Please advise this working mom

I think you have done a noble job in the time you have available. You should post your links to get feedback. Most warriors will give you gentle advice! I post articles on ezines, amazines, SEEKYT Articles, and PRlog to help drive traffic. I also use pingler dot com, and ping o matic, to regularly ping my sites and blogs. Also look at Aboutus and Social Monkey for building backlinks. Try Yahoo Answers to see if they have a topic that may closely resemble your sales channel, and become a frequent question answerer, leaving you link behind. Good luck!

I'm grubbing right now so gonna keep this speedy.

Congratulations on taking action. From what I've seen so far, you're light years ahead of other newbies on WF.

With that said the most obvious thing that jumps out at me from what you've said is to scale up what has been making sales (your lenses) but instead of putting all of your content on the lenses; put the content on your own domain first, wait for it to get indexed - then create the lens with similar but not exactly the same content and give yourself a link back (in the text, not the link list @ the bottom). As long as your content is unique, you can't really go wrong.

Once you get a nice little rhythm going - start researching syndicating your content. There is a **** ton of info on WF in this regard (free).

I think you have done very well for yourself - I cant even imagine trying to do this stuff with a 3 year old and an offline business so my hat is off to you!

What I would do is find the pages that are earning money - either your lenses or your pages on your site. Then find out what keywords they are getting traffic for, check out their ranking for that keyword in google and if they are not #1 already then get some backlinks to them to push them up to the #1 position.

You will get a ton more traffic in the #1 spot and earnings will increase.

Lee

i found out ..................the best way to rank sites is articles....articles.....articles......
cheap and effective, they will float on the internet outer space for a million years...
look on this site to have people write effective articles for you.
thanks
good luck
internet marketing courses is name of website that will teach you alot about writting articles for free....

From what you have described I think you are already doing a good job. You just need to fine tune some of your strategies to get the positive results.

Welcome to the forums! By the sounds of it you're off to a great start, so keep it up!

You're definitely in the right place to learn as much as possible about internet marketing.

I'd suggest that you start list building so that you can
invite your visitors back to the site. Repeat visitors,
people who feel like they know you, should become your
best customers.

Try to figure out who is visiting your site, maybe analyzing
your website stats. Look at what keywords are bringing
them in and use that as an indicator of what they are looking
for. That will indicate what you should probably focus on.

Willie

Focus on one site and 1-3 strategies for marketing that site. People always say to focus on one strategy but with some strategies, there is only so much you can do.

Just keep plugging away and you will see results, eventually. However, also note that some sites just have a limit on how much they will make. It's rare you will hit on a site that brings a full-time income. If you want to go the route of developing sites, think long-term to have multiple sites. But focus on the first one before moving on and working on others.

Treating IM as business

Considering I was hard-pressed on time, I would treat anything I do in IM as starting a new business. This is because just like any business, an IM business takes effort, money, and time to be successful. So I wouldn't take a single minute I spend on IM for granted.

Which means I wouldn't start multiple businesses at the same time. Hence, I would focus only on one website when I start out, until I make it a success. If it turns out to be a failure, I would learn from those mistakes and move on to starting another business (website), where I'd apply the lessons I've learned.

Importance Of research

Just like any successful businessman knows, "market research" is the key to success of any business. It can make or break a business even before the business is started. Hence, I would spend most of my time on learning how to do good keyword research and finding the right product to promote.

Just like any new businessman who's starting out, I would stick to the niche/industry I am familiar with or at least interested in learning about. Knowing my niche in and out would be important, otherwise I wouldn't know about the problems customers in my niche face every day. Hence, I wouldn't be able to provide optimal solution(s) for those problems.

Hence, I would not end up making as many sales as I hope to. So I would make sure I knew everything about the niche or the type of product I was promoting and the problems people face every day which the product promises to solve. If possible, I would choose a niche in which I myself have been a customer/buyer.

When researching the product to promote, I would try to go for the product which is decent, in that it delivers on what it promises. For this I would try to figure out the refund rate for the product. If that is not possible, I would at least try my best not to promote products that come across as scams. If I did promote scammy products, then I'd at least make sure it was very difficult for the buyer to get a refund or the period for refund is not sufficient to make the decision on keeping or returning the product.

