ScottMW.com

A tree.

People argue. A lot.

Many times they argue over things that already have answers. But they also like to argue over things that can not be answered. This is a problem.

If people are arguing over things that have no answers, why are they arguing at all? I think I may have an answer. They argue at the leaves. Let me explain.

Every belief you hold at this point in your life has a basis on some other, more solid idea … to a point. Consider the tree on the left. It has roots, a trunk, large branches, smaller branches, even smaller branches and at one point, it had leaves. Beliefs are a lot like trees in that there are leaves of ideas that are based on tiny branches of belief, which are based on other branches of belief all the way down to a rooted belief.

Often the larger branches of belief are largely unquestioned and someone might not even be aware that smaller beliefs are perched atop them, but they are. And going a bit further down the tree, the trunk and roots are often the foundation for a whole host of ideas and beliefs about the world.

When we consider this analogy in terms of how people argue, you’ll notice people are usually arguing at the leaf level. Once the leaves don’t hold, they move down to the branches for support, then down to the larger branches but typically at this point is when people give up and have gotten no where, instead holding on to the bitter feelings and anger that go along with any heated debate.

This is why I believe it’s important to skip the leaf arguments, and even the branch arguments. Instead, we should start at the roots and work our way up.

A tree with dead branches.

The reason for this is simple: if, at any point in arguing the “tree,” the part you’re arguing does not hold up to scrutiny, then everything it supports is no longer stable. If the foundation for anything is questionable, then it stands to reason than the beliefs and ideas resting on the foundation are unstable as well (picture on the right).

Of course, this is not to say that the ideas and notions represented by the smaller branches are absolutely false. It is to say that their existing foundation is unstable, but these ideas could (perhaps) become supported by separate foundations.

To be continued.

Here are my favorite feeds from today!

The worst things startups do (Scobleizer)
How to price your work (All Greyscalegorilla)
Bugatti Veyron Crashing into the Water – CRASH – SPLASH! (YouTube)
Baby deer escapes Lions at the National Zoo part 2 (YouTube)
South-Africa Bikini walk (YouTube)
Prince Of Persia Film Sands Of Time Official Movie Trailer (YouTube)
I have already used the name for *MY* programming language (google.com)
Woman Falls Onto Subway Tracks (YouTube)
Leopard Hangs Out Car Window (YouTube)
Church Sign Fail (FAIL Blog: Epic Fail Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments)
Are You Smarter Than A 1954 8th Grader? (blackinformant.com)
Whaddaya Mean Obama Hasn’t Done Anything? (Esquire.com Article Feed)
Sleep better in your own bed ((title unknown))
Failed Beer Run (YouTube)
Al Franken kicks eleventy-million kinds of ass in health-care hearing (Boing Boing)
Jim Carrey?s new personal website: A visually stunning treat (PopWatch)
Top 10 Homemade Remedies for What Ails You [Lifehacker Top 10] (Lifehacker)

Thanks,
Scott

If you’ve ever been running a fierce ad campaign for one of the products you’re selling and stopped, you’ve probably noticed that you keep on making sales for a while after. That’s exactly what happened to me a while back when I stopped my Clickbank campaigns; I stopped paying for advertising but targeted traffic just kept rolling in for my landing pages. It was beautiful .. for a while.

The reason this happens, I’ve found, is because your landing pages get indexed pretty well in Google, Yahoo, etc. for the keywords you bid on with PPC. After you turn your advertising faucet off, the organic hit sponge still has some traffic soaked up inside of it (search engines still have you indexed). You’ll notice that this will last for a while and then eventually your stream will turn into a trickle and then dry up. So what’s the solution?

Well, for one thing, you can continue bidding on those search terms that got you indexed in the first place but decrease the bids just enough for you to stay indexed but not generate too many clicks. This can be an issue when maintaining a campaign because PPC services generally like you to keep a relatively high CTR but if you can manage to keep your ads running, you should be OK.

Another great way of keeping your sites high in search results is to link to your landing pages from any other high traffic websites you may have, while keeping in mind good SEO practices and of course, search engine guidelines (don’t hide your links). A good way to utilize SEO for organic traffic is to put a ‘title’ and ‘alt’ property in your links that is related to your desired keyword search (read more about this here).

