MSN & LinkedIn

Information Products

As I mentioned in my last post, I started running a PPC campaign for my relationship product back in October. However, I was running into an issue of being able to track which keywords were getting optins but not which ones were making sales.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I could use Aweber to deduce the keyword. All of my customers get shifted from the main autoresponder list over to the the buyers list once they make a purchase. By going through my Clickbank records, I was able to find the email addresses of all of the customers and track down which URLs they used to signed up originally. The URLs had the keyword at the very end for tracking purposes.

Now, I know which keywords have lead to purchases. Unsurprisingly, it was only a handful of the ones I was actually paying for on MSN. I culled the majority of the keywords and added a few variations on the buying keywords to see if that would help. I also increased my daily spend limit. I didn't want to do that before knowing which keywords actually made money.

We will see how things go.


Consulting

I purchased a guide on LinkedIn and started working on my profile yesterday. It is almost complete. Once finished, I will started to position myself as an expert on LinkedIn and will hopefully started to get some clients.

Things are going slow for the UK client but hopefully his ecommerce site will be finished soon so that I can start doing the SEO work for him.

More Email and Possibly a Better Strategy

I have a number of things going on so I'm going to split them into categories.

Information Products

After the last update, my main product site essentially dropped from #1 to being no where on the first page. It seems to be coming back now, though, as it was #5 last night. I have one of my employees creating articles for Unique Article Wizard and blog comments for that site.

The same is true for my relationship product. I've told her that I'll give her a raise if she gets that site to the Top 3 in Google for the main keyword. It seems to make it to Page 7 for a day or two before disappearing from the rankings entirely. I'm not sure what's going on with it or why it doesn't seem to be able to stay in at least the top 100.

A few weeks back, I converted that site over to Wordpress to take advantage of the SEO tools that Wordpress has to offer. I'm not sure it helped much=)

I have, however, been seeing some results from a PPC campaign I set up on MSN for the relationship product. The problem there is that I'm able to see the conversion rates for the opt-ins on each keyword but not the actual sales. Today, I will find a solution that will help me in that area.


Amazon Affiliate Products

My other employees are hard at work on the 4 Amazon affiliate sites I had them build. The plan is to let them get the sites ranked well for the individual products before having them build 4 more sites. One of the sites already has 3 products on the first page for their main keyword. Hopefully there will be demand for the product this Christmas season. According to Market Samurai, there is a decent amount of search volume so time will tell.


Consulting/SEO

I sent email to 3 more cities yesterday. That is a total of 13 cities out of the initial 22. I've had 0 positive responses so far. I did get 2 emails saying that they weren't interested. I think I'm ready to say that the email shotgun method is not working.

The problem seems to be:

1) The industry. I'm targeting a profession that is willing to spend big money but also has a ton of gatekeepers keeping guys like me at bay.

2) Bad Email. The email addresses that I'm able to find are not going directly to the decision maker.

While looking for an email address the other day, I stumbled upon the obvious - LinkedIn. Today, rather than sending another barrage of emails for 4 hours, I'm going to learn how to use LinkedIn to make connections directly with these professionals...

...And then I will implement.


As a note, I think the methodology I initially took for getting clients is a good one. I just think that it does not work with this particular industry.

Tons of Email Sent

After finishing all of the videos for getting offline clients, I started sending the emails last week. Today I finished Tampa, Houston, and Seattle. So far, I have not had any responses but I'm sure it is a numbers game.

That essentially sums up today's work - sending email.

I've Been Gone for Months...

...And I didn't even realize it.

Things have been a whirlwind in those months. Back on April 25, 2005, I wrote on this blog:

"30 years old and I need to be out of the "rat race". That's seven years from now. I can no longer afford to bide my time. It's time to get it done."

Today is November 8. It's my 30th birthday... And I'm out of the "rat race"!

August 19th was my last day of working the day job. Since then, I have been a full time Internet Marketer!

It was a complete shock to everyone at my old job. They couldn't believe that I was leaving to be with Natasha and "start" my own business. It was funny, though. As I talked to more and more of the older men there, I couldn't help but get the sense that there was some admiration towards me for "taking my shot". For not letting my life pass away, regretting that I didn't at least try to do my own thing.

Things haven't been easy, though. My bread and butter products seem to be waning so I've had to shift my business model around.

I'm also in the process of getting some offline clients to diversify my income. I'd be doing SEO and other work for them on a monthly basis. I've created promo videos relating to a specific niche in 22 cities. I started sending out emails yesterday and have taken care of Atlanta. Even though I'm a bit apprehensive about the idea, I think I may have to start cold calling. Just sending an email off into a black hole and hoping to get a response isn't very effective. We will see as things go on. I may end up sending all of the emails and then following up by phone a week later. It shouldn't be to painful, I used to be a telemarketer in a past life=)

I also now have 3 employees and they are all doing great. One of them is completely dedicated to building Amazon affiliate sites and doing the SEO for them. The other is dedicated to doing the SEO and Twitter work for my relationship product.

Being fulltime is great but it is true that you can easily be distracted. Staying focused has been a little tough, but I refuse to end up going back to a job like so many of my friends who tried to go full time. I just can't do that.

So I need this blog to be my accountability - now more than ever. I've said it so many times before but this time the stakes are soooo much higher.

Overall, I'm very happy. I'm with Natasha now instead of half a country away. I'm working on my own business rather than wasting away at a dead end job. Things are good=)