FINALLY! A CASH FLOW WEBSITE TO CALL MY OWN!

On the last day of 2013 I put the finishing touches on my first cash-flow website, "FIND UAVS FOR SALE HERE". It's a review site of an online store for personal drones called DroneFly.com. It only cost me $17 to set it up. For every visitor who clicks a link to the DroneFly.com homepage and buys a drone, I get a 5% commission. I've earned $33.75 so far and that means I'm in the black already! This is something that I literally built from scratch. It took me weeks, but I got it done. I had some problems with making the YouTube video so I borrowed a video from DroneFly.com's YouTube channel instead. Now the site has five pages, a YouTube video, a home page with three posts, and it's already earning me money. Now I just have to build some more sites next year. My goal is to build two of these Google Sniper sites each month and retire by June. I haven't got the check from DroneFly.com yet, but I'll be sure to post it here when I do.  If you'd like to visit the site you can click here.

Promoting Solo Ads

How did I miss this? I’ve been involved with internet marketing for quite some time, but never heard of promoting a product with solo ads until I joined 5FigureDay. In the past I’ve never really had enough money to put together a good campaign of paid advertising, so I relied on the free stuff which of course doomed me to failure. Now I find out about solo ads that are not only affordable, but also a very effective way to start marketing products online. So what exactly is a “solo ad”? A solo ad is simply submitting an email to someone who has a mailing list who then sends it to his or her subscribers for a fee.  

I’ve done some shopping and it’s possible to run a solo ad for as little as $5 or $10. Most people who provide this service will charge you from 40 to 50 cents per click and may even guarantee a minimum number of clicks. There are several sites online that provide a list of sources for you to choose from when selecting a service. Be sure to check if they have recently run a campaign for your product so you don’t end up duplicating someone else’s marketing efforts. Also check for reviews to see that others are happy with their campaigns.

Being the cheap bastard that I am I paid $5 for a solo ad through Fiverr.com, a company known for providing a host of services for just five bucks. “You get what you pay for” they say, but I still wanted to see if a $5 ad would be worth the bother. If it wasn’t, then I’d only be out five dollars. I paid for an ad on a Wednesday, hoping that it would run on Thursday because Friday isn’t a good day for ads. The results? I got an email from my tracking service telling me I had to upgrade my tracker so it could handle over 100 clicks! I’ve had over 4200 clicks so far. I was amazed. So you can get traffic for a song. However, how many will turn into leads and sales?

I haven’t tried a $10 ad or a more standard service yet, so the jury is still out on those for now. The bottom line is that you have to test and track any method of promoting you do to get the word out about your product. Solo ads are just one way to do that and also a good place to start. 

Building An Email List

It’s been a long time between posts, over three years. Since my last post I’ve seen a series of failures that have almost brought me to the point of quitting my dream of succeeding online. I’ve never stopped trying, despite thousands of wasted dollars and years of my life. Recently I’ve run across some information that reconfirmed something that I’d learned from several sources during my travels along the Information Super Highway: “The Money Is In The List”. I never really tried to build an email list that I could consistently market to, probably because it would require an autoresponder to manage it and that costs money. That was me. More worried about the cost instead of the benefit.

Recently I subscribed to a system called 5FigureDay for the astronomical cost of one dollar for the first month. In just a few days I absorbed a wealth of information on marketing and building an email list. I was blown away to find out that the value of just one email subscriber is considered to be $1 per month. That’s the industry average. It can range from 50 cents up to $2 depending on the quality of the list and the products marketed to it, but overall the average is about a buck. That means a list of 500 can be worth $500 a month to me if I use it wisely. So I’ve started building my own list and got my first subscriber yesterday. The 5FD system leverages the efforts of those in my list if they decide to join 5FD and start promoting it. Not only do they add subscribers to their list, but to mine as well! My list gets built by my efforts as well as the efforts of others automatically. Once I reach the 500 level I’ll start doing something called “Ad Swaps” which will allow me to multiply my list several times and make it even more valuable, but that’s for another post. I still have 499 to go!

