My 2010 POST! A Story and a PLAN for YOU.

I was just out to dinner with a new business partner who had confided in me that his English professor in college had told him:

"Before you write your papers, have a couple of beers first as your writing will be better."

Ok, so I'm not a beer person, but I'm going to be transparent in telling you I have had a couple of cocktails before writing some of this submission No, I was not drinking on xmas morning

My tail is personal, has taken much of my time, and has been a huge learning experience for me - and I hope to share in an effort to save you all time and the heart ache I personally endured. You will also see a little plan here to make perhaps your first dollars.

My tale begins with a girl who wanted to just lose some weight and had a second dream of making some money online.

I joined a members site in early 2007 which was a lifetime membership site. It had some great pictures of women who had lost weight and were inspirational, and had followed a low carb diet - which was something I was personally familiar with.

Anyway, I decided to drop the 39.95 for the lifetime membership and take the plunge.

Within 24 hours I had met some new friends and decided to stay.

In just under a month I had dropped over 20 pounds, and all was well with the world.

The site I was a member of had an affiliate program, and I really thought I had found the perfect product to promote.

Before this time, I had initially started looking into online marketing because I had a product of my own I wanted to promote. Some how that idea never came to fruition. It is still something I want to pursue in the future, but is not a big enough thing for me to want to just focus on it alone, so it is in the "hobby" closet.

I had made a squidoo lense once before, but did not know about keyword research, and making that first lense it took me some time just to figure out how to make a simple html link.

I had played with an old copy of dreamweaver on my OS9 Mac - and I felt hopeless trying to figure out how to design a website the way I wanted it. In addition, I had no idea how to "ftp" and did not know diddly about cpanels etc.

What did I know?

I knew what an affiliate link was. I knew a couple of little tricks from one ebook I had purchased. And while I read the entire ebook from front to back, a lot of it was complete jibberish to me and I didn't have a clue what a lot of it meant.

I knew if I wanted to make some money off this new great program I had found, I was going to have to get a website up, and that was that. Oh, and I was going to use those 2 little tricks I had learned and see if I could make some money.

I didn't know what it was called at the time, but what I needed was something that was going to give me a WYSIWYG editor. If you are reading this and don't know what that is, I highly encourage you to google every time someone puts up a term you don't understand and look for the answers.

I had received an email from GoDaddy about their website tonight program. It said I could get a website up and running in just a couple of hours, and the hosting was only going to be 3-4 bucks a month. I took a package that gave me 5 pages (I think) and with no copy and thought to keywords and no clue I bought the hosting and I bought a domain. The domain I bought was one piece of this puzzle. There is more I could have done with this domain if I knew then what I know now.

When buying the domain, I had been instructed to buy a domain that included the name of the product I was promoting.

Warning: Get permission before including a product name in your domain. You can easily email the product owner/creator if you are an affiliate and they will tell you either yay or nay.

Here is part of the reasoning. Having the name of the product added some "authority" look to my domain.

Ok, so I bought the domain, and I took 2-3 hours on a Sunday night to make my website with GoDaddy's website tonight program. It does what it says it does folks. You can just get a site up quick and no fussing with design. Just get some copy together - a page or two discussing your product and what it does and why it is so swanky.

Now, this was not all that was needed to make some money. I now needed some traffic. I did not know diddly about backlinks, article marketing, video marketing, SEO etc.

The second trick I had learned was I needed to use adwords and I was only going to bid on one keyword. The only keyword I was going to bid on was the actual name of the product.

Why?

This product was very new - but had been swimming around for a year. Others had written articles about it.

My efforts in only bidding on the name of the product were going to bring me people ready to buy. Yes - I would get people seeing my ads who were actually looking up the product to find more information and who had been somewhat pre-sold by seeing the name of the product elsewhere.

At the time, bidding on the name of the product was roughly a nickel a click. I did not have hundreds of dollars for adspend - but I could muster up a 5 dollar a day budget AND I had luckily used that adwords credit they give you when you first buy hosting somewhere.

There was one final trick to my ad - and some will call this grey/black hat - but the point of the ad was to get attention.

My ad read:

"Problem with Keywordname
I can't stop losing
Read this before you buy"

So, the "problem" page was actually some real testimonials I had obtained from some other members whose problems included losing weight so fast they had nothing to wear that fit and some other silly problems that many people losing weight wish they had.

