From depressed college teacher to ...
History and the future
Posted 08-30-2008 at 02:12 PM by Jean Morgan
When I first started out in IM I was clueless. Totally clueless. I had no idea how to build a website let alone promote the site. My first venture was a site I bought readymade for £99. The man who was selling these sites was a great guy and very helpful. Each site was somewhat customized to make it look different from others. The idea was to dropship the products I was selling.
The site was set up and off I went. I paid for adwords with Google and as I had no idea what I was doing I ran through a lot of money very, very quickly. Because I am a total idiot I ran up a massive credit card debt in a few short months, yes I did make sales but only a few hundred pounds worth and I spent thousands on the ads. I just didn't learn or didn't learn fast enough. I just thought the sales would suddenly start happening yet they didn't. Eventually there was a huge row with my husband, he paid my debts but gave me 6 months to sort out what I was doing or else. For the next 6 months I spent my money on useless ebooks and software that was going to make me thousands overnight.
Another mistake had been made, yes I did learn stuff from the books so maybe all of the money wasn't wasted but most of it was. Even with several books about adwords I was still not on top of things there. I continued to buy. Does anyone want an unused copy of Butterfly Marketing? Boy is that an expensive mistake for me. I know a lot of people had massive success with it but not me, I never had a good enough idea to get that one going and I found the software too difficult to use.
I carried on buying...
I developed what is now called "Analysis Paralysis" - I had tons of ideas but no idea how to implement any of them. I just was not getting anything out there and my spare time was spent trawling forums trying to find the answer to everything. I discovered the Warrior Forum and still visit there every day. I think I learned more there than I have learned anywhere and became addicted to the WSO section where I bought more and more information to add to what I already had. I joined more and more mailing lists and fell for more and more sales pitches thinking one of them would be the holy grail.
I built a pile of sites with sitemaking software to take advantage of the Google adsense program. I never did much with this at all, none of the articles were unique - I just bought PLR and threw it up there - so none of the pages got ranked in the search engines. Mysteriously, on Christmas Day 2005 I was informed that my account had been terminated because of fraudulant clicks. I never clicked, nor did I tell anyone what I was doing so that remains something I do not understand at all. It was probably the best thing that could have happened though as it made me look at other things and in particular affiliate marketing.
I was in another mess. At sometime around the summer of 2006 I bought a piece of software that took affiliate datafeeds and created websites from them. I built several sites and paid for a few adwords and waited. A miracle happened. I was making steady sales not all of which came from the adwords ads, some were from organic search. I had stumbled, unintentionally upon the "long tail". I had also learned not to use broad phrases in my adwords and was targetting products by name. I was getting 5% clickthrough on those words. I learned to ruthlessly trim my adwords account, any keyword not getting a click after 30 impressions is scrapped. Keywords not achieving a minimum of 3% clickthrough also get scrapped. The benefits of this are enormous. My quality score went up and my adwords cost went down. I turn a healthy profit from my adwords account.
This continues to be my business model today. I build affiliate sites around one product or maybe dozens of products. I add content to the sites from articles I write or have written for me. This adds value to the sites and increases their search engine exposure. I make a healthy return from these type of sites and add more from time to time. Over time in the blog I will talk about exactly what I am doing, tools I am using and the results I am getting.
Right now I am very successfully marketing a physical product here in the UK. I import the product and sell it from 3 websites. I make a decent living from that alone and thesedays I spend only about 30 minutes per day managing that business. I have an ebook which I have written which is almost finished and I hope to launch it in late September. It is in a niche outside IM and will act as a lead in for the product I am selling and a few complementary products too.
I am not sure what will come next. I am keen to get more physical products to sell and expand upon that. I also have a couple of people I consult with on their businesses and I may want to do more of that. I really enjoy the teaching side of this. What I really want to do is enjoy my life more and leaving my job was the first step in that process.
The site was set up and off I went. I paid for adwords with Google and as I had no idea what I was doing I ran through a lot of money very, very quickly. Because I am a total idiot I ran up a massive credit card debt in a few short months, yes I did make sales but only a few hundred pounds worth and I spent thousands on the ads. I just didn't learn or didn't learn fast enough. I just thought the sales would suddenly start happening yet they didn't. Eventually there was a huge row with my husband, he paid my debts but gave me 6 months to sort out what I was doing or else. For the next 6 months I spent my money on useless ebooks and software that was going to make me thousands overnight.
Another mistake had been made, yes I did learn stuff from the books so maybe all of the money wasn't wasted but most of it was. Even with several books about adwords I was still not on top of things there. I continued to buy. Does anyone want an unused copy of Butterfly Marketing? Boy is that an expensive mistake for me. I know a lot of people had massive success with it but not me, I never had a good enough idea to get that one going and I found the software too difficult to use.
I carried on buying...
I developed what is now called "Analysis Paralysis" - I had tons of ideas but no idea how to implement any of them. I just was not getting anything out there and my spare time was spent trawling forums trying to find the answer to everything. I discovered the Warrior Forum and still visit there every day. I think I learned more there than I have learned anywhere and became addicted to the WSO section where I bought more and more information to add to what I already had. I joined more and more mailing lists and fell for more and more sales pitches thinking one of them would be the holy grail.
I built a pile of sites with sitemaking software to take advantage of the Google adsense program. I never did much with this at all, none of the articles were unique - I just bought PLR and threw it up there - so none of the pages got ranked in the search engines. Mysteriously, on Christmas Day 2005 I was informed that my account had been terminated because of fraudulant clicks. I never clicked, nor did I tell anyone what I was doing so that remains something I do not understand at all. It was probably the best thing that could have happened though as it made me look at other things and in particular affiliate marketing.
I was in another mess. At sometime around the summer of 2006 I bought a piece of software that took affiliate datafeeds and created websites from them. I built several sites and paid for a few adwords and waited. A miracle happened. I was making steady sales not all of which came from the adwords ads, some were from organic search. I had stumbled, unintentionally upon the "long tail". I had also learned not to use broad phrases in my adwords and was targetting products by name. I was getting 5% clickthrough on those words. I learned to ruthlessly trim my adwords account, any keyword not getting a click after 30 impressions is scrapped. Keywords not achieving a minimum of 3% clickthrough also get scrapped. The benefits of this are enormous. My quality score went up and my adwords cost went down. I turn a healthy profit from my adwords account.
This continues to be my business model today. I build affiliate sites around one product or maybe dozens of products. I add content to the sites from articles I write or have written for me. This adds value to the sites and increases their search engine exposure. I make a healthy return from these type of sites and add more from time to time. Over time in the blog I will talk about exactly what I am doing, tools I am using and the results I am getting.
Right now I am very successfully marketing a physical product here in the UK. I import the product and sell it from 3 websites. I make a decent living from that alone and thesedays I spend only about 30 minutes per day managing that business. I have an ebook which I have written which is almost finished and I hope to launch it in late September. It is in a niche outside IM and will act as a lead in for the product I am selling and a few complementary products too.
I am not sure what will come next. I am keen to get more physical products to sell and expand upon that. I also have a couple of people I consult with on their businesses and I may want to do more of that. I really enjoy the teaching side of this. What I really want to do is enjoy my life more and leaving my job was the first step in that process.
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