My Goals for 2008

This posting is hopefully not one of those boring “these are my goals for 2008” postings that you find all over the place. I don’t do these type of postings very often in general. But I want to write down my goals so that I am able to go back and check them off when I complete a goal or task. I have large expectations for 2008 and I want to remind myself not to lose track of what I want to accomplish. So, that said – here is some stuff I am trying to accomplish in 2008.

1. Increase my income from affiliate marketing to at least match my monthly income from Google Adsense
2. Build up knowledge and share some of it on this blog as a) time permits and b) without jeopardizing my income.
3. Build up my cash reserve to at least 3 times of what it is now
4. Network. Network. Network with other people in the industry.
5. Visit at least one major convention – be it PubCon, Affiliate Summit, or SES

Here is more input for each goal. Goal #1. I am making some decent money from Adsense per month (low 4 digit $$$) and it helps me for sure to expand my business. But at the same time I’d like to reduce my dependency on Adsense and build up income from Affiliate Marketing. A lot of my efforts will go towards this goal. My current income from affiliate marketing fluctuates between $50 and $300 per month. So, quite some work that will keep me busy. Goal #2. I am learning a lot from other blogs and I am thankful for that. I’d like to give back a little bit of that by sharing knowledge as I go. You might not get a full blue-print from me, but I see it that you grab bits and pieces here there (that’s what I do). Take all those pieces and put them together to see the big picture. That’s where the value comes in. Goal #3. I like to have more cash on the side. One reason is that I can collect interest from that money. That is easy money in my business pocket. It also allows me to be prepared for growth. I can spend money on PPC marketing, on software. I can buy existing websites and add more income streams that way. You get the idea. Goal #4. Networking is an important piece in this industry. I am not doing it enough. I want to connect more with other people and share knowledge and opinion. I started a little bit in 2007 with traveling to the SEOMOX SEO Seminar in Seattle, but these ‘networking leads’ have turned out to be quiet, except for one guy adding me to his newsletter (not really what I consider networking). And last but not least – Goal #5. It goes hand in hand with goal #4. I think going to a convention can help a lot to gain important business knowledge. So, I have not yet decided which convention I should attend, but I will try to make efforts to go to at least one.

So, there you have it. These are my goals for 2008.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope that 2008 will turn out great for you.

Christoph

Last minute Tax Deductions

I decided to spend some more money in 2007 – especially since I returned the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook and will have to count the refund towards 2007 and not 2008 from an accounting perspective. I mentioned several times already that I am running a server (Windows Server 2003) at home for my keyword and SEO related tools. The current server is an old AMD XP1700 workstation with 768 MB RAM. I built that machine myself in 2001 and it is surely getting old. So, today I went onto Dell’s website and played a little bit with the configurations for servers and workstations. Workstations can make great servers considering that you trade redundancy and server reliability a little bit towards price. But overall – if you plan and customize a workstation properly it makes a really great server at a lower cost. This usually works great for small businesses or home offices where you do not need all the bells and whistles of a real server (e.g. rack mounting, SCSI drives, dual or quad physical CPUs, hot swappable drives, etc.).

After browsing Dell’s website I ordered an OptiPlex 755 workstation from Dell’s Outlet store. The outlet store sells machines returned by other customers for various reasons. Dell then recertifies the machines and makes sure they are pretty much as new. At the end they deduct a certain amount of the price and sell the machines again. None of these machines extremely old or used a lot. I actually have not seen a machine that came from the Dell Outlet store that did not look brand-new and acted as if it would be new.

My requirements for a new machine were less on the consumer side, but on the business side. I wanted a strong dualcore CPU and at least 2 GB of memory combined with a SATA hard drive. I don’t care about Video card, DVD drive, or stuff like that too much. I think I made a good deal on this Dell OptiPlex 755. A newly configured machine of the same type came out at $940.00 + Tax + Shipping. My new system was priced at $569.00 + Tax + Shipping. The system features a Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6750 (2.66GHz, 4MB, VT, 1333MHz FSB) and 2 GB of RAM combined with a 160 GB SATA hard drive. This will make for a great work horse sitting in my basement crunching bits and bytes for me. I liked especially the 4 MB CACHE and the high CPU speed of the Core 2 Duo Processor. This will speed up some of my business processes from like a Yugo to a nice 5-Series Beamer (BMW).

So, if you are planning your taxes carefully, make sure you make final adjustments before the end of the year. My Dell order is confirmed to ship in 2007 and so is my credit card charged in 2007 as well. And due to the nature of this item and the existing tax law I can fully write if off in 2007 as a business expense (I love easy tax deductions). That’s all I needed.