It was a negative ad, but it worked because anyone looking to try a new product is going to want to know what "problems" there might be with the product. Is that really black hat or just marketing? Hmm.

Ok, so the site went up on a Sunday, I had a 5 dollar a day limit on adwords and maybe only reached roughly 2 bucks a day on adspend. Thursday rolled around and I was working a double shift at the restaurant I was working at for that time and low and behold I had made a sale! Saturday rolled around and I had been out shopping, came home and found more sales!

Within one week, I had paid for my hosting for the month, my adspend invested, and I think I was at a 2 dollar profit. It was all going to be gravy for the rest of the month.

So, this seems like a happy story, and there was more money made off this campaign but I need to give you all warning of what happened next.

The diet was to be featured on a major magazine on the front cover. One that is at the check out stand and every housewife would have a look at. The name was going to be known in households all over the place.

Referring back to my book where I got the "tricks" from, it had told me this was going to be KILLER and that book was so right.

I saved up about a thousand dollars so I could bump my adspend up to a hundred bucks a day to prepare for the big launch.

A month and a half later it happened. The magazine hit the stands about a day or two before it was supposed to - but I had already popped my ad up with the additional adspend. I had received an email from the product owner asking me if I was dragging people off the street or something. She could see there was a flood of traffic coming from my site.

Low and behold, I was blowing out my 100 dollar budget as adwords will go over your set amount, and I was making a LOT of money. I pushed it up to over 200 a day and was pulling in over a grand a day in profits.

Then, some issues happened. One big mistake was that the site I was promoting got so much traffic it went down several times - for several hours. This was absolutely TRAGIC. Why? Because I was spending on adwords, people were clicking through to the main site, and could not buy.

You probably never saw someone so determined to figure out aweber so fast in an effort to capture names so I could get back to them with my affiliate link when the site was back up again.

If you are going to spend money on ads - please please please get a list in order!

After a few days, I had blown through my adspend and was going to have to wait for a payment from that affiliate program before I could invest some more for my site to be seen on the front page again.

Now, like an idiot, I thought my site would magically find it's way to the top of the google search. There were no backlinks, no keyword optimization, etc. So, that never happened.

My sales came to a dead stop. I was scrounging up some money to run the ad a little bit, but eventually it was a losing battle as others had figured out what I had been doing - including the owner of the site in question.

Here is the tragic part of this tale.

There were flaws with the product in question. It had used fake pictures and testimonials, and the diet itself was quite dangerous. The owner had lied about her personal success and used fake pics to represent herself.

It took this massive launch for things to come out and a private investigator to get video proof.

This whole mess turned into a class action lawsuit. The class was certified, but things have not finalized yet. The owner of this diet plan is still on the web, making money, and the wheels of justice roll ever so slowly.

Honestly, there was no way I could have known about the full extent of fraud going on, but I highly encourage anyone looking to promote a product to dig up as much as you can on the product creator as well. Don't blindly promote things.

If you are going to sell/promote diet stuff, Keep in mind you are messing with peoples health. I highly encourage you to stay away from this field if you are not a nutritionist or really knowledgeable about the field.

Making money is not that hard, and you can see results in a very short time with very little investment. But making money is NOT the most important thing in the world.

Find solutions for people that are safe, promote products you are confident about, and really take some time to learn some different ways to make money online. Just go do something today. Put up a web page if you never have before. A squidoo, or what ever - and just do something. Keep learning.

Oh, here is a quickie cleaned up version of the plan above to make you money.

1. Get a budget of 50 bucks.
2. Find a product that is relatively new (but safe). You can email the product creator, check backlinks to their site, snoop all over and see what you can dig up. If something looks fishy or too good to be true, dig some more.
3. Get permission to use the product name in a domain
4. Kick up a site of a few pages with some information about the product
5. Sign up for aweber and create some kind of bonus
6. Start an adwords campaign, just bid on the product name, and in your ad use something like "keyword bonus" - People will look at bonuses, coupons, discounts, etc - so get something to get them on your list. Make a special report, use some PLR, what ever.
7. Run your ad, watch it, and learn.

You can always begin writing articles, making videos, etc directing to your site.

Adwords is great for new products, but your ultimate goal should be to get that organic traffic and not be paying for people to come to your site.

Adwords can be great for testing the waters and see if your copy converts and you can get some sign-ups to your list.

Wishing everyone here a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

Thank you all for reading my 2,010th post for 2010.