If you’ve been following the WebWriMo challenge, you know that it wasn’t as successful as many hoped to be. There are no official numbers from the rest of the group just yet, but to my knowledge, only one person completed the challenge, and that person is InternetAuthor of Wickedfire. She joined the game much later than most of us, and kicked our asses in a couple weeks. This beer is to you InternetAuthor!

As for me, I’ve just missed the 50% mark by less than 1,000 words. But I’m not too upset about it. This has been one of my most productive months by far. And this will be a good point to gauge my productivity by. My goal is to beat my previous months word count each month.

I was very productive the first couple weeks, then I kinda got burnt out, then got sick, and really lost motivation. But even at 24k words, I’ve gotten more unique content up, than I have in a long time. I’ve really learned a lot this month, some grew fantastic moustaches, and I can’t wait to participate next year.

Please don’t judge me on my Photoshop skills. Thank you.

Update: The Blind Ape posted a WebWriMo update, and another snazzy graph.

Just wanted to pop in really quick to wish my 2 readers a happy Thanksgiving. We as affiliates, SEOs, or whatever you may do online, are extremely fortunate that we can work the way we do; when we want, how we want, and for as much money as we want if you really think about it.

Just the fact that we were able to afford a computer and internet connection at one point, so we could start our own businesses online, is far more than a lot of families have, not just in the US, but worldwide.

Take the time to donate to your local food bank, a little money goes a very long way. It’s too late to help people get food on the table today, but you could make a trip to a food bank or soup kitchen and really touch the lives of a lot of people.

Black Friday

In a few short hours, I’ll be stuffing my face with turkey, numerous high carb foods, and dessert. I’ll probably fall asleep well before 10PM (I won’t have my computer around to keep me up). Well before the butt crack of dawn, most of my family will be out in the cold waiting for some deal of some sort. I on the other hand will be waking up in the afternoon, and will hit the online retailers in the comfort of my own home. Suckers… I’ll probably just pick up a 22″ LCD monitor, but who knows.

I’ve never really looked into the traffic on Black Friday, but I assume it could go either way. Monday, no doubt, will be a high traffic day. I’ve recently hired a well qualified local writer to ease the work load, and I’ll be launching a content generation promo for Cyber Monday.

Anyway guys, once again, have a great Thanksgiving. Spend plenty of time with the family, and maybe try to get away from the computer for a little bit.

Oh and if you don’t like sweet potatos with marshmallows, you’re freakin’ insane.

I’ve added the no-follow free plugin to hopefully give motivation to those willing to participate.

November 11th emp posted an update on Blind Ape SEO, with a fancy graph. Go check it out in all its fanciness.

Glowleaf is way ahead, with Greg in second with a baller moustache for the month of Movember. However, assuming that nobody has written much in the last few days, my new word count would put me in second. I’m sure an update, is gonna put be back at least into 3rd. Ballinnnnn…

GaithersburgLocal is coming along nicely, the links from this blog got it indexed almost instantly. But as it turns out, there isn’t a whole lot happening in Gaithersburg, so finding content has been tough. I’ll be making an update about my progress in an upcoming post, as well as some ideas I have for promotion and monetization.

In other news, I’m selling a Pomegranate site on DP, as of now the bidding has reached only $25, with a BIN of $75, a damn good deal if you ask me…

Dominating the local SERPs has been something I’ve been pondering for quite some time now. But as with so many of my projects, I never get around to them, lose inspiration, or some other pathetic excuse. The reason local SEO has always appealed to be is the added sense of security. There will always be small business in my area that are looking to expand onto the web, and I certainly believe I can help.

My plan of attack is to create a number of various, high traffic, web properties for my “hometown” of Gaithersburg, Maryland. I hope to make some valuable connections with local small businesses, by offering low cost, high traffic, ad spots across my network. But where will they direct this traffic? Ah-hah! That’s where I come in. Not only can I offer my customers low cost, highly targeted, local traffic, but I can also provide them with a full blown web presence, and internet marketing campaign. In other words, the cheap ads will be my foot in the door.

Gaithersburg Local

My first project is GaithersburgLocal.com, which will be my main hub. I’m honestly not quite sure how I’ll be keeping it full of fresh content, but maybe November is just the start of many 50k word months, thanks to WebWriMo… we shall see. Working on a local project will hopefully get me in touch with some people that will be happy to help out too.

