Money and Business Tips (Affiliate Marketing, Business, Stocks, E-Commerce etc.) - Keither dot Net

Things Starting To Pick Up

I have finally gotten my memberships approved to Never Blue Ads and Market Leverage.  At first glance it appears Market Leverage has the wider variety of offers which is good as I have seen a few I might be interested in promoting.  Never Blue also has some great offers and I love their user system that shows success, categories and the searchable offers.  Likewise, Market Leverage’s interface is also very user friendly.

I have had a chance to look through both networks and have narrowed it down to 3-4 offers I want to promoting.  I think starting off I will test run one offer on one network to keep things simple.  I’m sure there will be a huge learning curve and I’ll learn a lot optimizing it for profit.  Once I have a profitable campaign (even if I have to try a few) then I will begin trying multiple campaigns.  I hope to select my first offer tomorrow and begin developing the landing page tomorrow night and Friday.  After that I will begin constructing an ad campaign this weekend and hopefully launch next week if no snags materialize.

Also as I’ve mentioned I am launching a discussion forum.  The site development is complete and it is ready to run.  I will also be working on constructing an Adwords campaign for it this weekend.  So I have one site to build and two Adwords cammpaigns to create for a two launches next week.  Exciting times!

No Comments | Posted in » Affiliate Marketing, Business Start-Up, Domaining, Free Stuff, General Business, Miscellaneous, Motivational, Web Development

Start Now Because “Tomorrow” Never Comes

One of the biggest problems people have with becoming successful in any type of business is procrastination.  The common phrases are always “It’s too late today, I will start tomorrow” and “I don’t have time today, but I will get started tomorrow”.  I have recently re-read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and he gives some good insight on this type of thinking and these people.  In the book he states that “I can’t afford” is not an option, but asking yourself “How can I afford it” is the key to the solution.  This gets your brain thinking of how it is possible instead of shutting down and accepting failure.  So in place of saying that you don’t have enough time or money ask yourself “How can I provide the time and money to start today?”

These “tomorrow people” will read and research about what they want to do, but never actually take action to put things into motion. These people are waiting for the perfect time, but the truth is that if you continue doing this you will never get started.  A perfect time will never materialize, because it simply doesn’t exist!  You will have better times than others to start, so keep your eyes open, but there will always be reasons not to start.  Instead of the “perfect time”, find an opportune time, focus on the positives and run with it to the best of your ability.  Overcoming the negatives and focusing on your strengths is what makes business people successful.

I strongly believe in educating yourself before diving into any matter of business or anything in life for that matter.  The more we know starting out the easier things will be moving forward.  When educating yourself on a subject, relate to the building of a house.  In order to have a strong, sturdy house you need a strong foundation and this is the research you are doing initially.  Once you have a good foundation you must begin collecting resources, seek assistance if needed and finally begin building your house.  You cannot build a house simply on theory or be successful solely on it.  Additionally there are things in business that you can’t understand until you actually experience them in practice.  An example is PPC marketing and setting up an ad campaign on Google Adwords.  If you’ve read into using Adwords you know it can be very overwhelming and as much as you know, it won’t click until you get into their system and begin building.  You simply can’t fully understand how each aspect of a campaign links to another or how bid pricing works until you do it.

So the lesson to take away from this post is simple.  Do not spend all your time reading and studying other peoples success, but start creating your own.  This does not mean stop learning as you should always continue educating yourself, but don’t neglect the power of action!  Start today, as for most of us there is no tomorrow.

No Comments | Posted in » Affiliate Marketing, Business Start-Up, Domaining, Free Stuff, General Business, Miscellaneous, Motivational, Web Development

Maybe it was .me that was over hyped

I have an update from Thursday’s post about .me domains.  It took a little longer than expected, but I did receive a full refund via PayPal from GoDaddy.  I hate locking up funds for any amount of time, but it this time wasn’t bad as I had no question things would be carried out fairly.  GoDaddy is a respectable company and I have never had any other kind of trouble with their service.

To top off the refund, I also received a phone call on Friday from a representative from GoDaddy apologizing for the mess.  I can only imagine how many of these calls they had to make to all the people in the same situation!  I have to give them some respect as this is much better and meaningful than an automated recorded message they could have implemented.

As I also said in that post I had almost immediate buyers remorse once the hype wore off and I began analyzing the situation more clearly.  I really don’t see the .me extension being worth much other than brand-able sites in the near future.

CDF Networks made a post today sharing my views on the extension in the affiliate marketing sense.  It is very true that .com has always been the king and will remain so for many years to come.  I am just starting out in Affiliate Marketing, but it makes sense and as an internet user myself I am always more cautious if the domain isn’t at least one of the top three extensions (.com, .net or .org).

No Comments | Posted in » Domaining, Web Development

Updates - Slowly But Surely

Just a quick update on what I am doing and how I am moving forward with my online business plans.

The last few days went by so fast that I really didn’t get much done business wise this weekend.  I had stayed up really late Thursday night and had to work at 8am Friday, so when I got home from work I crashed.  I didn’t wake up until about 11pm, so I hopped online and checked websites and email and went back to sleep.