What has worked for me and I’m sure many others is paying for links on other related websites. I say related because search engines (especially Google) like to see related content linking to related content. Trust me, it will improve your rankings in the search engines. Additionally, this practice can be used for any type of traffic building but might not pay off as well as the affiliate marketing combination. In general, contacting the webmaster and working out a reasonable price is completely up to you but all I can say is — never settle for the first price they give you. Remember, you’re here to make money!

And finally, if you don’t want to fork out any money at all, you can always offer up a link exchange with a website with related content (you link to them and they link to you, respectively). Just a word to the wise with this practice- The problem here is that the search engines see this as a weaker link than one site linking to another with no back-links. This means you might not get as high a ranking for a particular keyword, especially since the site linking to you gets more traffic.

Good luck,

Scott

As you can see, I finally hit my $1k goal on Azoogle. Not a bad day, overall. This will be going in the book, once I finish writing it.

Now that this goal has been met, my next goal is maintaining the $1k/day status and then, obviously, pushing on up to $2000-days with the same profit margins. I doubt this will be a problem though with the new campaigns I’m rolling out. Only time will tell!

A buddy and I have been trying out a new trimming method for our campaigns and it’s been working like a charm. Not only is it helping to maintain our current levels of incoming traffic but it also cuts spending! I love it!

The system is finally starting to make sense to me and I know for a fact I could start with nothing at this point and start generating the same kinds of numbers you see in the above picture. That’s a comforting feeling and there’s definitely no looking back.

My current goals are to expand in to several other markets as well as seeking out new methods for bringing in tons of targeted traffic. The best part is, now I can afford to pay for all this stuff.

More later. I better sleep.

Scott

Today, I heard a knock at the door and walked outside to find a small box. As we (my wife and I) have been receiving gifts for our soon-to-be-born little girl, we both thought the box to be something baby-related. That wasn’t the case. No, it was an iPhone and although the box is black, it was shining from inside its package with all the glory of Apple.

It was supposed to be an anniversary gift from my wife but apparently, it had come really early and she hadn’t gotten to it in time to shield it from view. Hey– not my fault.

I didn’t have more than 15 minutes alone with my new little package when we had to rush off to pick up a baby crib, but as soon as we were back I was all over it. iTunes updates, music syncing, address book filling, ringtone setting, you name it.

Although I realize the initial glow of the iPhone will fade after a spell, I do see the beauty that is the iPhone. So much so that I forgive Apple for omitting basic staples of such an awesome phone (like cut and paste, video with the camera, flash support, bluetooth syncing). Also, I realize that most of these things will be covered in future releases and that their plan is to probably keep people interested while they release the already-created “features” along with bug fixes as they come up.

All annoyances aside, the machine is glorious. If you don’t have one, get one. I went from a Blackberry Pearl to the iPhone and the iPhone rocks the world of the Pearl.

Next comes my real love– my baby girl. Set for release on November 10th of this year!

Stay tuned.

-Scott

Hey everyone,

Sitdiary.net is back and registration is open! Please let your friends know!

Last night, I was attempting to activate the registration function for Sitdiary. In the midst of furious coding, I noticed my FTP server stopped responding and the upload didn’t complete. I restarted Dreamweaver (the html editor) and logged back on to find that the file had been deleted and I’d overwritten it on my side. I was thoroughly frustrated and angry with myself, but for every dark cloud there is a silver lining.

As I was looking through the Sitdiary code directory, I noticed the old code files just sitting around, so I decided to activate them just for the hell of it. A few bug fixes and code updates later, Sitdiary is running just like it used to!

Seeing it back in action is, for lack of a better term, beautiful.

Scott

Finally, VidTutorial.com has been launched and will now provide you with free tutorials on tons of things, like: Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Affiliate Marketing, Basic HTML, How to give a cat a bath, and more.

We plan to teach the web and we believe the best way to learn is by doing, and that exactly what the idea is– you can follow along as the video plays, so there’s no more confusion about doing something incorrectly on a normal web page based tutorial.

So far, I’ve churned out a few different tutorials on simple Photoshop effects and a couple basic HTML tutorials, but there will be many more! Stay tuned.

- Scott

Just some quick updates on my progress to the $5000/mo goal. Recently, a friend of mine told me about the wonders of ad segmentation and how it would improve CTR as well as targeted traffic. For those of you who aren’t aware of what segmentation is, you can either Google it or look at DirectoryVault Chad’s post on the subject here. He doesn’t go into detail, but you’ll get a better grasp on what it’s all about.