Anyway, the goal is to compete with the local newspaper(s), and hopefully I will gain the advantage as newspapers become obsolete. I plan to be providing news, business, entertainment, sports, dining, and event coverage. I’m still not sure if all these different super-mini-niches will be contained under the GaithersburgLocal title, or if I will migrate them over to their own domains. Wordpress probably isn’t capable of everything I want to do, so it will likely be the only option. Again, we shall see.

Day 1:

I justed started working on this a couple hours ago, but I’ve gotten a good chunk of work done already.

• I got another sexy theme from Elegant Themes. I’ve actually used a few themes from Nick, the owner already. I figured I would take advantage of it since it’s only $19/yr. The theme still needs a lot of changes, but it’s hard to work with without much content to fill it with. Many changes will be made in coming days.
• I got a post up about a Veteran’s Day event being held in downtown Gaithersburg. I plan to stop by tomorrow, during the event, so I can take pictures and such. Community involvement is going to play a big role in the success of this site, so I figured I’d start sooner than later.

Whats Next?

I obviously need to add more content so the site can start looking worth the $8.81 I payed for the domain. Once the site fills out a little more I’ll be able to present it to local business owners, and properly promoting it.

I know a few business owners in the area, and am going to try to strike a deal for free ads on the site, in exchange for some in store ads, that will hopefully bring some traffic in. I also plan on taking a page from Shoemoney’s book (though I doubt this is in anyway original), and try to collect emails by offering coupons from local merchants.

I’d really like a community of some sort to go along with it, but it may be one of those features that deserves it’s own site. Speaking of which, has anyone ever tried phpizabi? I used it when it was still very unstable, and it caused me nothing but trouble. However, it looks much more promising than before. Glowleaf recommends phpfox, but I almost always prefer to go open source (because I’m cheap and like the faster development).

The other option is to go with a forum, and I’ve always wanted to use Vanilla or bbpress.

Anywho… I’m just rambling at this point, and I doubt anyone wants to continue to read my frantic brainstorming. I’ll try to update you guys on the progress of my local efforts, the results in particular.

I wish I knew exactly what was next, but then again, this industry wouldn’t be as fun if I did.

I used the following method to earn my first few bucks with affiliate marketing not all that long ago. I continue to use it today. However, the exact method I’ll explaining I no longer use because it got saturated, and the ads may not even be TV or radio on anymore. Whatever it was, I stopped making money with it and moved on.

The Concept

The basic stradegy is to bid on keywords that people may be searching for after they see or hear an ad on radio or TV. By doing so you can get extremely cheap clicks, with very little competition. In this example I was taking advantage of the TVFreeXbox.com commercials. It was some young guy talking about how you could get a free Xbox 360 for just signing up.

What they didn’t tell you in the commercial was that you had to complete X number of offers before you got it. It was essentially the exact same thing as the free gadget email/zip submits you see on almost every affiliate network. The only difference is that these are promoted on TV/radio, and they probably won’t go so far out of their way to keep you from getting your reward.

So I was bidding on keywords such as tvfreexbox.com, “tv free xbox”, etc. (Make sure on keyphrases you do exact or phrase match or you will be paying for a bunch of keyphrases that won’t convert.

This is an easy mini-niche to earn some extra cash with for two reasons. The clicks are cheap, and there isn’t much competition, as mentioned earlier. The second reason is that people that are searching for such things are usually not too bright to begin with, are happy to enter their zip/email, and they may even think you are the company advertising on TV which adds to your percieved reliability.

Tips and Expansion

• The closer you can get to the advertised domain, the better. But be careful not to copy it too closely. I was running a campaign with theirdomain.info instead of the .com that they were using. It wasn’t long before my affiliate manager contacted me to tell me the company was threatening legal action. On Yahoo, I even made the mistake of using their domain as my display URL. Conversions went up, but I’m pretty sure thats what got me in trouble.
• Don’t direct link. People that find your ad have probably searched around for other free offers. They’ve probably seen your landing page before if you are direct linking, and your bounce rate will be higher than if you used a landing page.
• Go the scam route. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m sure you’ve seen those “MLM Program Exposed” ads on Google, or something similar. I have a feeling this would work. Especially for sites that have the SERPS littered with forum/ripoffreport threads.
• It’s also a good idea to explore outside of the “free stuff” niche. I know it has been discussed on Wickedfire before, how you can bid on late night MLM urls and such.