Saturday I woke up early and went out to eat breakfast with family and then spent the whole day in Des Moines hopping around to a few different places including the mall,  Best Buy and the movie theater.  You might have guessed,  I had to see Dark Knight as soon as possible, so we caught the earliest showing at 12:30 and that pretty much took up a good portion of the day.  I came home, relaxed a little bit and then it was time for Affliction and UFC Fight Night.

Sunday has always been a lazy day for me personally.  I didn’t wake up until late, ate something, watched some movies and wasted time online.  Not very productive and I really need to learn to use Sunday better until I am making some serious money.  It’s really not worth wasting that productivity time unless you’re with family and friends.  Sitting around doing nothing isn’t acceptable!  Once I get things rolling I can go back to Sunday being my ‘day off’…of course if I’m making money I won’t mind working it!

For those wondering, yes Dark Knight is as good as they say for any batman fan at least.  Even if you aren’t a big Batman fan you will more than likely enjoy it.  It’s a good story and where I have never been a fan of Heath Ledger he really did put an awesome twist on the Joker character.  I think a lot of the buzz is because he died, but he truly does do an amazing job in this movie.

Anyways, on the business side I will be launching my forum Zabafoo.com this week.  I am shooting for a discussion forum that isn’t niche based which could make things difficult at first.  I want a community of many diverse interests and posters rather than a niche forum.  I plan to purchase some paid posting  one day and then the next launch a Google ad campaign to hopefully ad a lot of members before the paid posting is fulfilled.  I will also explore other forms of paid ads and free traffic to supplement these efforts.  I have ran a few forums in the past, but at that time I was active on many other forums so attracting members was easy.  This is completely new for me to be launching a VERY broad forum and attracting completely new members.  It should be a fun and challenging experience.

On the affiliate marketing front I am finding it extremely difficult to allow time to get starting.  I am signed up with Never Blue Ads and have browsed offers without anything really calling out to me.  I have submitted an application for Market Leverage and hope to get that account verified today.  I will continue researching offers on both networks and hope to have something selected for my first ever campaign by the weekend.  I will develop my website(s) this weekend and hopefully launch an ad campaign for it starting next week.

Today it’s back to business. I will be be getting my Market Leverage account verified tonight and continue researching offers.  Tomorrow I will start gathering keywords for my forum campaign for it’s launch this week.

No Comments | Posted in » General Business, Miscellaneous

What about .me? Who?

I’m sure anyone who is online and works with websites has now heard about the new domain extension .me.  I am also fairly confident that many have been reading the horror stories or experienced the problems first hand.  With that said…What the hell were they thinking?

I can understand the amount of traffic and people interested in registering these domains, but there has to be a better way of doing it.  I sat patiently on the GoDaddy website for about an hour watching the countdown clock tick away.  The website was fine, loading normally and I foolishly began to think maybe GoDaddy is ready and can handle the influx of traffic and registrations.  Once 10am (my time) rolled around the trouble began for myself and everyone involved.  I fired off the first few domains I was interested in and ‘luckily’ they were still available.  I selected them, continued through the next page and then I waited…and waited…and waited.  As I proceeded to the payment screen it hung and I knew I had lost my domains.

So I refreshed the page, at this point not really caring if I got the domains or not, as I figured they have already been registered.  To my surprise after a couple more refreshes the domains were still in my cart, not taken and the payment page loaded.  I quickly clicked through with my PayPal account that was already on file hoping to avoid any more pages and it went through without a hitch.  I then received my GoDaddy confirmation email listing the domains I had registered, followed by a PayPal receipt.

At this point I thought life was good, so I headed to a few domaining forums to check out the current .me buzz.  Everyone was pleased with their registrations and began listing their new domains.  I listed what I had registered (youand.me, chase.me, talkto.me and view.me) and waited for the domains to show up in my account.  Then people began complaining about the WHOIS database not updating and getting bounce back emails about the domains being taken.  I figured had got mine because my payment confirmation and I hadn’t received any emails back from GoDaddy.  Then it happened, nearly an hour after the fact i received emails for all four domains saying they were already registered.

“Dear Keith,

The following domain name has failed to be registered:

VIEW.ME

Error: VIEW.ME:  cannot register - already registered

We will evaluate this error and retry the registration
if appropriate.

If we are unable to successfully register the domain
name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please
allow one business day for the refund to be processed."

To be honest I wasn’t too upset.  I didn’t go for the extremely relevant one word domains because the chances would be slim.  I went for good/clever domains that probably had a little less competition for acquiring.  Once I ‘purchased’ I these domains I had almost instant buyers remorse.  Are you going to be able to resell something like youand.me a year or two from now for big profit?  I really don’t think so.  Like the .name extension the buzz fizzled out quickly and you were left with another ‘non big three’ domain.

I have yet to receive a refund from GoDaddy, but I have contacted them and waiting patiently.  My main problem with he process is the system of checking if it is available.  I realize that is quite the load of registrations, but there has to be a more instant way of securing a domain.  Once it’s been searched it should be checked and it’s either available or it isn’t and then held for X amount of time until it is registered or released.  Letting people get as far as payment and confirmation emails only to find out they were too late is extremely disappointing and a tie up of money.

Have a good one,
Keith

1 Comment | Posted in » Domaining, Web Development