Two years ago I started online. I joined The Challenge (well…it was called the 30 day challenge then), failed to complete it, and the rest is history.

Funny thing is…The Challenge is starting up again but in a vastly different format (more about that later in this post)

Today kinda marks my 2 year anniversary.  So about time for this update dont you think?

“So Whats Your Progress?”

Life is good….

Not sure I am on track with all my goals though!

I did manage to escape the dreaded cubicles (or in my case the M4/M5 motorways) In February of this year.

Shortly after, we packed up and moved over to Phuket for 4 months. Fantastic time, and all of us, even my 5 year old daughter, has caught the travel bug.

Any recommendations where we should go next?

And before you suggest it, yes I have seen Finch’s list of top countries to travel to as an affiliate. And yes – he decided to head out to thailand before I even thought about quiting my dayjob.

So to avoid any rumours that I might be stalking him…..alternatives that are not on his list please

Stack That Money

Apart from grinding out & optimising campaigns i’ve spend a fair bit of time helping folk out at the stack that money forum.

From simple beginners guides, to more advanced video tutorials. Im sure there is something there that takes your interest.

Here is just a flavour of some of my in-depth posts:

• iFraming CPA Offer Landing Pages within Facebook
• Full walkthrough of a $30 per day PPV campaign (great for beginners)
• Building Landing Pages On Speed
• Rapid Offer Testing With High V0lume Targets
• Super Sneaky Adplanner Trick
• WARNING: Build Your Own Scraper With Google Docs

Long Term Projects

I love the chase of CPA marketing with paid traffic. But….It aint a sustainable business really unless you build systems, process and offshore teams to run it all.

And to be honest I do get fed up sometime of the daily grind of churning out more and more quality campaigns.

So as a way of offering some variety, and building some long term assets, im making good progress with a bunch of projects:

• this blog (are you freakin kiddin me -> need to show it some more love
• spy killer webservice to protect your campaigns from copycats
• RunItWhere (more info to follow soon….its all about traffic)
• Scraping toolset
• TabEdit
• Sweepstake/contest apps for Facebook

“What About The Challenge?”

Yeah i promised to talk about this years Challenge.

Whether your a newbie or experienced, I suggest you check it out for a number of reasons:

• Ed has consistently over the last 7 years identified major shifts in online marketing and I have no doubt he will do it again this year. The Challenge is where all of this comes together with clear actionable steps!

• Getting Stuff Done, Shipping, Focus finders, CFTs ~ Whatever your poison ~ The Challenge always offers a good dose of advice for streamlining your workflow and overcoming procrastination

• All content will be available from Day 1

I failed to complete 2 challenges Got behind and lost the passion for it quit quickly. 3rd time lucky this year!!

If you’ve been a visitor to my blog for the last 12 months you will have noticed some changes.

Upto about July 2010 I had posted very little, and was mainly focussed on Adsense. Since August I have been more regular and now that I am looking back 12 months I can see the difference it has made:

From 33 visitors a week, to 629 in the last week.

And I did this without blogging every day and without extensive link building.

What Changes Did I Make?

Rather than provide low value high volume blog posts – my aim is to be less frequent but offer significantly more content and value.

The graph above shows when I made big jumps in my traffic at 4 points in the last 12 months:

• 11 January: Blogger Adsense Profits Template resulted in a 220% increase in visits
• 8 August: Quoted a tweet from Ryan Eagle (@ewanetwork), posted a tweet with the link which Ryan picked up and retweeted. This resulted in a 580% increase in visitors.
• 31 August: Guestposted about PPV, Jquery and Landing Pages on PPV Playbook & linked back to a post on my blog about building landing pages. 279% improvement in visitors. I am still getting a steady 30 new visitors referred from this guestpost each week.
• 28 October: Guestposted about PPV Url Scraping on Jonathan Volk’s blog. This resulted in a 235% increase in visitors.

Whats The Result?

Comparing traffic from the week before the first change in January to the last week, the 4 changes/actions above resulted in the following improvements:

• 1806% increase in visitors, from 33 to 629
• 2859% increase in pageviews, from 49 to 1450
• 2.3 pages/visit rather than 1.5
• Bounce rate reduced by 28%
• Average time on site from 2m 22s to 6m 53s
• Increase in regular visitors by 63%

But What Does That Mean?

3 lessons:

1. Guest Blogging Wortks: It works incredibly well if you are very targeted in which blogs you approach. I approached 2 blogs and got a guest post opportunity on both. The second one (Jon’s) as a result of the good press I got out of the 1st one.
2. Quality rather than Quantity: As a new blogger you dont need to blog each day. Blog once a week, or twice a month but give 200% more value to your users and the traffic will follow.
3. Engagement is Key: Embedding yourself into a community and a market is more important than Search Engine Rankings. Engaging with your market gives much longer term value and the rankings will take care by itself over time.

Last Updated: 1 August 2010

This guide assumes you are setting up your blog from scratch. If you have an exiting blog on Blogger that you want to monitise with Adsense, or you want to update from the previous version of this template, skip to Part B & C.

