Well as you move through the vast world of make money online, you come across numerous buzzwords and phrases that make up the industry. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing and today’s topic Pay Per Click Ads.

After failed attempts to generate traffic to my website, I received an email explaining another way to generate traffic called pay per click (PPC). I immediately knew that this was the most expedient method of getting traffic to my website. I searched Google for all the information I could handle on the subject. The only problem was I would have to pay (as it states) for the traffic.

I opened a Google Adwords account, chose a hot product to promote and off I went. Being new to pay per click, I was very cautious when it came to structuring my first campaigns. I wanted to make sure I didn’t spend more than I could afford seeing I hadn’t made any money online yet. During my time of study, I learned how to operate within the Adwords domain, how to find profitable niches and most important how I was suppose to make money.

Well to make money online with pay per click ads you must make more sales of your niche product than it cost for the ad/s you place. I thought I had a hot niche with reverse phone lookup. Placed two ads as a split test to see which one would perform best. After getting an average 1.5 to 2% click through rate, I had no sales. I continued monitoring my campaign for the first 300 clicks to determine which ad of the two had the better click through and conversion rate. One ad barely beat out the other in click throughs, but still no conversions from either.

Well needless to say I became frustrated as I spent more money on a program with no return on investment. I began to make the changes recommended in some of the follow up articles I read on pay per click with not success. After switching products and achieving the same miserable results, I decided to put this program on hold before I became broke.

I don’t want to give the impression that pay per click advertising is not profitable. In my case I went in under funded and I believe you have to have enough money to effectively promote your ad/s over time. The key is to get your ad/s positioned on the first page of the search results requested, preferably positions 3 through 6. Also have a daily budget that would allow your ad/s to stay positioned there throughout the entire day for maximum exposure.

Now there are other keys to making a pay per click ad campaign work, but that’s a course in itself.

So until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

Two posts ago I was talking about the disapproval letter I received from Google for Adsense. I spent the last “A Journey” post explaining why I cloaked my affiliate links. Now back to the second reason for my Adsense disapproval, "No original content". Well I wanted to laugh, but Google is driving the ship. You have to wonder, how much original material can it be considering there are over 188 million search results for "Make Money Online".

You have to wonder as I did, why did I choose “Make Money Online”. When I started it sounded like a winner. How can you go wrong teaching others how to make money online? As I journeyed, I found that there were an enormous number of players in this arena. So it stands to reason why it’s difficult to generate original material in this area. Well apparently the big boys are generating this so-called original material, but again what material is original?

Well you know me; I started a Google search for make money online to see what original material was out there and as I suspected, the topics between websites were somewhat the same. Obviously the main topic was how to make money online, followed by the mistakes most make when attempting to make money online, to why their system is the be-all to making money online. Now there are numerous subtopics like affiliate marketing, article writing, ebay, search engine optimization (SEO), Google Adwords, pay per click advertising (PPC) and so on.

So all that being said, let’s define “Original Content”. My definition is simply “Something created that never existed before”. Webster says “relating to, or constituting an origin or beginning – not secondary. So does 188 million search results for make money online constitute 188 million forms of new original content. Well the answer as you guessed is no.

As I discovered, to generate original content is to take someone else’s written material and reword it so that it’s not considered plagiarism. Now how’s that for original content. So that’s the game played to get this so-called original content. You can’t blame Google, because who wants to search for information and visit ten websites with the exact same content.

Well the only ways around this is to do just what I stated above, find a niche that you can write about from your personal experiences or become an innovator who finds original ways of making money online. If you are not a writer as most of us aren’t, then use the websites that give access to free articles that can be rewritten for original content. Make sure at least 50% of the original article is reworded to constitute original content.

Well until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

I do admit that as an internet marketing affiliate my affiliate links are cloaked on my website. The reason for cloaking is that as affiliates marketers, we are given an affiliate id that lets the affiliate vender know who sold his or she product and who to pay the commission. Your affiliate id is attached to the URL in more cases of the sales page of the affiliate vender. These links look somewhat like this (http://yourAffiliateID.VendorsID.com). This is what is called a naked affiliate link meaning everyone can see it as that.

Now anyone who is apart of an internet marketing affiliate program know, having naked affiliate links is not a good thing. As we all know, there are dishonest people out there who are ready, willing and able to steal our hard earned commissions. This is where the cloaked or encrypted links come in. Cloaking or in some cases the encrypting of affiliate links is a must when it comes to commission thief. There are numerous programs and scripts designed to do this. Most of these automated programs use JavaScript, which the GoogleBots or Spiders can’t read for indexing purposes. Another reason I suspect Google disallows the practice.