Essentially, what you do is break lots of general keywords that match your particular destination page and break them up into very targeted keyword groups that match specific pages on the destination link.

So that’s great and it’s a beautiful concept, except for a novice to advertising, this can be more difficult than it seems. This last week was my trial in segmentation, and to be honest with you, I failed miserably. For three of the seven days, I spent $150/day with next to no returns. This was because I paused my successful campaigns to segment them into several smaller groups, and in doing so I got a ton more clicks and for some reason, way less sales. I will say this — most of the money was going to an industry that is heavily saturated and gets tons of traffic, but that doesn’t account for the other campaigns which were usually more successful.

In fact, if I showed you my current ClickBank screen shot, you would be depressed for me because I lost my momentum I had going before. Luckily, I saved my campaigns that were bringing me success and I enabled those again a couple of hours ago. I have a new strategy now that won’t cost so much, and it might save you a ton as well. In short, it’s:

DON’T BE LAZY.

Yeah, that’s right– I said it. On my previously successful campaigns, I was so lazy upon finding something that worked that I didn’t want to actually research into the success, magical as it seemed. Now, knowing I was so close to my goal before and knowing how easily it was removed from grasp, I have done several things to ensure future success:

1. I have reduced campaigns down to the way they were when success was happening
2. I am now using software I am developing for public release to make affiliate landing pages easier to manage
3. I am using that same software to track keywords from click to payment, thus maximizing keyword efficiency
4. Each time I start a new campaign, it will be reasonably capped as to avoid loss on ROI
5. I will avoid saturated markets as much as possible and focus on niches

This starts … now! I will keep you updated on my progress as I go along, as I know a few people are keeping track.

Wish me luck!

This is a continuation of part III of the ClickBank Experiment.

Good things are happening in the world of ClickBank!

First off, if you’ll take the time to click on my ClickBank earnings as of 2/14/2007 @ 10:00pm (thumbnail to the left), you will notice I had my biggest sales day yesterday at $148.34! Woohoo! Not only did I break $100 for a couple days in a row there, I also technically broke $150 because I also had a nice $5.00 with AdSense (totaling $153.34). So double woot to that!

You’ll notice a few zero days (days where I made $0 on ClickBank) and these are days when either A.) the market was fluctuating (out of my control) or B.) I was messing with my bid prices on keywords. So don’t lose hope if you’re just starting out with ClickBank. There is steady money to be made in this, despite actual low days (like today – a market fluctuation).

Now as I’ve been talking about my ‘Experiment’ a lot on DigitalPoint forums in the ClickBank area (I’ll talk about that in a minute), I’ve been asked a lot of excellent questions. One question everyone probably wants to know when you have a good day like $153 is – how much did you spend to make that much? My advertising budget came out to about $73, which might depress you until you think- that’s a profit of $80 for something that runs essentially on auto pilot while you’re gone.

Also, that advertising budget is covering all of my advertising expenses as I am also testing additional campaigns that might turn out to be profitable. When they aren’t profitable, and they aren’t most of the time, then they eat up the profit! But, in the end, it’s more than worth it because you’ll have paid to find 100 working products out of 1,000 that generate you income on a daily basis.

This is also known as passive income, and it’s a beautiful thing. I can be at school or another job and be making the same or more money while I’m away. Oh yeah, and what happens when I’m on vacation? Money keeps rolling in. What happens when I’m in the hospital? The checks keep coming. As long as someone is there to deposit your checks into the bank, your income is going to be generated like interest in a bank account — 24×7.

Anyway, there has been much buzz about my experiment on DigitalPoint. Just check out this thread I started when I was trying to make my first sale with ClickBank. The thread doesn’t only contain my testimony, but also the advice from some experts in the field. You’ll notice that a nice chap that goes by Telmari contributes a lot on there. If you’re starting out on ClickBank, or even if you want some new pointers, I definitely recommend checking this thread out.

As I’ve reached one of my main goals (breaking $100), as well as a sub goal to that end (breaking $150), my next goal is obviously to break $200 in a day. So when that happens, you should be expecting another post. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.

That’s it for now. Thanks!