Stephen Pierce is Awesome!

Two weekends ago, I went to an Internet Marketing seminar in Dallas. It was awesome! It started off being a pitchfest but quickly turned into a wealth of knowledge. I also had the chance to meet a lot of people there, both people like me and those who have made it big like Mike Koenigs (who is really cool, by the way).

But out of all of the speakers, Stephen Pierce was the most impressive. I'll have to go into the details of the seminar later because I'm going to be late for work but I seriously believe it was a game changer!

PPC Withdrawal

I am a PPC junkie. As I write articles and submit them to directories, I can hear Yahoo and MSN whispering "I'm soooo much faster, Jon. I can give you traffic in a matter of MINUTES!"

I feel my hands shake as I force myself to concentrate on the new strategy. The itch to pay for traffic is constantly hounding me though. It's relentless and completely unashamed. The PPC Itch promises me great highs, and indeed they are definitely out there. But it can also leave you broke and destitute.

As I write this, my mouth has suddenly become dry and sticky and stale. PPC withdrawals aren't pretty.

Anyway, I'm working the 30 Day Challenge system almost to a "T". My sites are already in existence so I did not use Wordpress Direct this time around. Maybe next time. So far I've seen no traffic from my article submissions. I guess I just have to keep at it.

Last night, I decided to remove my Adsense blocks from one of my older sites. There is an affiliate program that I've been a part of for years but haven't really pushed. I switched out all of the Adsense for banners of this program. We will see how that goes. Preparation makes things so much easier. Back when I first built that site in 2005, I had placed all of the Adsense blocks into Server Side Includes html files. That way I could change out the content at will. What would have taken hours took me about 3 minutes last night.

Good stuff!

I've Gone Guerrilla...

Indeed. With my launch of 25 videos yesterday for one of my niches, I think I'm officially a guerrilla. Trying to make things happen with the least amount of expenditure possible.

This week is Traffic Week on the Jon's Biz Channel. Article Marketing, video marketing, social bookmarking, and other backlinking methods are on the menu. We will see how much traffic I can generate from my new guerrilla tactics. How I long for the days of PPC where I could turn on a campaign and let the traffic flow...

Alas.

Anyway, this is the first concerted effort I've made to generate unpaid traffic since 2005. Can you believe that?! Crazy stuff. Anyone with tips or idea on how to get natural traffic flowing, let me know. I am employing some tactics from the 30 Day Challenge of this year. Hopefully they come to fruition.

Of course, all of my links will point back to my opt-in form. The goal is still the same - get more opt-ins. The part I haven't decided yet is whether I should focus on the traffic for one niche this week or several.

A Lot Has Happened Since Last Post...

My work to get back into PPC failed. Once again, impatience and poor strategy have cost me dearly in both money and time. I am learning my lessons, though. I just wish it wasn't costing me an arm and a leg in the process.

So, I'm forced to use organic methods of driving traffic. Luckily, I've picked up some great nuggets along the way that should help things. One of them is a great affiliate program that provides you with everything - articles, lead magnets, etc. It has helped me formulate my strategy on building organic traffic. We will see how it goes.

One bright note, in the past few weeks, I've seen the power of having a list. I have lists in the 3 niches now: one for my product and 2 others. Using those lists after I curtailed most of my PPC spending, I was able to generate a significant amount of money. The best part is that I'd already paid to get them on the list so the money generated was all net!

Good stuff.

Next thing. All the stuff you hear about buyers being more valuable than regular list subscribers is true beyond belief. My small list of a few hundred buyers (which I've neglected and didn't set up a true automation for getting them on the buyers' list until a month ago, otherwise it would be much bigger) bought MORE of a product that I was promoting than my full list of nearly 6,000.

And they did it without me using the second follow up promotion I used on the 6,000!

The Lesson - If you can get a buyers' list going - you're building your own gold mine. If you can figure out how to do so as an affiliate, then you're really on to something.

Holy Cow!!!

I didn't realize it had been this long since my last post. That's insane!

Anyway, I'm plugging away at my email marketing. Right now my sign ups are pretty low - between 6 and 10%. However, I am split testing and working to boost that number. My goal is to reach at least 25% opt-in.

My copywriter for my product salesletters is AWOL. I'm going to call her to night and get things back on track. She had a personal event take place earlier this year so I've given her a lot of leeway but now I really need her to finish the job. I'm actually going to end up paying half of what we had agreed upon because she felt bad about the delays. Even so, not having those letters by now has thrown a lot of my goals off for the entire year.

Other than that, my girlfriend moved to Michigan for law school. I'm working hard so that I can go full time and move up there. Hopefully I'll be able to do that soon.

So Much On My Plate

This has been a busy month. I've been working to launch lists in several markets, start a take over of my product's market, and get a new product developed.

Unfortunately, the new product has fallen by the way side. I need to get back on it because it's in a proven market and the traffic is strong enough that I'd make a nice amount of cash with it. That will have to be my focus tonight - getting everything prepped to build the product. Once it is actually built, it shouldn't be overly difficult to clean it up and launch. We will see.

Something tells me I probably shouldn't do this but I'm going to call Google today and see if I can get some answers about my two domains that have been slapped. Wish me luck.

Validation #3!

It came this past weekend - I made a sale on one of the test campaigns I was running.

That makes 3 campaigns that have proven themselves to be worth the effort of building a real site and autoresponder. This campaign is a low traffic one right now so I think I'll keep it active for the moment just to be sure the sale wasn't a fluke.

As for the other 2, I launched the autoresponder for one of them last night. I have some really high hopes for this one. The traffic has been high and one of my presale pages has had an awesome conversion rate. I took that winning version and slapped on a pop-in. We will see how things go. Eventually, I will switch to an all out namesqueeze - but not yet.

Roger - I don't know what happened except that on two of my campaigns I used a Frank Kern-provided namesqueeze page. Looking back at that page now, I see that I forgot to add the links to my privacy policy, etc. Damn!

But yes, I did make sure the sites were actual sites with real content and were indexed (the sites, not the landing pages) before I ran my campaigns.

Hmm...