released a new product about targetting the #1 in MSN. Frankly from the experience I have had of MSN I can’t see the point of this. I checked last months stats for some of my sites that rank #1 in Google, Yahoo and MSN the traffic from those sites are as follows.

Google 711

Yahoo 69

MSN 67

and for those of you interested..EzineArticles 691

All search engines like sites to have a keyword related domain name so if you are building a site about “Solar powered widgets” then by getting a site containing the keyword you will stand a much better chance of ranking at #1 in all the search engines. 

You also need to ask yourself if you target MSN and use various methods to get to #1 will those methods that you use have a negative impact on your Google Ranking? For example 3 years ago I used a service called link vault that posted my links to random sites and in return my sites displayed related links on them.  of the 9 sites i tried this on 7 of them were de-indexed from google. Sure I had #1 in yahoo and msn but the traffic didn’t make up for 50% of the traffic I lost. 

It’s a fact of life for interent marketers that Google brings you a vast majority of your traffic if you rank well in google. As you can see from my stats  above over 10 times as much. Now I don’t know about you but i’d rather spend a few extra hours a week getting higher rankings in google than getting easy rankings in any other search engine.

Sometimes I am amazed at the responses that some of the posts I write get. After writing the 10 tips for earning money at christmas I had a load of emails asking me various questions…

 Yes it really does work (why would I write about it if it didn’t)

Yes I did earn over $20,000 last christmas

and yes those same sites are still earning me money and it is increasing the closer we get to christmas.

I decided that I would like to help some of you to make money in the run up to christmas so i have come up with a simple plan. It simple in there are only two parts to it.

1. What can I do for you.

2. What I want you to do.

If you are on any of my mailing lists you would have received an email about this yesterday. So you can skip the next bit.

1. What can I do for you

I can help you make money on the run up to christmas. It’s easy and it’s like taking candy from a baby. I’ve set up a special forum in the Wordpress Goldmine members area and there i will take you through the process of making money. There are live working examples of pages and I plan to schedule a live Q&A session or webinar. You can ask questions and seek advice you can pick my brains until they bleed. I will do everything in my power to make sure you make as much money as possible in the next 7 weeks.

2. What I want you to do

This one is simple I want you to take action. I want you to follow through on this.

This is not going to take long all you need to do is find a few hours and you will make money. If you can’t follow through with this you should seriously consider if internet marketing is really for you. As i’ve said loads of times I made $20,000 from a few hours work… This isn’t a boast it’s a fact, those few hours work changed my life  I am offereing to show you exactly how I did it. So do you want it?? 

If the answer is yes. Then if you already have Wordpress Goldmine head over to the forum now (you’ll find the link in the download area)  and register I’ll activate you ASAP.

If you don’t have Wordpress Goldmine then click on one of the links or graphics in the sidebar. Complete the purchase and I’ll see you in the forum.

Last year I made more money in November and December than I did in any other 6 month period prior to it.  It set me up for my successful year ever plus this year the same sites I set up last year are already starting to attract a healthy income even before I’ve done any promotion of them. The main one has already had a couple of $100 days and I’ve not touched it since last November.

You are not too late to jump on the Christmas bandwagon. You’ll hear of people who set up their Christmas sites in June not me a week before Thanksgiving is more than enough. The secret is to focus on 1 or two products and aim to dominate the search engine listing for that product.

Last year with 2 articles, a blog page, and some social bookmarking posts plus squidoo and hubpages I had 7 of the top 10 place in google for 1 product. That was enough to sell over $250,000 worth of that product . Not bad when the commission was 12%.  When the supplier ran out of the product I just switched my sales links to ebay where people who had bought 2 or 3 items were selling them for 3 to 4 times what they paid for them.

There is nothing like the feeling of checking your income stats and finding you made $300 from a 2 day old blog post..it has to be up there as one of the best feelings ever… it’s even better when it happens every day but it never feels as good as that first time.

Here are some tips that will help you.

1. 1. Choose 1 or 2 products it doesn’t matter what they are, think of what people buy for christmas and stick to those. Don’t spread yourself too thin
2. 2. Watch TV read magazines and make note of whats being heavily advertised
3. 3. Try to use product names: Tissot Men’s T-Touch Titanium Watch will rank better than Mens Tissot Watch
4. 4. Decide who you want to sell through, you have a choice of merchants and affiliate networks CJ.com, shareasale, google affiliate network are great but don’t forget Amazon and eBay you might earn less commission but they are well known and customers are happy to use them as they are trusted..and when was the last time anyone only bought 1 item on amazon!
5. 5. Make you site/blog so that it is easy to swap out the links for another if the merchant sells out.
6. 6. Write or outsource articles it’s cheaper than PPC.  Each article I wrote last year earned me in the region of $7,000  even if you only earn $100 per article isn’t it worth paying $7 -$10 for it?
7. 7. Don’t overlook adding adsense to your site PPC advertisers bid big at christmas to get sales of popular products.
8. 8. Avoid the obvious products that everyone will be going for you don’t need to be in a competitive market there is more than enough money to be made on other products.
9. 9. Your aim is to get as many of the top 10 search results so don’t be afraid to get links back to your Articles on EzineArticles tools like gather, Zimbio and Digg can be very useful.
10. 10. When you start earning money reinvest some of it in services like UAW which will help increase your search engine rankings.