I hope this was informative, and gave some of you guys new to AM some ideas. This definitely won’t make you rich, but it can make you at least $50 a week depending on how many advertisements are running for the sites you are piggybacking off of.

If you are looking for some email submits to try this method with, check out Copeac (aff). If you signed up under my link, and are looking for some help, feel free to ask.

Every time I start a new Wordpress based site, I usually spend multiple hours looking for an appropriate theme. Luckily I know enough HTML, CSS and PHP to modify the themes a bit. Otherwise I don’t think I’d ever get any projects completed.

There’s always something like 125×125 ads, horrible coding, bad slicing, or some idiot trying to be innovative by adding a completely useless feature that only confuses visitors, and break the theme if you take it out. Not that I don’t appreciate the open source community, especially the one supporting Wordpress, but damn make more functional themes for God’s sake.

Improvements are on the horizon with the new magazine theme fad, and more flexible and robust themes, but I still find it almost impossible to find a decent theme these days. Maybe I should stop bitching and finally learn how to put a Wordpress theme together. Naw, maybe some other time.

This is a horrible way to do things if you’re trying to utilize the fire and forget mindset. Just get something up. Eventually you will stumble across a theme that you think will work for it.

While the Carrington Blog theme was pretty slick, the whole reason I use Wordpress is because it is easy, and I can manage almost everything from the control panel. Carrington on the other hand had me constantly going back through though dozens of theme files locally. Which is a big pain in the ass. The theme is supposed to be aimed towards developers and I’m sure it really flexible, but this is a personal blog of sorts, and I’m lazy.

So I finally decided to shell out some cash for some premium themes. So I got a license for the cheapest theme club I could find. So far everything looks good, but I’ll probably spend tomorrow messing with it. I think this theme adds a more professional feeling to things, which I think will be good for marketing my services. I’ve also been looking for themes for local projects, and I think at least one of the themes here will do.

In other news…

Obama won the presidential election, and I’m up to 3835 (including this post) for the WebWriMo challenge.

I’ll be posting some semi-useful stuff in the next couple days, which will be aimed towards beginner to intermediate afffiliates, so you guys already banking, don’t expect a whole bunch from me. Though you guys probably don’t waste much time reading such posts anyway.

I mentioned my extra motivation to get this blog up in my first post. EMP, veteran WickedFire member, and the writer behind Blind Ape SEO has started the first WebWriMo challenge. The goal is to write 50,000 words worth of content during the month of November.

The idea is inspired from National Novel Writing Month where people are encouraged to write a full novel in a single month. Quality is not a factor, the goal is to just get shit done, and hopfully inspire some creativity in the process.

I’m not quite sure how many words in I am yet, but an update, and possibly a sidebar feature will be up soon to track my progress. I know I’ve already done a few thousand words for personal projects as well as writing content for others.

I encourage the couple people that happen to find my blog this month to participate.

Update 11/3: I got the progress bar up, and calculated my word count, which is just about 2k words.

I happen to be far more productive around 2-3am than any other time of the day. The bad part is that I get exhausted around 6am. This leaves me with 2-3 hours of peak productivity. During the day I’m constantly getting distracted by my horrible cigarette habit, my ever-nagging brother, or even TV when I’m extremely bored and unmotivated. But in the wee hours of the morning, I can actually focus in on my work and get some shit done.

I’ll admit, I decided it was time to get my personal blog back up right before I hit my exhausted stage. We shall see in the morning if it will remain up. Part of the reason I’ve decided to get it going again is because as I’m growing more and more in the internet marketing industry (affiliate marketing, SEO, etc.). As I expand my services and knowledge, I get the growing urge to share what I’ve learned, and network with others, particularly in my area of Gaithersburg, Maryland and the Washington DC/Baltimore area as a whole. I’ll be explaing the remaining part of my motivation for getting this blog up in my next post.

To be honest, I have no idea what direction I will be taking this blog. But as they say, “strike while the iron is hot”. If I didn’t get this blog up tonight, I may have never done it.