Making Money on the Web For My Real Estate Busniness

IFWs turned out to be just another dead end for me. Now I'm trying to use the web to help me make money from my real estate busniness. One way to do that is get investors to visit a squeeze page for free information (it's not really free because they have to leave an email address) and then they visit a static page with free information, but also nine different offers that might help their business. If they click on some of the offers I get paid a fee because they are CPA (Click Per Action) offers. On others they may buy a product and I would receive a commision as an affiliate. In short, if I just drive trafffic to these pages, then I'm bound to make money. The key for me is being able to drive traffic effectively on a low budget.

TA-DA!

I got $50 deposited to my Paypal account today thanks to Project Payday. It's the first real money I've ever made on the Internet. Someone paid me to complete a few offers on a IFW (Incentivized Freebie Website) in exchange for $50. It only took a few days too. I ordered a $45 check from Paypal which leaves $3.50 in the account because they charge $1.50 for the check. As soon as I get the check I'll post a picture of it. I'm still in shock. Now, on to make even more money from IFWs.

SPINNING WHEELS ON THE INTERNET

Every day I do a certain number of tasks in order to be successful on the Internet. These tasks take at least 2-3 hours and sometimes longer. By the time I’m done it’s almost lunchtime. In addition I do a few tasks in the afternoon and all these tasks are turning into a ball-and-chain, dragging me down to a crawl on my trek along the Internet road to success. Here they are:

Twitter: I tweet early (something inspirational), answer direct messages and then try to increase my following.
Blogging: I post to my blog and then make sure to ping it.
Safelists- I surf a Safelist to earn credits to show my ad to other surfers.
Orange Leads: They allow you to send an ad globally and also to the main control panel. They also give you seven leads at a time that you can email. I’ve done this twice and each time three of those addresses were bad.
Squidoo: It’s kinda like blogging. I have two lens that I contribute to on a daily basis.
USFreeAds- I try to submit an ad there daily because Google is supposed to love them.
Blasts: Every afternoon I send an email blast to millions of Gmail subscribers (I think). I also use the credits I’ve built up to send an ad to Safelist subscribers as well.
Twitter: I tweet again (something entertaining or funny)
Blogging: I write my blog for the following day.
Slumming: It seems that I’m always checking out another opportunities.

Why? Because despite all the time I’ve devoted to these daily tasks, I haven’t earned a dime on the Internet this year and the year is coming to a close real fast. In addition, these tasks are distracting me from giving Google Sniper my full attention. It begs the question: If doing these things isn’t making you any money, then why do them? Well, I haven’t been doing them that long and I have enjoyed writing for my blog. Something has to start making me money soon or I may have to …Get A Job!

The Coolest Check On The Internet

The other day I was scanning some Safelist ads to gain credits when I ran across a great way to capture leads in the future. The ad was for Global Domains International (I have to give them credit) and the first page showed a paycheck. On the check there were two open fields that need to be filled in, one for a first name and the other for a last name. To move on to the next page you had to fill in the blanks and the payout figure was something like “Unlimited”. Then you are taken for a ride in a Ferrari! The destination: Corporate headquarters for a little conference session. This was all so cool. It kind of fulfilled the old saying, “Writing your own check.”

I couldn’t help thinking about that check though. Obviously it was a great hook to get people to sign in and move forward. However, I thought they missed a great opportunity to capture more information in order to try and sell me or someone else again. They didn’t get an email address or even a zip code. Maybe they thought it would be too much to ask and it would have lost some people. The way I see it, once you have them get some way to contact them again and sell them until they buy or drop dead! The check concept is an interesting idea and I’m sure it could be tweaked to get some contact info while still keeping the visitor interested enough to continue. I sent GDI an email complimenting them on the ad, but they haven’t responded yet. If they do maybe they will tell me who did the ad for them and I can get an ad like that for my websites.