Another thing that’s most disturbing about not being able to encrypt your affiliate links is there are programs online that steal your commissions without any human intervention. The program searches for these transactions and automatically inserts the thieves affiliate id in place of yours. I’m not an authority on this process, but there has to be a way to protect internet marketing affiliates, while pleasing Google and the other search engines.

So what am I suppose to do? I read a post that stated that a .php redirect was the best way to go. So I got rid of the JavaScript encryption for each affiliate link and implemented the .php redirect script. Both systems gave me the same results, but I wasn't sure how this affected me with Google. I recently searched Google for my website and I got the same results mentioned earlier. Apparently Google has blacklist my website, so the .php redirect didn’t matter. I read that once Google zaps your website, you may as well build a new one and get rid of the old. Not a pleasing thought considering the time and effort that went into building it.

So until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

How many of you know that building a website or webpage, then publishing it means nothing at the time you publish. Well I didn’t and I felt like Rodney Dangerfield (no respect) when I realized this. I had signed up for numerous online marketing affiliate programs and I expected to have made at least one sell of an affiliate product.

I checked my visitors log within the cpanel of my hosting account and noticed that there was no traffic to my site other than the GoogleBot and me. So I decided to do a Google search for my website. Well it turned up nothing but information pertaining to the previous owner of the domain name. Then I searched in "Online Marketing", which I knew was a long shot.

Well during this time I had signed up for Google Adsense, a program where Google pays you on a per click basis in most cases for advertisements they place on your website or blog. I figured this would be a way to make a little extra income on top of affiliate products. Google has to approve your website before they will allow you to place ads.

Well as I stated before, I felt like Rodney Dangerfield again when I received an email from Google stating that my application for Adsense was disapproved. I thought, not only is my website not visible to sell affiliate products, but I’m not even going to make any money from Google Adsense either. The email went on to say click on this link for the reasons for this disapproval.

The reasons were that I violated Google's webmasters guidelines and that my site offered no original content. Now lets look at each in the order given. I read Google's guidelines and the only thing I could see was their dislike for Cloaking. Now my understanding of cloaking is disguising the destination URL that displays on the bottom left portion of the webpage with an alternate URL. This is also known as a redirect.

I think I understand why Google takes this position and I can’t blame them. Say you visit a website or blog and decide to click on one of the links on the page you’re visiting. The link icon says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices” and the display URL at the bottom on mouseover says, “http://Amazon.com”.

Now you click on the Amazon icon and behold you’re redirected to some pornographic website. Now for some that would be okay, but to others that would be offensive. It wasn’t where you intended to go and most important, think about our children who surf the web. Apparently this was such a problem that Google banned the practice or maybe never allowed it in the first place. Now again, this is my take on this issue.

The only problem I have is that we are not redirecting our visitors to another website, page or blog. They end up where the advertisement or link states. Here’s an example: Your visitor sees an icon that says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices”. They mouseover and instead of seeing the affiliate link http://amazon.com/AffiliateID, (which we don’t want thieves to see), they see “http://www.mywebsite.com/AmazonBooks. As you can see ,there is no deception because Amazon Books is clearly apart of the URL and most importantly, your visitor lands at the Amazon Books page.

Well I’ll give an explanation for my actions in the next “A Journey” post, so until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

Well my website was complete and I’d just entered into the world of online marketing. Considering I’d never built a website before, in my opinion it wasn’t too bad. Far from what I considered to be a top notch website, but still not bad. I liken it to everyone thinks the baby is ugly but the mother. I was pretty proud of my efforts considering all the technical challenges I encountered along the way.

I studied many websites in the online marketing niche and tried to emulate some of their better qualities. As a webmaster, (an I use that term loosely) it was easier said than done. I had gotten to the point to where I understood HTML well enough to get around a webpage. I could have cut and paste parts of others websites, but that felt like cheating. Many do it and change some of the attributes just to say that they are not a copycat.

Now lets be earnest, how original can a webmaster be considering there is estimated to be over 182 million websites (I’m not sure if that includes WebPages and blogs) on the Internet. Now am I saying that I have a one of a kind website, no I’m saying I didn’t copy and paste things I liked from others. I truly am not trying to make anyone feel guilty, I’m just reflecting on my experience.

Considering some of the beautiful online marketing websites I've seen , I might have to give up being a choir boy just for the sake of looking good. Like Billy Crystal says "it's not how you feel, but how you look" and I want to look marvelous. But all joking aside, I going to have to take my own advice and hire a professional webmaster to get the results I desire. I'm being stubborn in taking this action considering all the hard work that went into my website. It's hard to let go!

