I was recently asked by one of my friends who is doing some PPC work what I thought of his landing page. I thought it was good, but it wasn’t what I would call the best.

Here is an example of a good landing page. And when I say good I mean it converts into sales. https://www.acaitotalburnoffer.com/atb_002_thc_hal_vbv/index

Note: I am not an expert on any of this. I’m just relaying some things I have read about marketing and how things are reported to work at this level.

Back to landing pages -I read that most people already want to buy something, they just need the right advertisements to reassure them that what they are buying is a good buy. So marketers reassure consumers, with doctors in white coats in TV ads and online, who the product is approved by, who uses the product, how well it works (perhaps case studies), how popular it is as well as testimonials which are also a good seller.

Letting consumers see the result of the product perhaps a BIG smile on a beautiful man or woman or perhaps together. This gives the impression that if you buy and use said product not only will it whiten your teeth, but you will be beautiful, have a great body and fall in love with someone that is also beautiful.

Who wouldn’t want that? That’s where they want to bring the consumers so it’s almost a "duh" of course I want that. The decision is easy for the consumer then and of course people make money as value is transferred.

If you can reassure a consumer or make him feel good about buying a product, whether the product is good or not, he will buy. So it doesn’t matter whether you are in PPC, SEO or just plain affiliate products off your web site you will still be able to sell to them.

I just got done busting my butt trying to add nofollow links to the comments section on one of my social bookmarking sites.

I was getting a lot of link spam and although I could have deleted the comments, I didn’t really want to. So I had to get creative.

Ok, actually I looked around until I found some pieces of javascript code that did what I wanted it to. I had to take three js functions and hook them up together.

In the end no matter what link the user enters in the comments section it will always have the infamous rel=nofollow attached to it.

I know a lot of people don’t like this tag cause it can hose them in their efforts to get good links. But most of those people are the guys sporting some link spam. The old rule still applies. If you have good content and offer something of value you will get a link of value in return. More links = more PR. Just look at Microsoft’s web site (PR 9)! They offer lots of value don’t they? Well, that depends on who you are. Alright, I confess I use XP at work too. But I don’t like it so there!

The real reason I added this to the site was because my page rank dropped from a 6 to a 4, then down to a 2, then 0. FRICKIN ZERO. That’s horse piss! I have excellent internally linking on this site. I have close to 45,000 internal links. Well, dang it hang on I’ll go check to make sure.

Ok, 85,162 pages indexed at yahoo. Only half that at Google -which is still good by comparison. They say if you can get 10%-25% of your content indexed by Google you’re doing good. I’ve got 47,640 inlinks. Now that includes all links. Breaking it down its like: 2,670 incoming links and 44,970 internal links. Not so much on the incoming links. I have to work on that.

So back to my original point. With such sweet internal linking structure I was holding my PR nice at a 6. But then it started dropping off, I didn’t think much of it, but it got worse. I added some nofollow links on the outbound links, but I forgot about the comments.

I login to MySql and check it out -just to see how many I have. I don’t remember the exact count and I don’t feel like opening it back up to check. But it was about 15,000 or so -aw heck I’ll go look dang it. Hang on. Total comment count is 15,150 BooYa! What a memory. haha. So yeah, after closer inspection there where like 85% of the comments had links in them. Hmm, so let me do the math. (carry the one…..) Ok, that’s like 12,877.5 outbound links. Wait did I just write a half link? Dang, that would be cool. Anyway… So duh moron. Yeah, no wonder I lost all my freakin PR. Stupid poser link spammers. Not any more though.

Lesson learned. Money lost, lot of money lost. I sell links, and with a higher PR I could have been banking more green. Dang It!!!

Yes, I did it again. I started another site. But I just had to. It’s for this project I am working on to collect something from users (can’t say what) and no it’s not cash. Well not right at first.

I found this absolutely smokin’ niche that looks like its got close to no competition. Oh yeah, and it gets like 74,000 searches on Google each month. Nice! So I’m going to work my magic and see if I can get a site up.

I’ll offer the user’s two of whatever I am asking for. So if I want x, I will give them two bonuses or freebies specific to that niche. That should help me get what I need and help them at the same time. Plus with that much traffic you know I could get some sweet affiliate cash from that.

Oh, and since I don’t have the site up yet, I went ahead and secured a domain and created the account on my Virtual Private Server (VPS). I use Liquid Web -they are super great! But the site itself isn’t up and working -so I put up my “Coming Soon” app to grab emails while I’m building it.

It would be nice to have it completed in a week, but I’ve got other commitments as well my awesome day job that absolutely rocks ICE! But, hey I’m working on it right? We all are. So press on people -success is just around the corner.

I didn’t get a chance to do hardly anything on the computer that I wanted to. I was busy with yard work, kids and other family responsibilities. Very busy. I’ve got a meeting Tuesday after work about a new jobs site that I have a 3% stake in. And no, I’m not ready for it either. It’s called Eng -short for Engineering. I’ll talk more about it later.

