Karlonia.com

Yesterday, while searching through some of my regular blog sites, I followed a link to a site called TylerCruz.com and discovered an almost unbelievable case of affiliate marketing failure. After a 15-day “plunge” into the world of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, this site owner managed to lose $927.70 and even posted this screenshot to “brag” about it.

While it is normally not very nice to criticize another webmaster like this right out of the box, I am hoping that in this particular case we can extract some positive lessons from it. This little experiment has provided an excellent case study for newbies who may be considering a similar foray into the world of affiliate marketing. As I see it, our test subject here has made five classic newbie mistakes that we can use as learning opportunities in our quest for money-making enlightenment.

1. Jumping into an overly competitive niche

Tyler’s first mistake was choosing four niches that already had lots of competition. This almost always spells trouble for beginners. They will either wind up paying too much per click and lose money, or they will get very few impressions for their ads because they will not be able to make it onto the first page of Google AdWords, Overture, etc. Tyler managed to do both of these; he only got one impression for his ads on the first day even though he had lots of keywords. Then in an effort to get more clicks, he raised his bid prices to ridiculously high levels (he was up to $3 cost per click at one point). Not surprisingly, the results were unfavorable.

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Two pieces of survey-related mail arrived today. One was a $60 check from an online focus group that I had participated in about two weeks ago, and the other is a regular mail-in questionnaire about health issues.
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Although this is an area where my current skill set leaves something to be desired, I know that high quality content alone will not guarantee traffic or inbound links. Design matters too; if the appearance of a site is so unappealing that it drives visitors away, then they will not even bother to read my carefully crafted content. So after researching this subject and combining my findings with comments from other people on this issue, I have discovered 8 simple ways in which a blog’s design can be improved without having to spend lots of money on web development.
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The Coca-Cola company has extended the time period of its rewards program from the old end date of April 16, 2007 to a new ending date of January 31, 2008. This is good news for those of us who are collecting reward points from bottle caps and boxes; we will have several more months to save up points and redeem them for prizes.
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Being an Internet marketer who has been making (and sometimes losing) money online since 2004, I have joined lots of programs, registered at many sites, and opted in to many other marketers’ email lists. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a fair amount of spam mails flowing into my inbox over time.
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Yesterday, I was checking out a site called Helium and found a particularly useful post on the forum there that gives us some clues about how to make money by writing articles and getting paid for them.

The original thread starter, posting under the username of “flashemolecule”, discovered that although it is possible to build up a small income over time by writing good quality articles and publishing them at Helium, much more money can be made by using those same articles and selling them to other sites that will pay people for writing content. Fortunately, although Helium retains lifetime usage rights to your article after it has been published on their site (unless you specifically ask them to remove an article and they agree to it), they do not claim exclusive rights, which means that we have the opportunity to build up multiple streams of income from the same article. For example, if you write an article at one site and manage to make $5 from it, you can probably make that same amount or more by selling the same article to other sites such as Constant-content or Associated Content.

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This morning I have received a Spam email pretending to originate from Regions Bank. As a public service, I want to relay this information to any readers of this site who may be current customers because I have examined the text and determined that it is almost certainly a phishing scam.
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In an apparent insult to feminists everywhere, queries into Google’s search engine for common phrases such as “she invented” and “she succeeded” are returning suggestions such as “did you mean he invented” across the top of the search results pages.

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Today Clixsense sent out their latest email update. It appears to be more of a promotional mail than anything else, and like many such advertisements, it’s mostly true but there is some exaggeration in there as well.

Update 9/26/07: For more information about the Clix Sense program, please see my recently updated article filed under ClixSense Review. If you have arrived at this page after searching on the keyword “clixsense scam” or similar, I can assure you that the program is not a scam. I have now been paid by the site and received a check in the mail on 9/07/07.

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Yesterday’s news about the online interactive survey invitation is getting even better. Apparently, there has been a slight change in the start time and length of the session, causing the company to offer a bigger payment as compensation.
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There is more good news from the paid survey front. Yesterday I received a regular email questionnaire on the topic of “Foods” that was supposed to be 10 minutes long. It turned out to be a screener for one of those interactive online surveys that usually pay more money than the regular kind.
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Another $25 check arrived in the mail today. It was a payment for some surveys that I had forgotten about but that were completed sometime last month. I also received a newsletter from one of the market research companies that actually had some good information.
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ClixSense, also spelled as “Clix Sense” is a paid-to-click program that allows you to get paid for viewing online advertisements. It is a relatively easy way of making money on the Internet.

As a member, you can accumulate earnings by logging into the site and browsing through a list of ad titles. After clicking on one of the titles, you will see a bar across the top of the page with a timer on it that will begin counting down from 30 seconds. When the timer reaches zero, you will be credited with the earnings from that ad view and will be able to click on more ads as long as there are still some available. The earnings for each ad view range from a minimum of one cent up to a theoretical maximum of five dollars. In practice, most of the ads range in value from 1-10 cents.

The program is free to join, although Clixsense does offer an upgrade option for the cost of $10. The purpose of the upgrade is to allow you to prove to the advertisers that you have proven purchasing power (i.e., a credit card, debit card, or other form of payment) and are willing to spend at least a small amount of money. The advertisers see this as a good thing, and accordingly will reward you with many more ads to click on, giving you the opportunity to earn much more money in the long run than you would as a free member.

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Today I received an email from Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of Texas, regarding a statewide election that will be held on May 12. I know that many of you will not be affected by this, but since I happen to be a Texas resident and know that I have a few readers who are also living in this state, I want to pass along the relevant information that I have discovered so that you will be able to cast an informed vote.

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In an event of fortuitous timing, Eduard Fernandez has released the AutoHeader SEO Wordpress plugin, a new plugin application for Wordpress blogs that automatically generates clean title tags, meta tags, and performs several other small but important tasks for webmasters who want to achieve better SEO results.
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