Archive

Rich Schefren’s Cashmap Newsletter

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 30, 2008
in Internet business and Recommended Products
. 0 Comments

“Online Business Mad Scientist” Rich Schefren has just put out a new business building course called “The Cashmap Newsletter“.

Okay, I know that sounds like a funny name for a course.
It revolves around different detailed diagrams (maps). Including big picture maps, and detailed process maps.

It’s really like a visual concentrated version of his famous business coaching. About applying his knowledge directly to your business. And it’s a lot cheaper than his main course!

Plus it has a 60 day guarantee. So no risk, if you decide you don’t like it.
Anyway, check it out

Open Office 3.0 beta 2

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 30, 2008
in Tools
. 0 Comments

Before I get deep in this I should mention that I’m not an anti-Microsoft guy, or an open source zealot.

But just wanted to say that with the new 3.0 version of Open Office, it’s now alright to give Microsoft Office the boot. And even with the current “beta2″ version.

I’m sick of shelling out money for MS Office every time I switch platforms (like when I switched from Windows to Mac) or when they come out with an upgrade.

On the other hand, the Open Office “evangelists” have been too early, in the past, to declare Open Office a replacement for MS Office. The prior 2.x versions of Open Office have been good for the Windows world.

But in the mac world, it’s been coming up a little short.
You had the option of running it under X11 (clunky and quirky) …
Or running it under “NeoOffice” (slow, with some bugs)

Now macintosh users can finally jump in to a real version.
And all platforms get the benefit of complete compatibility with MS Office - including VBA macros.

Finally, after years of promise, OpenOffice is ready to become the standard office suite!

(okay, maybe wait until version 3 is out of production. Though in my case even the beta 2 version is better than what I had!)

Don’t get too hung up on a particular domain name

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 30, 2008
in Display URL and Domain names
. 1 Comment

Don’t get too hung up on your domain name. You may think you have the “perfect” domain name. Not realizing you might get better CTR from a more appealing domain (and hard to know, short of testing, which is more appealing). And not realizing you might get better quality scores due to a domain better matching your main keywords.

For example, you may think your domain “JimsGreatBigOnlineStore.com” is perfect for selling model rockets (to give a random example). But people searching will respond more to something like “ModelRocketOnlineStore.com”, that corresponds to what you’re selling. And Google will give you higher quality for keywords with the words “model” and/or “rocket” (which are the most important keywords in that domain).

Oh, and you get more free traffic too, especially from Google!

For example, I threw together a blog under “ScottsdaleOnlineMarketing.com” (for the Scottsdale Arizona area).
I’m currently getting the top listing in Google for “Scottsdale online” and different variations.
Not big traffic. But it is outrageous to me that I could “own” that keyword for organic listings, by virtue of having the domain name and a little content.

Now I understand that you may have a domain name that is established, it give good branding, and/or you may already have affiliates under it.
That’s cool. I’m not saying you throw it away. But you can still have a different one that you use in AdWords, if you find a better one for AdWords purposes.

When to give up on a product or niche, with AdWords

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 30, 2008
in Niches and Testing
. 1 Comment

Sometimes you just have to give up on AdWords for a product or niche.

I don’t usually like to recommend “giving up”. But after trying ALL the tricks, you may have to declare it to not work.

For example, I was helping a client advertise hammocks. But we eventually had to punt on it. It was a rare case where nearly all of the searches were for “hammock” and “hammocks” and the price was outrageous (i.e. unprofitable) per click. Plus content and placement targeting wasn’t much better. Only good for doing very infrequent sales from off-the-beaten path keywords and content sites.

(note: normally I don’t tell a client’s niche, but in this case he is pretty much abandoning it on AdWords, so he’s cool with me “giving it away”)

Though most of the time when someone is looking at this situation it’s because they don’t know how to do Adwords well.  But once in a great while even a master Adwords advertiser has to say “time to move on and pick something else”.

Luckily for the client this was just a test, and he wants to go on to the next niche.

War Chest Builder - more info

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 10, 2008
in Uncategorized and War Chest Builder
. 0 Comments

Based on looking further, I should mention some things:

I should warn that if you’re going to really use War Chest Builder, then you should be prepared to spend a few hundred a month on domains. And more if you want to do dedicated hosting.

You should be looking at getting “.info” domains, which are cheaper. Why spend for “.com”s, if you’re doing AdSense?

And be a little patient in rolling out content, and then AdSense later. So don’t expect to just “flip the switch”. But that’s really about building a business (which is a good thing) rather than expecting a quick return.

43 Split Tests

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 10, 2008
in Testing
. 0 Comments

This is a great report from internet marketer Ryan Deiss.
Check it out here

He and his team have spent over $1 Million doing 321 split tests, to find the optimal choices for salesletters. Like what words for your “Buy Now” button work the best. What background color results in the highest conversions. And tons more.

They boiled that down to 43 key tests. With those findings you can extremely boost your conversion rate. Even with just very easy “tweaks” (such as buy button text, buy button size, background color, etc.)

They’re giving it as a free report with signup for their “Total Access Club”. Though you are free to try out the club and cancel if you don’t like it

——————
Sneaky way to get some of the secrets:

You can get some of the “goods” of the 43 Split Tests report, without even signing up for it.

Just check out their own salespage at 43splittests.com.
They’re applying what they’ve learned from the testing.
So take notes and use their salesletter as a template for your own.

Of course better to get the report, to get the full goods.
But you can get a lot of value by just checking out their page.

That will put you a lot further ahead then the 99.9% of people that are just guessing about what works best (and I’ve been one of those “cowboys” myself - just guessing at what to do)

AdWords Keyword Tool now includes search volume

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 10, 2008
in AdWords News and Keyword research
. 1 Comment

Oh, and here’s some big AdWords news:
The Keyword Tool now (finally) includes search volume information.

