Category: Personal

Happy 2016 folks!

Just want to say hello to all of my wonderful readers! I hope you all had an amazing 2015 and I’m wishing you a fruitful 2016.

What am I up to?

Before I tell you what I’m currently doing, did you know that I almost quit Internet marketing for the second time? haha. The first time that I temporarily quit was when I was starting out back in June of 2009 (before I joined Wealthy Affiliate). The second time that I quit was when the Google animal updates began taking place and I was hit the most during the April 2012 update.

It was really hard as many of my online properties that are ranking on top of the the search results went down the drain. That was really discouraging and I can remember my panic back then. I was buying backlinks here and there hoping to regain back the rankings but ultimately the rankings on many of my sites never came back.

Anyway, I wrote a brief story of what happened after that hit on my WA blog.

Here’s what I’m doing or at least trying to do right now. I’m thinking of this as my new year’s resolution for 2016 because I believe I have never done anything like this before.

I have a website that I built back in August 2015 and I wrote over 10 articles (yep, only that amount of articles because I’m too lazy. haha). My plan is to rank the homepage for its keywords by building some backlinks from wherever I could get them.

But now my plans have changed. I’m still going to build backlinks but I’m also going to write one review article every single day (I’ll try not to work on weekends) until I reach 100 articles for that site.

That’s the plan: write 100 review articles for a single niche site. I’m just going to apply some brute force and see what happens when a site has 100 articles.

I’m not going to be writing just any article. Like I’ve said, the articles are all going to be review articles and each will target a product name. The plan is to have those article ranking in the first page without any backlinks (although I’m still going to build links to the homepage).

What about you? Have you written a hundred articles on a site before? What do you think of my plan? Hoping to hear your comments!

First of all, I don’t really know what to say. As you can see I’ve neglected my awesome blog… AGAIN! It’s been over 2 years ago since my last post about my drum covers.

So why am I writing again?

I’ve read in one of my posts that I wouldn’t talk or write about affiliate marketing anymore. But the truth is that affiliate marketing is a big part of why I’m living the life that I want and I want other people to achieve their ideal lives by using the power of the internet.

A lot has happened in my 6 years of doing affiliate marketing. I started back in July 2009 and learned proper affiliate marketing training from Wealthy Affiliate. My income was climbing at a steady pace and everything was just going well.

Back then, getting top google rankings were very easy. You just build a website, give it automated backlinks, wait for top rankings in a couple of months and watch your account explode.

The process was golden…

Until the google animals came into town! I think this was around in April 2012.

Over 80% of my top rankings went down the toilet along with my profits.

I was scrambling to regain the lost rankings and reading everything I can to help remedy the situation. But nothing was working.

There were a lot of things that were going through my head and most of them were not good. haha!

I still decided to move forward and I continued building websites. Slowly but surely everything was moving forward again. But at the back of my mind, the fear of the google updates still lingers. Of course I changed my previous methods but essentially getting top google rankings based on my experience still remains the same.

It’s my 6th year but I feel like I’m starting all over again. That’s perfectly fine though because I love challenges.

What am I up to now?

Like I’ve said, I’m just building sites again. I’m also planning to resurrect my blog from the ashes and begin providing value to my readers just like what I did previously.

I’ve been updating my previous articles (which is over 100!) and I can’t help but cringe when I see some of my posts where I used some outdated and borderline unethical techniques. haha.

I’m still going to promote Wealthy Affiliate because I strongly believe that no affiliate training program comes close to the level that WA has.

Of course I’m still pursuing my no. 1 passion which is playing the drums. In fact I just submitted an audition video for a cruise ship gig.

So in summary, I’m still here, alive and kickin!

What about you… what are you up to? I would love to hear from you and from my previous readers. Leave your feedback below.

If you read my about page or the blurb in the right sidebar, you’ll know that I’m really a drummer by heart. Drumming is a real passion of mine and I’m the happiest individual when I’m playing the drums. I’m having so much fun playing drums that I want to be playing for the rest of my life.

The first drummer that really inspired me was Carter Beauford (Dave Matthews Band). But Carter is not one of the drummers who are coming here in Manila.