PART A: Get your blog setup & ranked

1. Pick your niche, topic and keywords

2. Create your blog

Login

Create your new blog.

Enter your blog settings

Blog Title – Something interesting including your target keyword phrase

Blog address: Use your keyword phrase, in the following order:

• acnecures.blogspot.com
• acne-cures.blogspot.com
• acnecuresblog.com (replace blog with anything you like: news, info, reviews, etc)
• acne-cures-blog.com (replace blog with anything you like: news, info, reviews, etc)

Use the “Check Availability” link to make sure the address is available.

Enter the capcha

Continue to the next screen

Select the Simple template and click Continue, followed by start blogging

3. Setup your static pages

• Contact me
• Terms & conditions
• Privacy policy

Contact Me

Enter your page title: Contact Me

I suggest you include some introductory text before adding your contact me form.

The easiest way to add your form, and capturing email addresses for future use (* lists *), is to embed a Google Form using google docs.

If you’ve already got a form setup for another blog, just embed that one.

If not, just go over to Google Docs, and create a new form. Here is a good guide on creating forms with Google Docs.

Setup your form based on the data you want to capture and get the embed code.

In your Blogger page, go to Edit HTML and paste the embed code.

Before you publish your page, set your post options:

Publish the page. When you publish your first page you will be asked where you want to include the Pages gadget.

Choose Blog tabs, and click the Save and Publish button.

View the page to make sure you are happy. Make further changes if needed.

Dont worry about the look and feel of the overal blog as this will change when you get to Phase B and implement the Blogger Adsense template.

Privacy Policy

Create another page, this time for your privacy policy. Use this site to generate your privacy policy which is compliant with adsense.

Before you publish the page set the post options. Use the same post options as when you did the contact me page.

Terms and Conditions

There are loads of options for this online, just search Google for them. The one I use is from the UK Government’s Business Link site. You can also use this for things like your Privacy Policy, but I prefer the one linked to above.

4. Configure your blog settings

Before starting to post your blog posts, there are a couple of configuration options for your blog that you need to update.

Basic

Make sure you press “Save Settings” before moving on to the next section.

Publishing

No need to change anything here at the moment, unless you want to change your domain or point your blog to your own domain.

Formatting

Most of the settings on this section can be set to your own preferences. Make sure the following are set in the way I outline:

Comments

Archiving

Site feed

Email & Mobile

Set as per your own preferences. I dont use this at the moment so leave it per the default settings.

Permissions

The default settings are the ones you want for the Blog Readers section. But just in case you accidentally changed things, make sure that anybody can read your blog.

5. Find your authority site

Authority & trust are important and increasingly tests indicate it might be a factor used in Ranking sites. Therefore make sure that your sites link out to relevant authority sites. How to find one?

Take your target keyword and search for it in Google. Look at the top results, and see if you can spot a Wikipedia listing, or .edu or .org website. If there isnt one, move a “level up” to your main keyword.

“Whats a level up?”….A level up is “Acne” if your target keyword is “Acne Cures”.

If your still out of luck, just look on Wikipedia for a relevant page to your topic and use that one.

Make sure that in each of the posts you write about below, you include 1 authority link.

6. Post your 4 articles

Write (or outsource) your 4 articles. 2 for your main keyword, and 2 for your target keyword.

Then post them on your blogger blog.

As per Steve & Tim’s template and Adsense Guide in The IM Advantage, if you dont use a blog title then it wont show a post heading on the home page. Myself, I do use blog titles because it improves usability and it also helps with ranking your sites.

I suggest you experiment whether with or without title works best. Make sure related keywords are included in your page title if you do, and keep it to 70 characters. For example:

Herbal Acne Cures

Feel free to include images in your post.

7. Getting indexed & ranked

Onsite optimization

Once you have your post written, keyword optimize it by:

• including your target keyword and some related keywords throughout your document, but only a couple of times. Dont overdo it.
• include your target keyword in section headings across your posts
• link out to 1 authority site in the body of your post (see step 5 above), but only once.

Is your site indexed?

Search engine rankings

Instead of creating a bunch of social bookmarks (delicious, digg, stumbleupon) to your blog to get it indexed, I use a technique that is slightly different.

Here are some other good tips from ProBlogger: 5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours

Offsite optimization

The main approaches I use to create backlinks:

• Directory sites
• Forums
• Setup squidoo lenses and hub pages
• Guest posts
• Outsourcing

Aim to get to 10 visitors a day before you move on to the next step.I suggest you continue building links, and maybe once a week writing a new high quality article.

1. Download template

Download the template to your harddrive. Some browsers open up XML files (the file format of the template), so I have zipped the file.

2. Install the template

Go back to your blog dashboard and click the Design link for the blog where you want to implement the Adsense template.

Then go to the Edit HTML page and upload the template file you just downloaded and unzipped. You do this by selecting the template file using the Choose File button followed by the Upload button.