So there you have it 10 tips to help you to have a very prosperous christmas. I cover how I created and promoted my sites in more detail in Wordpress Goldmine so if you bought it earlier in the year it’s probably time to have a re-read of it!

Finally If the only thing that’s putting you off of setting up sites for christmas is that you don’t like to write articles then visit www.articleandcontentsolutions.com. Allison wrote all my articles last year so she know how to write product articles. (can you write 500 words on an obscure product? she can!).

She’ll also write articles ready for posting to UAW.  I’ve negotiated a discount for readers of my blog so use the promo code:  “Mark Loves Allison” (it’s ok she’s my wife!) when you email her and she’ll give you a 10% discount

It’s no secret that I very rarely use this blog to promote anything and if I do I can guarantee it’s worth you considering it.

It’s also no secret that one of the keys to my success over the past year is Micro Niche Finder. It has allowed me to target niches with very little competition and lots of searches. Adsense income alone from sites I’ve biult around niches and keywords I’ve found in the past 6 months was $500 last month and affiliate commission was similar.  Not bad for a $67 product.  However that price is about to change.

Version 4 of micro niche finder was released this week and it’s had major improvements. Gone are the wordtracker stats and they have been replaced with Stats from Google.  The immediate impact from this was that by rerunning some old searches double the number of results were returned .

Other changes Include the Strength of competition indicator being moved and replacing it on the main dashboard is a Commercial intent indicator, basically an indication of the likely hood of someone buying who uses that search phrase.

Within 2 minutes of the upgrade i had found a search term for a Nintendo Wii that had almost 1000 searches a month and only 47 competing pages with a comercial intent indicator of 89% not bad for a first attempt.

Unfortunatly with the improvements the price is due to go up so if you have been thinking of buying Micro Niche Finder now is the time to buy it. James Jones the creator has added more videos that show you just how powerful MNF can be.

http://income-academy.com/recommends/mnf

Before I get into this post it’s time for a rant. The last post I created I wrote In Microsoft Word and then copied it into the blog post. I checked it in my default browser (FireFox)and it looked fine. This morning I happened to open the blog up in Internet explorer and There was a huge problem only half the blog post showed up and nothing else not even a sidebar.

I couldn’t even access the site via IE. Luckily I got in via FireFox and found that Word had added a lot of code to the post and that was causing the problem. Once I removed it it was fine. Wouldn’t it be nice if Microsoft products worked well together!!

So here is a public service announcement. Open office 3 is now available as is Google’s Chrome browser and FireFox. I used to stand by Microsoft’s products as the generally worked well and were well supported but recently something seems to have gone a bit wrong. Office is no longer intuitive and I can’t find half the functions I need and IE is a complete PIA, every time I try to check my awstats using it I get errors!

So Today I am having an MS free day. I am on my Linux Box, and tomorrow I’ll be using open office and FireFox or chrome. Just to try to prove to myself that i don’t need MS. I also feel a MAC coming on!

Right back to the original reason for this post. One of the first posts I ever made to this blog was about my end of month routine (you’ll find it under the site promotion category). This routine still works well and ensures that very few of my sites fail to make me money.

I’ll reiterate the key point of the original post here. At the end of each month check the bandwidth usage of all of your sites. Pick the ones with the least usage check them for errors and if you can’t find any do some promotion on them.

I tend to choose the bottom 5 sites, if after a few months of this a site is still in the bottom 5 I’ll probably abandon it as it’s more than likely never going to make me money. Over the space of the 2 years I’ve been doing this I’ve only got rid of 2 sites that were complete failures.

Try it for a few months and you’ll find your income from those sites increases. One site I worked on 2 months ago has since had 2 sales paying $100 for each sale.

Breaking news… (it’s not often that i can break a scoop…hold the front page!)

It’s looking like clickbank have had a major hiccup today.  I received an email from them saying that my Weekly payment had been rejected by my bank and that they were switching my account back to check payments. The thing is my payment has been received. It’s there in my account.

Check payments are not a good thing for me it takes me about 8 weeks to get the money and it costs me a hefty fee each time I pay in one of their cheques.

Asking around several other people have had the same message and their payments have also been switched to check payments. Make sure you check your clickbank settings.!!

I’ve asked someone with more influence with clickbank to speak to the mamagement there and find out wahts happening. As soon as i know anything I’ll post it here.

*****EDIT*****

Just got this…

On 2008-10-15, ClickBank experienced a communication problem with our merchant bank,resulting in some direct deposit-enabled clients receiving emails stating their depositfailed and having their accounts changed to “Pay by Check.” In most or all cases, thedeposit did actually go through. Please check with your bank to see if your deposit wasreceived. We are working to find and correct the source of this error, and will givefurther details as soon as we have a resolution.

********

On a more happier note , i received an email from a regular reader of this blog asking me to have a look at a tool he’s created.  It’s a tool/site that analyses you and your competitors websites and rates them. The level of detail in the results is excellent.

I’ve made a few suggestions for improvements but there is no reason why you shouldn’t check it out right now. You can access it at www.reviewmyweb.com