I would also try to gather as much info on customers who purchase the products. I would either talk to the owner of the product, or hang around forums in that niche to see what kind of people are talking about the product or are talking about the problems that the product offers to solve, or analyze the product website fatburningfurnace.com - Quantcast Audience Profile to get a rough idea. This would help me target opportunities that I couldn't have thought about otherwise

Due to my limited budget and experience, I would aim for a low competition keywords, as I am testing waters and would like to increase my chances of success. I would choose keywords with high commercial intent. Which means I would never go after keywords such as MS Excel Tips, Funny Jokes, Free Weight Loss Tips, etc. Rather I would go after keywords other business were were spending money on. For this I would take a look at Adwords CPC for a keyword.

Importance of emotions in sales

As a customer who buys many things every month, I know that emotions sell more than logic. Emotions are why I make impulsive purchases. Hence, I would make sure that this is reflected in my writings on my website. Or at least service or product I was promoting makes a sales pitch based mainly on emotions rather than logic. Or which is balanced with both.

So lets say if my website was in the weight loss niche, and my articles were informative rather than sales type, then I would promote this product Fat Burning Furnace - Fast Weight Loss, Lose Fat, Fastest Fat Burning as opposed to promoting this one Best Diet Plan for Weight Loss with Meal Plans and Easy Recipes

This is because the first product sells based on emotions, while the second one sells purely on logic. Somewhere in the sales process you need to make a pitch based on emotions. You can't have an informative website and a product pitch that is based purely only on logic and expect huge sales. From my experience, this is especially true if you are relying on a website started purely for internet marketing and which gets most of it's traffic from SEO, but doesn't apply to blogs with high quality content and returning traffic (loyal followers).

Outsourcing for getting unlimited number of hours in a day and to get the job done right

I would then send the keywords out to a writer who is knowledgeable about the niche or I would write the articles myself if I had some free time and enjoyed writing.

If I wasn't good at technology, I would send my articles to someone who sets up blogs/websites for a living. I would find a person who offers reasonable rates and who won't take me for a ride, by going to a place where it is somewhat difficult to lie to clients and where supply exceeds demand and where everyone is undercutting each other (example buy/sell services on WF). I would then choose the person with reasonable rates and a solid long standing reputation based on numerous customer testimonials/feedback.

Once my product (my website) was ready, I would do what every businessman intuitively knows is important to success of any business. MARKETING! As they say, you might have the best product/service in the world, but it doesn't matter if no one knows about it. Hence, I would focus on getting customers to my website.

Assuming I had a rough idea of what type of marketing works best in the industry/niche I am in, I'd outsource it, especially if it was time consuming. Hence, I would outsource SEO. Since, I chose less competitive keywords to start with, outsourcing SEO would fit my budget. Again, I would go looking to a place where supply exceeds demand and award work based on reputation.

Improtance of mesuring everything and fine tuning a product

Finally when I start seeing traffic, I would keep optimizing my business/product (website) to keep making me more money (conversions). For this I would make sure I measure every customer response (action) and gather as much info on customers as possible. Hence, I would setup an analytics system on my website from day one to help me optimize my website as more and more data is gathered by each passing day.

If my business (website) is financially successful, I would aim for keywords with a bit of higher competition (raise the bar) and rinse and repeat the process and squeeze out all the money I can from it.

If the website is a failure, I will have enough data to make future decisions and would start over again.

Don't get caught up and overwhelmed with complex stuff

Finally, I would stay away from complicated stuff such as list building, advertising, social media marketing (useless), etc due to limited funds and experience. But I wouldn't shy away from experimenting with the same to increase my website sales, after my initial method is a success, and I'm making some serious money.

Hope this helps.

you are better off creating your own sites and building links for them instead of providing squidoo with more great content... just fyi

I used to on your situation and didnt know how to do. You make some sales from Amazon and walmart affiliate links, this means your system works. I has some notes for you:
1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Traffic
You find the good keyword with less competitors, you have 20% success.
You have good content( I means content can convert to sales), you have 20% success.
You have good traffic( 1st spot of the keywords), you have 60% success. And this time you need to keep the speed of build link to maintain this position.