You are likely to get a warning after you have pressed Upload. This is because the Simple template includes a number of widgets that this new template does not use. You can keep the data if you really want, but I recommend you choose the delete widgets option.

If this happens, just start over with Part B, make sure you unzip and dont edit the template before uploading.

Viewing your new blog template

Updating the homepage intro text

3. Enable Adsense

Its time to setup your adsense ads now. Again, I will assume you know how to use the Adsense features to get the embed code for your ads.

Getting an adsense account

In case you dont have an adsense account yet, make sure you develop your blog first. You need to request the account for a site that has at least 20 or so pages, meets the quality criteria for websites, as well as a regular flow of visitors.

http://hubpages.com/hub/adsense_approval_tips

Linking blogger with adsense

If your blogger account is not yet linked to your adsense account, then also choose “Switch Internet Account” and make sure you are linked to the correct account.

You will need to fill out a number of details from your Adsense account to enable the two accounts to be linked.

4. Setting up Adsense

Here are the dimensions for each ad position in the template:

Go back to your dashboard, and click the Design link. This will take you to the Add and Arrange Page Elements page.

There are 6 adsense ad units on this page that can be added in – 3 link units and 3 ad units. If you are not seeing all of them, re-upload the template after you have enabled Adsense on your blog.

Select the relevant Format. For the units in block 1 above use the big square ad, lblock 2 are the 180 x 90, link units and in 3 are the sky scrapers.

Additional tips

• Make sure you use the correct ad sizes
• For the colour scheme, use the default Google color scheme but set the border to white, and the display URL to black
• If you look carefully you will notice that the body text of the template is set to dark grey (#222). Based on tests where I have done this and had the main ad text pure black (#000) increased CTR.
• Check your allowed sites setting in the Adsense Setup area. Make sure its set to Any site, or include the URL of your blog

4. Customizing the Theme

Continue to build backlinks, making sure you mix and match the anchor text between your main keyword, target keyword, web address, and related keywords.

In the post earlier this week I shared with you that I had found a security hole. I am glad I made the right decision and today I notified the company responsible for the website.

I am sure they will have the hole plugged by the end of the day.

You probably want to know which site, but I am not going to share that information.

If your an internet marketer you will know how sacred your top performing keywords, ads, and landing pages are.

This is the only competitive advantage you really have…

…and this was the data I managed to get access to.

Are you looking for easy short term cut & paste routes to riches with minimal effort? You will be disappointed and probably hate me for not sharing this information.

Trust me though – I am doing you a favour. I recommend you do it yourself. Try, test, track and scale.

No doubt this saga has not finished, but the hole is plugged tight, and the data secure.

Now back to building my business with blood sweat and tears! I know I will succeed and this way I know it was me who achieved it.

Ta

Blue or Red

We all, every single day, come across opportunities – good and bad!

Some of these opportunities tempt you to ignore your values, ignore what you stand for and believe in, and join the dark side.

An age old dilema….

Do you go for fortune & riches? Or do you do the right thing?

Yesterday, for some bizarre reason, I stumbled upon such a dilema.

And I mean stumble.

I am not a big hacker. I am not a big web 3.0 wizard, that knows lots of stuff about XML, Ajax, Javascript and other such strange names.

And I am certainly not the latest and greatest internet marketing guru that is looking to pitch his latest product.

I am just an average bloke (where have we heard that before…honest I am not working up to a big Launch)…

…doing my utmost best to learn as much as possible so that I can one day achieve my dream, which is to actually have a life!

So should I cheat to Achieve my Goals?

Thats the question…

…And deciding took me an hour or so! Not long, I know.

It was actually an easy decision to make in the end.

Would I be able to sleep and live with myself if I took the shortcut? No

Would using this information make my life easier? Certainly

But with a sour taste in my mouth.

So….

You want to know what the opportunity is?

I wont go into detail and I will inform the company involved, but basically found a security hole in one of the worlds top 250 websites.

I guess its not so much a security hole, and certainly didnt involve any illegal hacking.

But it does…

…give me access to very interesting data people would pay big $$$ for to see

What am I going to do about it?

I guess I will do the right thing. Which is to:

• Confirm that I am not going mad and validate the data
• Notify the company involved of the security hole
• Blog about the experience

So make sure you come back to check the next installment of what possibly could be a fascinating story…

Let me know in the comments what you would do!

Launch Your Adsense Blog For Free And Start Earning Daily Adsense Profits In Less Than 10 Minutes

When Steve and Tim (Commission & Niche Blueprint) published their Going Oldschool November 2009 training at The Im Advantage, I could not wait and create this on Blogger. A couple of days before, after extensive research, they recommend you use Blogger instead of Squidoo or Hub Pages.

Why?

So I Set To Work….

Now that I’ve got the templates ready, Its time to share with you Adsense Addicts out there.

You might think…

“I Thought You Could Not Make Any Money With Adsense? WRONG”

So wrong in actual fact. Just look at Google’s Financial Results. 30% of their revenue is generated through Adsense (ie Google Network).