So after being frustrated for the past week I decided to jot down a few notes on why my online business has been declining in profits. Thought I would post them here as well as a reference guide of myself and anyone else who may be in the same boat. Mind you, this is just my opinion and how things are working for me right now. This is for the advanced marketer, so if it don’t make sense, “hey, what can I tell ya”.
Questions or feedback please leave a comment.
Make Money Online: whats working
Jeremy Schoemaker 2005
(in no particular order)
Adsense – high CTR with sites about physical products people looking to buy mostly. the 360 x 280 ad under images or above the post works best.
Amazon – only products that can fit in a mailbox or postman can carry seem to really sell good. and products you can not easily find in a store.
Your Own Product – you have all the control. make it great and it will sell, simply put.
Blogging – being the guru in your niche. if you provide good value, people will follow and buy what you recommend.
List building – that is IF you treat your subscribers with respect and do not spam them. giving real good value will keep them reading your stuff, and when you want to pitch something “every once in a while” they will buy from you.
Video Marketing – know how to do this right and you got gold! not being boring and long winded usually works.
Social Media – why is Twitter and Facebook so popular?? i still don’t get it, but everyone else does. have a LOT of friends and followers and you got gold! (see blogging above)
Mobile Marketing – still new, but the next wave of “make money online”. text msg marketing is gold right now. that’s until the “spam blockers” for mobile phones comes out soon.
Local SEO and Consulting – ranking real business websites and marketing is what the search engines are loving right now. businesses are too busy to learn all this facebook/twitter/seo stuff, but they know it works. this is what yours truly primarily does these days.
Make Money Online: what’s NOT working
(in no particular order)
List building – this WAS the way to really make money. But too many have abused it and confused the market. ton of emails in your inbox everyday from different people pitching the same thing. It still works if you do not spam your list to death and burn it out. to many dorks out there that don’t know what they are doing and make it look bad.
Landing Page Pop-Ups – folks just close em out before even reading them. exit pops work better for now.
Banner Ads – banner blindness. lot of bigger sites still use these and it pisses me off cuz they are CPU hogging flash banners and freeze up my browser. Yahoo, MSN, and TMZ just to name a few. no one clicks them anymore, unless you have 500k visitors a day then you may get some clicks, but these prob make money via impression and not so much click throughs.
PPC – if you do not have your own biz to promote, forget it because you will get slapped or deleted. besides it has gotten crazy expensive, cheaper to go old school in newspapers and direct mailers with better response!
Amazon – big bulky products like TV’s etc. People just don’t buy em online. I know cause I rank #1 for 5-8 popular TV’s and can’t sell any. My copy is good cause I sell plenty of other things using the same flow and formula.
Adsense – if the website is not about a particular product, then CPC will be lower.
ClickBank – vendors are getting greedy and cutting commish plus outranking their affiliates. lot of copycat products and very little value anymore. the value of ebooks are put out to pasture.
Launch Jacking – Too much competition and too much dancing around the SERPS. It is a gamble whether your site will be top 3 by launch day. besides the refund rate has been ridicules! over 50% in most cases.
Backlinks – Google sums this up. High quality and relevant backlinks far outweigh random irrelevant backlinks and those junk 10’s of thousands xrumer links.
Profile Backlinks – the spammy profile links are out of the closet per say and don’t count as much as they uesed to. even if they are high PR.
Web 2.0 – all have been google slapped big time. squidoo, hubpages, and ezine have all been devalued and are very picky about what they will let you talk about. their sites don’t rank worth a shit or provide good link juice anymore anyway, so don’t even bother.
Social Bookmarking – they have been abused for backlinks far too long because of their high page rank. owners can’t make money off em, too many auto bots creating content and not enough actual visitors to click their Adsense ads.
Affiliate Marketing – still works, but is on the decline. surfers already KNOW to search Amazon or similar for what they want. they just look for real reviews (not fake ones to sell a product as these are spammed to death) via search engines.
Adult Marketing – too many forums and usenet up-loaders steal photos and videos and give them away free. trying to catch and convict is very hard. even the big Hollywood production companies can’t do it. just can’t make money in like you could 8-10 yrs ago. a little, but not much.
SEO – search engines want to rank the free info (wikis) over any affiliate product because they want you to BUY those silly PPC ads! That is how search engines make money, off pay-per-click ads. Oh you can fool em once in a while but again, they are in control.
IM Gurus – the secret is out that they are all full of shit (see saltydroid.info – he rips em apart!). just like old school infomercials (like Don Lapre), they make money buy selling you their “make money” system. however there are a few out fellas/gals that practice what they preach and are cool.
In closing…
Affiliate marketing WAS the easy way to make money online. Let someone else create the product and all you need to do is promote it for a good commission. But it has gotten burned out and running on fumes. Besides Amazon is deleting affiliates in States that passed the “Amazon tax bill“. Look for more bills and laws like that to follow.
Oh well, things change and a good business person will change along with it. If your wheels are spinning, step on the damn brakes!
Have an opinion or something to add/argue about hits post? go ahead an let me hear it via commenting below. Note: i will not approve any hyperlinks for the purpose of spam/link juice unless its relevant. that is why i chose to post this on wordpress.com.
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