When in the Keyword Tool there is a “Approx Avg Search Volume” column. Approx Avg Search Volume is pretty much the volume for the prior month. Though in cases where it has “Insufficient Data” for the prior month, it will do a prediction for the current month.

To me the biggest benefit to this is to be able to do quick keyword research. Especially when looking at new keyword themes, or entire new niches.
A lot better than where it just shows the bar, filled in with green, to show relative search volume. Which is practically useless!

Now it shows actual volume. And this is straight from Google. As opposed to other tools that try to estimate search volume, without having Google’s actual data.

See Google’s post on this, on their blog

War Chest Builder [AdSense sites]

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 9, 2008
in Uncategorized and War Chest Builder
. 0 Comments

This is a post that I wasn’t going to do!
It’s about a system (and high-level mastermind group) for making big money from AdSense, called War Chest Builder

I’m not really “into” doing AdSense. I would rather promote things “straight”, rather than have Google serve ads and give me a percentage.

But then again there are real people making tons of money on AdSense.

Here’s what happened:

My friend Matt Garrett let me in on this “War Chest Builder” system for doing AdSense sites

I looked it over, it looked intriguing, but I dismissed it since I’m not an “AdSense guy”

Then this evening I had a beer and then thought “just because I’m not an AdSense guy doesn’t mean I should keep it from my readers”

Also, I’ve been hearing good things about it. So it’s not like some big systems/products that seem to be more about just grabbing money from people!
(in fact there have been a few products like that over the last few months, that I have refused to promote)

So I’m leaving it up to you. If you are interested in making big money from AdSense, then check out this page. Even if you don’t sign up, it’s very interesting.
And if you do signup and have great success with it, then please send me an email and “rub my nose” in it. Say something like “Darrell, you’re really missing out, because I’m making tons of money on autopilot!”.
I probably should get on the AdSense bandwagon myself. But you can beat me to it. And use this system to really accelerate your success.

Checkout WarChestBuilder … while you can still get in!

Google Nemesis (I don’t recommend)

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 9, 2008
in Product reviews
. 10 Comments

Hope this message isn’t getting to you too late, but wanted to give a “public service advisory” on this new product (actually a service) “Google Nemesis”.

It’s getting promoted pretty heavily, has a great sales page, and says a lot of cool things about affiliate marketing.

But I don’t recommend it. Even though I’ve recommended ebooks from Chis McNeeny, the creator of Google Nemesis, I can’t recommend it.

And I feel I must say that I literally don’t recommend it.
The reason I make that distinction is that Chris (and others) espouse the technique of stating the “contrary” view when promoting a product. So if you’re promoting Google Nemesis, you say something like “Don’t buy Google Nemesis” or “Google Nemesis is no good” and then in your writing you turn it around and get the reader thinking it really is for him/her.

Anyway, I really don’t recommend it.

And this applies to most of the “make a killing promoting ClickBank products via AdWords” products out there.

What they don’t tell you is that even though ClickBank is a huge marketplace for digital goods, there really are not that many good products on ClickBank. And even fewer good products that have good salesletters. You need both to have good conversions and low refunds.

So Google Nemesis will just be accelerating a bad trend:
More and more people competing to promote the same products.

It’s a zero-sum game.

Really the main winners will be:
Chris McNeeny … and people that are selling products on ClickBank (aka ClickBank Merchants). I myself am a ClickBank merchant so maybe I should just shut up and be happy (grin).

Actually if you’ve been wanting to create your own products to sell on ClickBank, now’s a great time to start! (I do consulting on how to quickly create and sell information products, if you need help … just email me for details).

So I’ve been sitting out promoting this. In spite of all of the stuff Chris (or I should say his copywriter) puts on his salesletter saying how it’s a slam-dunk, I know it’s not. If the system applied to all affiliate marketing, then I’d say there’s potential.

But it’s nuts to just pay to get a tool, to compete with thousands of others who are all trying to promote the same products. Especially when we’re talking about a small number of viable products.

For example: one of the big products on ClickBank is Keyword Elite (which is good, by-the-way). You do a search for it and you see tons of ads that are all trying to sell it. Do you think you can just jump in and promote it, using the same techniques as the other guys, and make tons of money?
You need a unique angle. And something like Google Nemesis, that thousands of people buy, is not it.

His big premise is that you can use the tool to “steal” sales from the guys making all the money on ClickBank. But then if you’re promoting ClickBank products you become one of “the other guys” that people are taking sales from. You’ll get some sales, and lose some sales. But you’re spending money on AdWords while doing it.

So let me add another winner to the list:
Google

Even though it’s supposedly about kicking Google’s ass. It’s not really Google that loses. Google comes out the big winner (along with Chris) in all of this.

Chris does have some good stuff in his ebooks. But his more recent stuff suffers from the above problem.

I think we should call this “Sneetch” marketing. Named after the famous Dr. Suess story The Sneetches

In both The Sneetches, and the ClickBank scenario above, you have a marketer who gets people to pay to “win” against each-other (in the Sneetches, it’s about whether you have a star badge or not).
All the people keep paying. And who ends up with the money in the end? The marketer collecting from all the suckers.
Though in the Google Nemesis (and similar) case Google also gets to win. Because they’re the ones running the whole ad auction.

Anyway, that’s my rant.

It’s not against affiliate marketing (which is a good way to make money online) or selling ClickBank products as an affiliate.
It’s against buying any sort of packaged tool or technique that has you competing with a bunch of others doing the same thing … for too few products