Adwords Quality Score Domain Killer

It seems like there are several levels of Quality Score minimum bids and how they apply to a domain name. At first when you get slapped with high minimum bids you can go back and work out better ad copy and improve the landing page/landing website. If that does not help to get your quality scores improved and to reduce your minimum bids the domain name moves up one level on Google’s internal ranking and after a certain time the punishment seems to become permanent. During spring/summer I was running a successful campaign on Google Adwords. Once the quality score and minimum bid settings moved mainstream I had to stop the campaign because I could not get a better quality score. It turned out Ok because at the same time the merchant provider made changes to their landing pages as well and so the traffic that I was sending from my landing page to the merchant failed to convert. No big deal.

I joined more affiliate networks this fall and one network had a similar campaign related to what I was running earlier that year and I figured it might be time to re-activate my campaigns. I build more content around my landing pages and added some more incoming links and let it all “cook” for a while. Finally I went to rebuild/re-activate my campaigns. I build a new landing page with dynamic keyword insertion and fired off SpeedPPC and Google Adwords Editor to upload my campaigns. I was instantly slapped with $10.00 minimum bids. I modified the landing pages again and let it sit before I tried again. Bang, $10.00 minimum bids. I built new keyword lists and bang, $10.00 minimum bids. No matter what I tried – the extremely high minimum bids just did not go away.

So, I went and bought a new domain name, uploaded the content from my other side only changing the domain name inside the text (as an example for the copyright, etc.) and then recreated my Adwords campaigns in SpeedPPC with the new domain name. I then uploaded the campaigns and bang, $0.03 minimum bids in many cases. It felt like Christmas when somebody turned on the lights on the Christmas tree. All my keywords were activated with minimum bids ranging from $0.03 to $0.05 and “Great” quality score ratings across the board. My campaigns are running again and I am ready to make some cash.

My Conclusion: Since deactivating my campaigns and starting with new ones from scratch (none of the old ones were used / I copied keywords and ad copy into new campaigns and pointed to a new landing page file) Google Adwords “remembered” the old quality score punishment and instantly applied towards anything done on that domain. I know from other occasions you can go back, delete the old campaign, fix some problems and come back and life is good – Google gives you another chance so to speak by re-evaluating your keywords, ad copy, and the landing page. However, if time passes by for too long without making changes (here: me just de-activating the campaigns, but not doing anything to the site for a few months) the punishment seems to move from temporary and fixable to permanent and non-fixable. The only “fix” in such a case is to register a new domain name and start fresh. That’s what I did and got my campaigns back up and running. So, if you are stuck on high minimum bids in Google Adwords, spend $8.00 on a new domain name and try again. It might save you a lot of time and might make you more money.

PS: If you are interested in buying SpeedPPC, make sure to do it through my affiliate link. I am still offering $100.00 Cash Back Bonus pay. Send me a copy of your purchase receipt and once your purchase is confirmed you’ll receive $100 cash back via PayPal.

Why I returned the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook 2008 Edition

This is a review of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook 2008 Edition with details why I returned the handbook to the publisher taking advantage of their 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. Back in November I wrote about my intention in buying the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook. A new version was published and I was waiting just for that too arrive. But when the book hit the (virtual) shelves of the MarketingSherpa Store I was quite shocked about the increase in pricing. The price went up from $297 to $497 for the new edition. I had higher priorities and it took me until early December 2007 before I was able to pull my business credit card out of my wallet to pay a total of $501.60 (Landing Page Handbook + Shipping). I received instant access to the PDF version of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook and pretty much started reading right away. It took about a week before the “hardcopy” of the handbook arrived. I was glad it was not damaged because a) it was delivered in one of those larger, soft material (not cardboard) priority mail envelopes that you get for free from the post office and b) because the mail carrier was able to squeeze it into a normal post box – not really properly sized to hold an item like this. Better judgment would have asked to place it into the box department and put the key in my normal mail box, but what it gives – I got lucky and received bended a little bit, but not damaged.

At this time I had read the Landing Page Handbook about twice and was ready to read it again. I prefer books and magazines when reading some stuff. It is easier on the eyes and allows to take notes or mark text that I consider important (either on paper or with sticky notes). The landing page handbook of Marketing Sherpa had some good information in it – no doubt. It also had some great information in it as well. BUT – many areas of the book were just a collection of numbers that are nice if you just want to provide statistics – but often enough the conclusions made from those statistics were short or incomplete or missing at all. What good is a collection of statistics without the proper conclusions from it? If I spend $500 on a product I expect a little more. This is not a $29.95 book from Amazon.com. For $500 I do except a little more. The examples of landing pages the book had were partially good, while others more seemed like placeholders to boost the number of pages of the report. A one or two sentence comment is not considered a great analysis in my opinion. If you expect the landing page handbook to be your guide to learn more about landing pages, you will be disappointed. The book has a great approach of introducing you to landing pages overall, some psychological visitor behavior, and touches some of the pieces to make better landing pages, it definitely fails to tie the knots. If you expected to build better landing pages after studying the 2008 Landing Page Handbook you would feel like being sent on a journey just to find out that the map is missing the details on how to find safely back home.