The two drummers that I’m talking about are Gavin Harrison (Porcupine Tree) and Mike Portnoy (ex-drummer of Dream Theater). Gavin will be coming here in October while Mike together with his super band consisting of Billy Sheehan, Derek Sherinian and Tony McAlpine will arrive in November.

Right now I’m really excited and I’m so very happy and grateful that they will be coming here. This will definitely be an experience!

Thank you Gavin Harrison and thank you Mike Portnoy and band! I love you guys!

What’s up folks! I’m not going to make up any excuses for my absence but basically I’ve been too lazy to post here in my blog. Now I’m hoping to publish a bit frequently but I’m not really going to talk about Internet marketing stuff. I probably might discuss a few things about online marketing but in general I will avoid talking about IM. Or maybe not… I don’t really know! hahaha. I just love IM and I’m not really sure if I can really avoid talking about it all together. hehehe. Why avoid IM? Let’s just say that I don’t want to become that famous. hahaha. But my email is open to those who want to learn this affiliate marketing stuff. So if you’re just new to all of this, just send me an email or you could start off by signing up to my mailing list as I send emails that will help you get started.

From this moment onwards, my blog is going to be about a lot of things. I still want to continue updating my blog and that’s why I’m going to be posting again. Actually I didn’t plan on writing this post but I wasn’t doing anything and I’ve finished all my work for the day and so I’ve decided to just wing out something here at my blog.

I know I’ve said that I wouldn’t talk about IM but I just have to tell you the good news. I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over 3 years already! Yey! First I have to thank my mother who took care of my tuition fee over at Wealthy Affiliate during the initial months. I can still remember that time when she was really skeptical about this whole affiliate marketing gig but I think I’ve made a believer out of her. hahaha! Next, of course my huge thanks to Kyle and Carson because they created Wealthy Affiliate. This is the place where it all started for me and I’m just grateful for WA and its community. Thank you to all of the people who gave me the “affiliate marketing is just a pipe dream and will never work” look. Thank you again for all the people inside Wealthy Affiliate who openly shares their tips and techniques freely. Thank you for the money that funded my IM education. Thank you for all the courses that improved my IM knowledge. Thank you for all the IM tools that made my life so much easier. Thank you to my wife for believing and supporting me right from the very beginning. I love you honey! Thank you for all of the awesome things that will happen in my IM journey! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Anyway I think my article threshold is just over 300 words because I’m running out of things to write. I have a lot of things on my mind and I will try to update this blog on a regular basis. Take care and see you later.

I just got a question from one of my fans (hahaha) and I thought I’d give the answer by writing this blog post. I wanted to do this because I know that it will also help people especially those who are just getting started with affiliate marketing.

First here’s the question:

Raymond, Thanks for the suggestion :). Have marked a timeline to complete the trainings on CWS and start off with launching a review site.

However I am a bit overwhelmed since most of the markets look attractive (baby products, smart phones, home decor etc) and I am trying to identify profitable markets. From your review I guess you tried CWS from a review point of view (and it’s as good as you mentioned especially getting the perspective right for beginners). Additionally, if you could share a tip or two on identifying good markets (helpful tools/sites to find out what’s selling hot) and prioritizing them, either on a reply to this mail or your newsletter that would be great.

BTW I couldn’t locate a link to subscribe to newsletters on your site. Did i miss it ?

How Do We Find Profitable Markets?

Just to be clear (and because I have serious OCD when it comes to terminologies. hahaha), when you say market, this refers to a huge group of people. In the question, you gave some really good examples of some markets (baby products, smart phones, home decor) and that’s fine. But what you want to look for is a sub market under that huge market.

This is what you call a niche. Basically you drill down even further until you can find a sub market (niche) that you can potentially break through when it comes to ranking in the search engines and obviously the niche should have enough search volume for its keywords.

Let’s Drill Down The Baby Products Market

For this example we’re going to drill down the baby products niche and I’m going to use the Amazon marketplace. I have to say that I’m head over heels in love with Amazon’s affiliate program. If you’re still not seeing any results with promoting those acne guides and ‘how to cure *insert obscure disease here* materials in Clickbank then I strongly suggest you try out Amazon.