Well until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

After putting together a website for online marketing, I decided to install the auto-responder that came as a bonus from the teleseminar package. Trying to get that auto-responder installed and working was a total nightmare. Considering I’m above average when it comes to technical issues and also meticulously following the designer’s installation instructions, I couldn’t get the software to work.

I called on technical support from my web hosting company and the teleseminar staff and nobody could get the auto-responder to work. Finally after two support teams quit, I gave up too. Red flags should have gone up when the designer stated in the instructions “Don’t contact me if you have a problem with the software”.

I settled with Aweber, the one most online marketing guru’s say is the best overall in the industry. Aweber offers a host of tools necessary for successful follow-up email campaigns. There are numerous “how to” videos, tracking tools, the ability to setup unlimited email campaigns and much more. Aweber starts at $19.00 per month and well worth every penny.

After viewing some of the videos, I was well on my way to setting up my first campaign. As most of you know, an auto-responder is a key tool in your online marketing business. It could take days if not weeks to follow-up manually with numerous campaigns without one.

Now that I had a clearer understanding of Awebers layout, it was time to setup a few follow-up messages for my opt-in visitors. I started with a welcome message and a few affiliate product announcements. I felt pretty good considering pain I endured with the previous auto-responder.

Now as I write this, I’m reminded that I must emphasize if I haven’t done so before, that this was the process that I took considering my limited knowledge. There is tons of Online Marketing “How To” materials out there (look at this blog) that will give you step by step instruction.

Until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

Now about two months into this venture the teleseminar series concluded and I had to organize and prioritize the information from my notes for online marketing. Some of the information was redundant, so I had to focus on breaking all that information down into a useable form. I’m a Googler (if there is such a word), which means I had to google additional information for some of the topics I didn’t quite understand. As most of you know, if you can’t find it in the google search engine, it’s not out there.

I filled my hard-drive with tons of “how to” material, articles, free online marketing gadgets and so on. If it wasn’t bad enough, now I have information overload. I went from not having enough information to having more than I could digest. I honestly didn’t know what to do with all the information and much more how to prioritize it.

I had to step back and pray for a little Divine intervention and employ good old common sense. I started my online marketing venture with a web host, which seemed appropriate seeing I could kill two or three birds with one stone. Now I have someone to host my site, also included was a free domain name for life and the website design feature. After attempting to register twenty or so of my best domain names for my website, I had to settle for one of my least favorites. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing, just that all my best domain names had already been taken.

Now that I have a domain name registered, it’s time to use that free tool to build my website. I have to say without fail, many of the guest marketers from the online marketing teleseminar series warned against attempting this especially if you’ll never done it before. Well I didn’t listen because I’m the kind of person who has to know how things work.

Now sometimes we have to bump our fannies to realize that someone tried to steer us in the right direction. I was convinced that since I was a fast learner, I could master HTML within a reasonable amount of time, couldn’t I? Attempting to write much less understand HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was a challenge within itself. I bit off way more than I could chew and didn’t know not to swallow. I choked on all that had to be learned from putting together a website from scratch.

Don’t let these web hosting companies with free site building tools convince you that you can have a quality site up and running in minutes. Now I’m not talking to trained webmasters, I talking about the average person who has never done this before. My advise for the beginner is to acquire the services of a company that partners with contractors who can build you a quality website. Three that come to mind are Elance, Guru and Rent A Coder.

Well until next time, have a Prosperous Day!

How many online marketing newbies are there? I started this blog because I am one of the many. I thought it would be interesting to document my journey into this vast world of Making Money Online. I had to stop and ask myself, why online marketing considering there is so much competition. The truth is that it looks like a good place to start making a residual income for my family.

Most of us know to survive you must have multiple streams of income in this present economy. So after reading numerous emails that state "Build an Online Business and put it on AUTOPILOT", I thought, yes that's what I'll do. Build an online marketing business and sit back while tons of money come rolling in automatically. Sounds good, but it's not that simple.

I decided to pursue this course after a number of emails from a well-known online marketer. The course consisted of a teleseminar series with twelve or thirteen interviews with other successful online marketers. For weeks I listened and took lots of notes as each guest marketer was questioned.

There was a lot of information given over the course of these many interviews, but we all know that you are only going to get a snippet from each guest. I was left with having to purchase each of the guest marketer’s course material to get all of what they teach. Now if you multiply the average cost of $1,200.00 per course by approximately 13 guests that would be costly. If you could afford to purchase any addition course material, you had to determine within your budget who and what it would be.

I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed, because I expected a sequential step by step, do this, don't do that kind of hand carrying blueprint. Now let me be clear, I'm not badmouthing the series. I’m just saying that I expected more direction.

Is there anyone out there that feels like I do?

Until next time, have a Prosperous Day!