How was your weekend? Did you get to those projects that you wanted to. I signed up for someone else’s newsletter even though I most-likely knew that I was going to start getting emails that didn’t apply to my situation at all.

I get so tired of these so called Inet marketing experts and all their tips and tricks. It’s very alluring though. You know how they start:

Hey <name>, I’ve got something great that you need to see. Start by making $100 a day.

That sounds great. I mean who couldn’t use an extra $3k a month? I know I could. But if you’re knew to making money online then this is a knew thing and you have everyone telling you what to do and its your job to filter through all the crap. Good luck.

I’m still working on it and I have never hit the $100 a day mark. The most money I have made online per month has been around $125. That’s it and its mostly from link sales on one site that gets a lot of traffic. But in recent days it has been slacking. So that income stream as small as it is may be drying up. Sucks. So I’m back to square one.

I’ve also tried making some money with an article site. You know the process I’m sure. You start with 7-10 articles about your topic put them up on a domain. Then drive traffic to it via article marketing. Have 10 articles written or write them yourself and submit them to the top five or six article directories. The five I am speaking of are:

Ezinearticles
Article Dashboard
Buzzle.com (sucks, cause they take several days to approve one article. If you submit any articles while you have an article that is pending for approval they will delete it.)
Amazines.com
GoArticles.com

So after you submit all these wonderful articles you get 5 sites * 10 articles = 50 backlinks using your specified keyword. Then you need to mass submit the 10 articles to like 1,300 article directories. The software I use for this is called Article Post Robot. Here is a picture of the box: It’s pretty cool software. And after using it to submit 10 articles * 430 article directories (the current count of article directories in APR) you get 4,300 backlinks using your specified keyword. That’s pretty good. No hopefully you will rank in the search engines for the keyword you selected.

I’ve done all that except mass submit my 10 articles. So far I haven’t made crap. But I’m still working on it.

Relaxation
In the my down time which is yeah pretty much never. Ok, I force to give myself downtime, but I usually end up watching a movie on the computer of playing Halo on Xbox Live. Something to blow off steam and the frustration I get with Inet marketing.

Other Ideas and Projects
So in addition to that I have something another site that I am working on. There are easily 50,000 members that could join this site. It’s a very niche market and the site my partner and I are developing is specific to them. So hopefully we will be able to sell the sites services to these 50,000 members -most of which are affiliated with a company which will have multiple members.

Project Numero Uno
Also I have something else that I have been trying, but I stopped working on it. I just don’t have the time. Besides my dad once told me that if you have too many irons in the fire you will get no where fast, get frustrated with your lack of progress and burn yourself out. So I put the other stuff on hold to work on the project I mentioned above. But when it’s done I plan to work on project number 2.

Project 2
Project number two has 300,000 searches on it a month. If I can build this site and get it operational, then I can start selling to the 300,000. I would probably charge them $9.99 a month. It’s basically a software product that I wrote that is being converted to a service. I got tired of dealing with Microsoft and their stupid Windows Foundation Layer in Vista. Absolute crap and a nightmare to code against.

Anyway, if only 1% of the available market of searches became members that would be 3,000 members and around $28,350 after PayPal fees. Not bad. But the question again is not can I build it but can I get it ranked. People say article marketing is the way to do it, but the jury is still out on that for me.

I read somewhere that when you think of a good idea then you can safely assume that 10 other people are working on it. If its a great idea then 15 other people are working on it. These figures apply to companies as well. The point is there is a ton of competition out there. We should use these figures to stay motivated on our tasks and to accomplish what we set out to accomplish. Good luck.

Are you thinking about starting a new blog? I am, but I’m not sure if I am going to. Here’s what I was thinking.

Topics:
A blog about a couple guys that have started 25 or more different web sites. Some of them were finished some weren’t and some weren’t completed because our competition got their first. The blog will be an on-going discussion of our current status on new web sites. We would also discuss the failures and successes made in the past.

Market:
I’m sure there are other people out there that want to quit their jobs and work full time for themselves. I’m one of them. So maybe this blog would gather some readers and we could all collaborate on things that we each have done and / or should have done.

Making Money
Would the blog make money? I would hope so, but that wouldn’t be the driving force. It’s possible for the site to make money without it looking like we have the blog specifically for making money.

Some of the things you can sell are: Text Links, Google Ads, Ad Brite, Azoogle, Affiliates (lots of affiliates).

I might put some of that stuff up eventually but not at first. Or, I may just convert this blog into that new blog.

So if you are thinking about a new blog -what is your new blog about? Have you given it enough thought to determine if there is a market out there for your topic? Do you have enough material to write about? Are you passionate about this topic?

I’m sure you have heard it before – money isn’t enough of a motivator to keep writing. That’s why you need something that you are passionate about. Write about that and you will be able to keep writing -so they say.

Well, I’ll make up my mind a little later and figure out what to do. Good luck to both of us.