Steve Oliphant’s Musings

A few hours ago I presented a webinar class on affiliate marketing. It was a lot of fun ( at least for me. ) I hope the people in the class thought so to.

One of the things that I said is that to make things happen online, you have to DO. It is not enough to learn, study, read, etc. You have to make things happen. Spend at least 50% of your online time writing or creating.

I realized that in life, the same thing applies. To make things happen, (Like for example, Going to Costa Rica) you have to DO to make things happen.

Well, currently I am resetting up a corner of a room that used to contain my computer and workspace. I let it fill up with boxes of junk when I bought a laptop and started working with the laptop more than my desktop.

But I realized something - when I had that corner setup I was making over 10k a month on the internet, from adsense, affiliate sales, and sales of my own products. When I let it lapse, my online income dropped substantially (I obviously did not have a Freedom Business System setup.)

I was also having lots more fun online than I have been lately.

And today when I went to make some “how to” videos for my NicheCreator software, I realized that I was being blocked by not having that space setup.

So for me, “Doing” at the moment means cleaning out, reorginizing and setting back up my corner.

I also plan to setup a Media Center Server for the other 4 computers in our house. I have been planning on doing that for a while and gotten blocked by the same pile.

So, I am listening to some good rocking music and cleaning and organizing! I hope you are being as productive.

I have known about this place for years:
CafePress - there you can upload your graphic (even if it is just text) and they will sell verything from t-shirts to coffee cups with your image on it, and give you a piece of the sale. I had my hosting company logo on some stuff at http://cafrepress.com/crecon years ago!

There are a surprising amount of websites that will pay you to write for them. You don’t have to be an accomplished writer or famous personality to do this.

The first place I became aware of is Associated Content. Billing themselves as “The People’s Media Company” they will pay you for your original written content, video content, and slide shows. I have written several articles for them and they seem to be pretty good. How much will you get paid? They pay from $3-$20 per submission and also give you a performance bonus if your content gets a lot of traffic. This is a site that you can definately make more than minimum wage on.

Another site that I found is ReviewStream.com. They pay for reviews of pretty much anything. To quote their website:

You could review anything around you including: any products, hi-end technics, companies, hotels, politics, cities, stores on your street, or even your neighbors pets! We’ll pay you for all of the reviews. Did you visit a barbershop today? Review it and get paid! What about your shopping today? Review the shops you visited and get some money back in your pocket! Did you return from a vacation? Review the hotel and its staff, the car you rented, cities you visited, restaurants (including McDonald’s), fashion stores and street markets … everything!

They are currently paying $1.50 per review and 10 cents everytime your review gets a vote. I haven’t written for them but they seem worth checking out. (Caveat: They have some bad press online. See This article for example.)

Another way to make money is to focus your articles or reviews on a product that will pay you whenever someone buys through your link. This is often called Article Marketing and the easiest way is to look at Clickbank.com and PayDotCom.com for products to promote. Then write a review or article about that product, and submit it to one of the following locations with your affilite link or hoplink.

Places to submit articles and reviews that seem to get indexed by google quickly:
http://www.usfreeads.com/ - classified ads - have to pay a minimal fee to include a url
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
http://www.searchwarp.com/
http://www.wordpress.com/
http://www.squidoo.com/

If you don’t have a blog yet - get one! It is a very easy way to publish online - in a future post I will tell you how to use your blog to sell your own products - and there are many places like PayPerPost that will pay you to make blog entries in your own blog!

If you have or like to make videos Scott Kirsner has a list of places that you can get paid to submit your video. You can make videos from something as simple as CamStudio(free). CamStudio does have some quirks - the settings it comes with by default do not work. But with a few setting changes (I will address them in a later post) it works as well as software costing $600.00.

I am trying out YouTube as a traffic generator for some of my products. Check out http://youtube.com/profile?user=isuccess to see what I am doing.

I am putting the finishing touches on a new product: Link Mask - it is simply a script that lets you either shorten or mask links. I have it installed at www.stevelikes.com.

It lets me use urls like
http://stevelikes.com/muvar
instead of
http://crecon.muvar.hop.clickbank.net
which is obvious a clickbank link url that would be easy for someone to steal the commission with.

It is really cheap. It is really easy to install and use.
Check it out!

James Brausch is giving away two books I want

I hope I get them

One is Richard Bach’s “One“. I have read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by him and really enjoyed it.

The other one; More Words that Sell will help improve my copywriting. (Something always worth working on.)

Questions I have about Multivariate Testing:

Would it be of value and/or possible to test variables in combination - IE, headline A with copy C makes more sales than headline B - even though headline B makes more sales with all other possible combinations?

My other question has been addressed - would it be possible and of value to test/track where the visitor is coming from? Answer is here

MuVar is getting updated - both improved and having bugs fixed.

James Brausch has used one of my suggestions, but has a really good reason for not using the other one - namely that the HTML code can get messed up. He asks if I used Firefox - I did. I also used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I also tested with multiple computers. So I would bet that the problem is a php configuration on my server. I haven’t tracked it down yet. I will post here if/when I get it figured out.

For anyone else trying to figure it out, it seems that on my server (and also some - very few - others,) once a cookie is set, it doesn’t get overwritten or reset. This is not good when entering new information that gets passed in a cookie. But my fix - using hidden fields in a form - is not good either because in the posted data HTML will get messed up. One possible solution that I haven’t tested yet is to mangle the data in the hidden fields so that there is no html there, and then after they are posted, unmangle them. PHP includes to functions that do this easily, base64_encode and base64_decode.

I probably won’t be able to test this idea or look for other solutions before next week. (I try to observe the sabbath on Sunday, and I have procrastinated taxes until the last minute) but if I find anything I will let everyone know.

How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message

Link I want to save - very usefull to anyone who is looking for ways to drive traffic to your website

James Braush is creating a book from content on his blog.

I am excited about this!

If you read his blog (or the book) you will understand why.

He takes his readers step-by-step and teaches them exactly what to do and how to do it to become one of the 2% who are making incredible amounts of money on the internet.

The information presented here is priceless. He teaches how to (easily) create your own products, how to make websites to sell them, how to drive traffic to your websites, and how to automate the whole process so that you can continue to make money even in your sleep.

James also teaches how to change your life so that you can become successful at anything. This is much more than a “How to make money on the internet” blog, it is a “How to become Free” blog! He writes on time management, self improvement, relationships, and much more.

You can receive a complete education on business, especially internet business, just by reading his blog.

I very much appreciate it James, I can sincerely say “Thank you!” for making this information available.

-Steve Oliphant