Not much accomplished tonight

My plan was to edit GoodLife4All.biz so that I could submit it to Yahoo UK advertising. Problem is I am not very good with HTML. I can cut and paste some simple links, and change the location of a couple things, but going in and doing serious editing is just beyond me right now. So I decided to advertise it with AdlandPro for the $9.95/month. So my monthly advertising expenditures are JUST over $100/month right now. But I've gotten some commissions through GoodLife4All.biz, so something is working - What a perfect lead in for my Tip of the Night! LOL

I have head about this AdTracker program - it is supposed to be very good. If we are going to spend advertising dollars, we really will need to know which ads are/are not working. If you want a free service though, go to Google Analytics. I have a Gmail account already, so I just signed up and posted Affiliate Curve. All you do is paste a piece of HTML code into the bottom of your site (even the newbie's can do that!) and then you get full statistics on where your visitors are coming from. Now, the AdTracker is probably better, but it costs. So if you need stats, but want to save some money, go with Google Analytics.

Hitting our Goals

Lets talk a little about how to best use our time. I don't have endless amounts of time to explore every product out there - Not only will that overwhelm me, it doesn't let me Focus on important things. For me, I have about an hour and 1/2 per day right now to get started in Affiliate Marketing. This isn't much time, especially considering how much I'm trying to get done. So I spend my time away from the computer Thinking about the most valuable thing I can do next for growing this online business. 3 days ago my goal for this entire week was to JUST get my NetSuccess programs set up. I conquered that in 1 night. How? I just thought about what I needed to do before I got to the computer. By the time I got to work, I had already mapped out exactly what I was going to do. I finished my weekly goal in about 2 hours. Next I realized that I needed to get my advertising campaign going. So I spent yesterday thinking about the inexpensive advertising options recommended. Now that I have that underway, I have it in my mind to get my AffiliateJunktion site up & running because they sent me the needed updates yesterday. I also have my next projects in the back of my mind - creating my web page to move this site to, setting up GoodLife4all to advertise on YahooUK, finding another traffic exchange site, buying an ebook I saw last night that looks really great. All these things are in the back of my mind right now. But the most important thing is what I'm doing TODAY, and what will help me the most right now.

What can we learn here? Simple - Set yourself a daily goal for what you want to accomplish. Think about what you need to do and map it out in your head. Then when you get time to work, you aren't browsing all over the internet trying to figure out what to do for your business that night. You have a plan and you are ready. Now don't overwhelm yourself - I don't go into a online work session saying "lets get 3 new sites all set up tonight!" cause again, overwhelming myself just leads to frustration.

Is this some revelation? For me it is - It's part of what you may have heard before - Work Smarter, not Harder. Like I had mentioned before, I am not a highly organized person. However, I am accomplishing much more than I thought I could in such a short time frame and this is the main reason.

Hope you find this useful in your own endeavors, whatever they may be.

Money Management & Just starting out

If you have read my posts, you know I don't have an endless stream of resources, so I have to keep things on as tight of a budget as possible. This is why I started with the inexpensive advertising - LinkReferral, TrafficSwarm, EasyHits4U, ExactSeek & now AdlandPro. But we need to keep track of expenses and I have to keep spending to a minimum - I'm trying to get the most for my advertising dollar. I am new, but I do know that you are going to have to spend some money on advertising. My goal is to keep it as cheap as possible, while still getting results.

With LinkReferral, TrafficSwarm & EasyHits you can get your advertising done absolutely free. My problem is I just don't have the time to surf for an hour & 1/2 every night. So for ME, I believe it makes more sense to pay for the upgraded memberships and spend my time finding a great Affiliate Program. There is also tons of free advertising (check NetSuccess again here), but eventually your going to have to face this simple fact - If you want QUALITY traffic, you are going to have to spend money at some point. Lets see how I'm doing so far:

TrafficSwarm = $30/month. Saves me about 1/2 hour a night of surfing to keep up with my unlimited URL's and also gives Pro Members a lot of "free" benefits (I " " free because if your paying $30/month its not REALLY free, BUT the Pro benefits at TrafficSwarm are great!)

LinkReferral = $35/month. Saves me another 1/2 hour a night surfing and increases hits a LOT (I have 110 hits in 3 days - that's a lot of traffic)

EasyHits4U = $6.95/month. Saves me surfing time and gets my links viewed by a LOT of people. Again, $7/month is totally worth it, to me.

ExactSeek = $12 for 3 months - If I get any traffic from this it's TOTALLY worth it.

AdlandPro = $14.95/month and you saw the list of services this provides.

So as you can see I'm keeping my budget PRETTY tight, but still spending it on things that I feel are very useful. I can't say for sure how these campaigns will turn out, but right now I'm feeling pretty good about every dollar I'm spending.

Hope you find this helpful.

I think I found a great advertising tool!

I think I found a GREAT option for inexpensive advertising. It's another of the NetSuccess advertisement suggestions under AdlandPro. Check out what you get for $14.95/month!