You know you need to build more backlinks,why you dont go to build it or hire someone to do it. It had a lot of ways to build back links and you can find some good posts on this forum. You can spend $5-$10 to test it and do not spam your money with a lot of poor links( don't use Xrummer, SB point direct to your money site). And you will not see the result within few days, you need weeks or month to see it.

Tami, good to see you aboard. Remember to watch your step always...

anyways, back to the topic...

I will tell u how I got started when I was in your situation...
I started off with fileserve (pays you per download)...uploaded some popular tv channels videos on youtube with a download link and users used to download it...then I earned my first $20 in 15 days or so...bought a domain quickly and later jumped on the Yahoo's associated content train...

it's all about writing articles...slowly my $20 per 15 days became $35/day...saved all that money up and when it hit around $300 I signed up at an affiliate network and started promoting dating offers on fb...

at this point was daily spend was topping $50-60 and in return making me some three digits...

that's basically what I did...now it's 4 times that...anyways, what I can suggest you is that see if yahoo still has that program and you can join it...

never tried fivver but i'm hearing some positive stuff on it...

hope that helped you a little

Have a nice day..oh hey say "hi" from me to your child/children xD

Wow Tami, that's impressive with the time you have available. I feel for you, as I have been there and done that...

I started internet marketing in 2006 and didn't make more than $100 a month until 2010 when I made over $80k!

Here's what I did in 2010... I picked 1 niche to become an authority in, one traffic strategy and hired a coach to provide 1 on 1 feedback and accountability. I ended up working much, much less and I monitored my Google analytics on the site and worked on the strengths.

Often I was writing blog posts optimized for a keyword phrase and my analytics was telling me that Google was sending traffic to that post based on a different keyword phrase. So, I would then go and write 5 blog posts optimized on the keyword phrase Google was already sending traffic for. This made a big difference...

I was also watching the bounce rate and time spent on the blog posts and I had an optin form at the bottom of every blog post. This told me if the information was liked by the readers and I built a prospect list, so I could update them with new blog posts.

I also tested many different affiliate products and measured which one generated the most sales and then created my own product based on those findings. It was an ebook that I eventually converted into a membership program at $27 a month.

I then offered affiliates a 70% commission and now my only traffic source is the traffic that affiliates are sending. This has allowed me to focus on helping out the affiliates and further improving conversions.

I hope my experience has helped you. I think the old days of having 10 sites all generating income have gone. With the Google updates and the focus on author ranking, you want to demonstrate to Google that you are an authority in one subject. This will help to get better search engine rankings, more traffic and better profits.

Have Fun
Ian McConnell

Good to see that you're making money - That instantly puts you ahead of a large percentage of people who 'do' internet marketing, so well done!

If I were you, I would scale up what's already working for you. There's nothing more demotivating than working at something that doesn't make money, so channel the motivation you get from making money into trying out other things. If the work becomes too much, look at outsourcing or put your 'story' together into an online course and show others here on the forum how you achieved what you did - You've already got a great 'angle' for your product, and I can tell from your short post that you have a nice way of writing!

(Just my two cents!)

Mark

I totally agree with Mark. If the Squido lenses work for you - make more lenses and put your work into that untill you start to get fairly stable passive income from them. Then - move on to your own niche websites - one at a time. You create one - turn it into a cash cow, outsource 80% of the work and move on to the next.

Don't worry too much whether you're doing the right thing or not. The more time you spend feeling fuilty or overwhelmed - the more time you've wasted on non money making activities. Key is: when you don't have time - make the time you put in worth it.

Usually - with IM you either start small and build up (takes up to a few years to become very successful) or you invest the money in outsourced help and keep the margins.

The reason that many people don't become superstars in IM from the beginning is that if you start small the initial investment of money isn't much and all you put in is: your time and many days later things start to take off. But before that - you learn, you try, you test ...

As Ian McConnell and DR's Fynest advised, once you hit a base income level for your IM venture, the next step is to focus on how to repeat this small success faster and with much bigger financial rewards. Again, focus on one thing and make it work. Avoid the pitfalls by hiring a coach - hand holding, guiding and accountability.

My 2 cents: whatever you do - keep on doing it. If for offline business the secret to success is: location, location, location, for online business is: repetition, repetition,repetition