When you go to the Baby section (market) you will find a lot of sub markets. I can see strollers, car seats, nursery, feeding, swings, potty training, etc. You can classify these as niches but you can even drill down further to find more targeted and more specific niches.

Let’s choose safety gates.

I want to browse products that have a price tag of over $100 so you have to check that option in the left hand side. If you’re following me (and I suggest you do. hahaha) you’re going to see a lot of products that are over $100 and have acquired a lot of consumer reviews.

At this point I’m going to plug in the keyword ‘safety gates’ into the Wealthy Affiliate keyword tool and check out what keywords I can target and build a site from (I also like to target brand name keywords). The minimum exact monthly searches that I’m looking for is 500 and above.

My Suggested Gameplan For You

Suppose you’re going to work out a ‘safety gates’ campaign, I would advise you to build a general safety gates review site. Have a mix of both review articles and information articles. And rank the review articles in the search engines.

For example your domain would be… safetygatesreviews.com and one of your posts would be ‘kidco configure gate’ which is one of the many brands that distributes safety gates. Then you will work on building links so you’ll be able to rank the homepage for ‘safety gates reviews’ and the inside review page for ‘kidco configure gate’.

How Do You Find Hot Products?

I don’t really have a surefire formula for this but watching some news and browsing the forums of your targeted audience can provide you a ton of ideas. I spend a great deal amount of time in Amazon and sometimes I would spot a product that got a lot of reviews just a couple of months ago and I classify this as a hot one. hehehe. If you have some ideas on how to spot hot Amazon products, I would appreciate it if you can share some of your strategies in the comments below.

What’s important for me is that the keywords have monthly searches and that I can penetrate the first page and eventually take over the top spot. And the good thing about Amazon is that there’s almost no second guessing if you’re going to be profitable or not. If you get ranked on the first page for a specific product name (eg. XYZ Sweep And Steam or XYZ Sweep And Steam review/s), it’s highly likely that you’re going to see sales.

I hope that you’ve found this answer to be helpful and I will try to add my RSS feed in the sidebar. hehehe. For now I will update you when I have a new post through my email list so make sure you’re subscribed. If you have some questions then feel free to send it in and I might write a blog post about it.

Right now I would like to share an email from one of my subscribers. I got this email four days ago and it’s one of those emails that motivates me to help people in learning affiliate marketing.

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Hi Raymond,

Your blog was the first access I had to SEO in January and I’ve been following faithfully ever since. I started very positive but made a couple of bad keyword choices that left me frustrated. I also got frustrated when all the backlinks I put in were not coming up. I ended up cancelling the products I bought and gave up for a couple of months. However I kept receiving your blog.

The turning point came when you put me onto FastAttack SEO and the warrior Forum. That really helped me get my head around SEO. I also found a great source for backlinks which really helped me out.

The final thing that fell into place was the keyword suggestions you gave a month or so back. I had a look at a few and with a bit more research found a beauty.

After a week I was halfway on page 2 just through the power of my url being the keyword. 4 weeks & 3 more articles later plus some great PR6 backlinks later and I went to no.4 on the 1st page. I got back from work to discover my first sale today.

I am so excited about where the site is going to go and inspired to create some more. My next challenge is finding killer content that will increase the sales. Any advice would be good.

Thanks for the great blog and I hope it goes onto inspire others.

yours very gratefully
Del
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Okay, I’m not that madly in love with physical products but since I started promoting them, whether it’s from Amazon or from an independent affiliate program, my mind didn’t stop on feeding different profitable ideas.

I mean everywhere you look, you could find a physical product that you can promote. That’s actually a curse that you’ll get when you get really deep into Internet marketing. Your life will never be the same again because everything that you’ll see is a potential niche. hahaha

Now the reason why I’m writing this post is I’m just excited with the latest campaign that I’ve been working on. You see when it comes to physical products, there will be all sorts of keywords that you can come up with especially if you’re targeting huge brand names.