3,000 credits every month on our Targeted Traffic Exchange network - put your ad in front of thousands of potential visitors!
5,000 banner/text ad impression credits to display your ads on top of our pages. - Excellent exposure.
Submissions to 80,000 search directories each month. - Saves you the time and hassle of trying to get listed on search engines yourself.
Automatically renewed ad (every hour) on one of the most visited Classified sites on the internet. - Saves you time by keeping you from having to renew your ads manually to keep them on top

Well this seems like it's WELL worth the $15/month to me. Also, you go to your account and get full statistics on all your ads. I have heard about a program that Tracks all your ads, and I will probably be getting that soon, but for now, I am happy to be able to view all my stats from AdlandPro -

If this sounds like a good advertising plan for you also, go to AdlandPro and sign up today

site style & colors

I'm really trying to make the site as attractive as possible - I want it to be eye appealing and easy to read. That FLAT white might have been a bit bright, so I'm going to try this on and see if I like it - Feel free to let me know which you prefer! Email me at therealnewbie@gmail.com about this or any other comments you might have! thanks!

Lets start the advertising campaign!

Okay, despite the fact that I need to still clean up this site a bit, I think it's time for us to start figuring out which paid advertising works for us. LinkReferral & TrafficSwarm are providing a lot of hits so far, but in order to succeed I'm going to have to get this out there even more. SO, I'm going to start small (and INEXPENSIVE) and use the NetSuccess Paid Traffic Recommendations (check it out here.) If that doesn't work, just click the NetSuccess link and sign up for a free account. I am not QUITE ready to pay the big prices for Google & Yahoo PPC ad's, plus I need to read the Google Adwords before I commit a few hundred bucks. BUT, they have ExactSeek - you can list a 30 character intro and 100 character description line. 3 months of advertising for $12! Now, this is the first time i've heard of it, but NetSuccess recommends it and this seems like a very reasonable cost for any advertising. I signed up with the keyword "Test Affiliate Marketing" - I'm guessing that this being a cheap advertising source, there are probably a TON of ads with Affiliate in it, so I added "Test" to hopefully differentiate it a bit - I just bought 1 ad, but you can buy as many as you want @ $12 for 3 months - I'll let you know how it goes. Tonight I'll probably sign up for the AdlandPro service - $9.95/month to keep your ad at the top all the time (rotating or something - haven't checked it out thoroughly)

anyway, hope your choosing a program that seems right to you. I think in a month from now I will be able to offer some REALLY solid advice & tips. Right now it's all new to me as well, but I hope your finding it useful.

I am pretty excited about NetSuccess

A few days ago the head honcho at NetSuccess emailed me about their new marketing lines. I wasn't that impressed with my first NetSuccess partner program, but I decided to take a look. I figure if the owner of the company is emailing me, it is probably worth looking into! So I went to the new landing page and was immediately impressed. Instead of the standard "get your free website" they had completely revamped the entire Affiliate Marketing program. They now have 4 areas of focus - all very relevant to online marketers - Search Engine Marketing, Web Traffic Strategies, Internet Marketing Education & Online Business Opportunities. I immediately thought to myself "hey, this company is getting serious". So I took a look around and found some outstanding programs. I personally signed up for Cash Machine Landing Page & SiteBuilder Elite. Both of these have free Affiliate Programs. All I did was sign up, get a referral code and add the link to my Traffic Exchanges. They both look like some serious cash generating affiliate programs. There are many more programs - If you become a Pro Member ($50 fee) you have access to 18 of their 20 programs FREE.

They have a free account where you can sign up and check out everything NetSuccess is about. I am really not one to be overhyped, and I don't want to fall into the standard industry Flash campaign, but NetSuccess is showing me that they are very serious about online marketing and giving us a serious platform for success. They have Free & Paid Traffic ideas there for you to use, a Members Traffic idea area as well as options to advertise on their forum. NetSuccess gave me the best startup tools & ideas I have seen, ESPECIALLY since I am so new to Affiliate Marketing! Right now, they are my #1 recommendation. Go see the landing page and judge for yourself - This really feels like the best program I have found.

addendum to Affiliate Junktion

I can highly recommend the Affiliate Junktion program and my own site, GoodLife4all.biz. However, I do have a word of caution about IPower - So far there customer service has been pretty lousy. It took me 30 min's to get ahold of someone last week when I tried to call. I also used the "Live Help" and the phone was actually faster. If you sign up for AffiliateJunktion, do send in emails whenever you have any problems.

The low cost of the hosting is a great benefit. The services are equal to any other hosting site I have seen & used. But I have to recommend sending in an email and be Patient with the customer service. My problem was self created, but I think the very 1st thing someone should have asked me was if my firewall was turned off - Kinda like the story about the lady who calls in cause nothing is coming up on her computer monitor. The very patient tech kid went through the protocol for all the "normal" things and it turns out the lady didn't have her computer plugged in - Sometimes you just start with the basics :)