In my case, I decided to plugin a certain brand name in the Google Keyword tool (which I suggest you also do) and saw that ‘brand name complaints’ gets over 5,000 monthly searches. This is a physical product that can be found in your home and they have their private affiliate program.

The thing is that I’m promoting one of their competitors and an average commission per sale is around $100-$300. Wait… I didn’t tell you the best part yet… the competition for this keyword which gets 5K monthly searches is next to nothing! hahaha

Let’s do some computation here and I’m going to be conservative here… When I get no.1 rankings, let’s say that 2,000 visitors will go to my site. Out of the 2K visitors, only 1% of them will click through and buy the product that I’m promoting. So when we do our computation, this campaign will generate at least 20 x $100 = $2,000 a month!

Anyway that’s all I have to share for now and I’m afraid I won’t be able to share my income results. However, I will definitely update this blog and share what happened so you’ll know if this particular technique worked. Wish me luck and if there’s anything you want to ask please send it in the comments.

I was browsing around Wealthy Affiliate when I read a member’s blog where he shared a phone conversation of two IM gurus, Andy Jenkins and Jeff Walker. The recorded conversation was originally from a blog post by Salty Droid which is a blog dedicated to blast out gurus who have no better things to do than persuade people to buy their $2,000 stuff. hahaha.

This Clickbank check was supposed to be here 2 weeks ago (it was sent on Dec.8) but this kind of delay normally happens during the holiday season.

Anyway, I’m glad the check arrived (I always give the mailman a little reward for bringing my checks) and I’m not going to save it.

That’s right… I’m not going to save it for the rainy days because I’m going to REINVEST most of my earnings to grow my online business. I’ve been reinvesting for some time now but I think it’s time to take it up a notch.

All my life I’ve been conditioned to save money because most of us have been living with the employee mindset or maybe our parents told us that saving is good. Don’t get me wrong, saving some money is really beneficial but when you’re building a business, saving and being tight with money won’t take you that far. At first it’s going to be hard and there’s the temptation to buy the latest gadgets or whatever but you have to take it one step at a time.

Anyway, today is Monday and I better start working. See you later!

In my last post I was feeling a bit frustrated because my campaigns were not performing that really well. Writing about my frustrations did help and it didn’t take too long before my energy was back in full throttle.

This time around my campaigns, both physical and information, are really performing all too well! I know January is going to be a great month because people are getting back to their normal lives after the holidays and this is also the time when they make their resolutions.

Here’s some of my updates:

Physical Product for Pets

I have an SEO campaign where I promote a physical product for pets. I got my first sale last December 29 and I got a whopping $79 commission from it. My jaw dropped after seeing that commission because it was only from a single purchase.

That sale got me really excited so I decided to setup a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign using Yahoo/Bing to get some quick traffic. I also wanted to check if there’s a good number of searches for the keywords that I’m targeting.

The good news is that I managed to get some more sales and right now I already have $135 in commissions. But I have a little problem because I’m not really sure whether the sales are coming from my website or from the PPC campaign which I’m just direct linking. I just emailed my affiliate manager asking how to setup some tracking for the links.

But I have a good hunch that the sales are coming from PPC because I’m getting a good number of impressions and clicks from it. What’s even more exciting is that my ad spend in only $3! So overall, my total profit is $132. These results are really encouraging and I plan to continue on adding some keyword groups to bring in more sales.

I Sold a Freakin’ Juicer!

I built a website that promotes a certain brand of juicer using techniques I’ve learned from the Deadbeat Super Affiliate course. I started this campaign around mid November and I really thought that this campaign was a dud. I was surprised because I only discovered yesterday that I sold a $200 juicer and my commission was $11.

Amazon commissions are generally low so it’s advisable to promote a product that’s over $100. Don’t be put off by the low commissions because there are a lot of upsides when it comes to promoting Amazon products like getting commissions from products that you’re not promoting, high conversions, tons of products with low competition. Seriously, all you need to do is just send Amazon some traffic and they will do the rest.

I already have my goals for 2011 and I’m going to work hard to achieve them all. I’ve been continuously learning and failing but you know what? I’m enjoying every minute of it.