My conclusion: If this book would have been priced at $297.00 like the former version I would have had no problem on keeping it. It would have still been expensive, but considering the value it delivered much less tempting to use the money back guarantee. It would have felt like an expensive item that did not fully live up to the hype, but still came out pretty good. But pricing the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook at a steep $497.00 is just way out of the ballpark in my opinion. A price increase that high is better be backed up by some serious value. Value I personally did not see coming from the 2008 edition of the landing page handbook. The landing page handbook is now back on its way to Rhode Island. I don’t know if this review of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook is what you expected. I am disappointed myself a little bit. I don’t mind spending money when I receive proper value in return. I do not return items very often. I might not always get what I expected when purchasing an item, but I always carefully weigh what I received and what value I got from a product. I only return items when the price and the delivered value are out of sync.

PS: This review was published after the item was delivered to the Post Office. I just had not had time to write about it earlier. And I used better packaging to return the handbook so that it arrives in a state that it can be resold as new.

Outlook for 2008

I am really looking forward to 2008. I am very motivated to continue down the path I am on. 2007 was a good year for my business – even though it did not develop as far as I had hoped for, but what gives. I think it is always to set lofty goals and works towards those compared to setting small goals that do not pose a challenge. I like challenges. So, my goals will be lofty again for 2008. I want to grow my business further – further than I pushed it anywhere before. My main area I am going to concentrate on will be affiliate marketing. I leveled out on my Google Adsense earnings and I hate the dependency I have on Adsense. I do like Google Adsense as the 4-figure income I make from it almost every month allows me to finance the efforts in other areas (PPC Marketing, Software, Hardware, Education, etc.) of my business. But Google Adsense is very unstable and I would not like to see it again to be my major source of income. The last quarter of 2007 has seens some larger direct advertising sales which gave me some good income and I want to expand that area next year. I am also working hard to expand my affiliate marketing efforts. The second half of 2007 has seen more income coming from that area and at this point I would be able to substain the loss of Google Adsense income if (god forbids) I would be faced with being removed from the Google Adsense program for whatever reason.

I will still be active in SEO for my sites, but I think I want to push my PPC marketing efforts more. It removes some dependencies on Google as well. I have always been a friend of several streams of income and that expands to having several streams of how traffic is driven to my websites. A large forum of mine is pretty much driven by word of mouth and Google in a 50/50 ratio. Considering that Google sends 500+ of visitors every day, you can imagine what that means for word of mouth traffic. The niche this forum is in is not an extremely high paying one, but it is very steady and stable. Anyway – back to my outlook for 2008. As mentioned before I will push my affiliate marketing efforts combined with PPC marketing. I am not handing out some top secrets if I mention here that I am getting ready for the tax return season here in the USA. Last year in February I bought a good domain name and got a small site indexed and listed in search engines since then. For the last few days I have been revamping the site with a really nice design and more unique content that I am writing. I also started advertising the site a little more to increase natural traffic. I still have to design the landing pages for the soon to be out tax affiliate marketing programs. I know, I know – that will be a busy market to be in come mid-January, but I think there is room for me as well and to make some money from it. The nice thing is that this market is really hot for a while and that there are several ways to make money. So, my goal is to make a net profit of at least $2,500 from it. I know, I know – it is small compared to the volume that is out there and if things turn out to be better I am the last one to complain. But I will be working on follow-up projects as well that will cover the time come April. And realisticly considering the time per day I have available for my business is not enough unless I really hit gold with one of my efforts. Another goal is to grow the business to a volume that makes 50% of my income from my full-time job (that’s a lofty goal already since I do not work for something even close to minimum wage). Building up cash at the same time will allow me to make some other decisions down the road eventually.

Another goal is to make it to one of the major conferences next year. 2007 I made it out to Seattle to the SEOMOZ training seminar. For 2008 I might look at one of the affiliate summits or maybe even PubCon towards the end of the year. The chance to do some networking and eventually to gain some knowledge from the conference speakers is something I am really looking forward to. If you can recommend a certain event, please feel free to post in the comments.

Oh, well …. it is getting late. It’s almost Christmas Eve and I have been working the night away. I will not be busy in affiliate marketing for the next few days, but I will not be lazy, too. Anway – Have a Merry Christmas if that is what you celebrate. If you celebrate something different or nothing at all – all the best to you, too. Have a great 2008.

Christoph

Small Business Tools that make your Life easier

I usually prefer to work on all the exciting stuff that helps to make me more money, but sometimes you just have to do the plain old boring business stuff like accounting and filing/archiving of data and paper. Yuck. I do not like those tasks too much, but they come with running a business and cannot be avoided (unless you want to get into trouble with the IRS). Since those tasks cannot be avoided really, it makes sense to work smarter not harder on them to reduce the time and efforts spend on them. I am not having an accountant at this point as I think my business volume just does not justify the expense yet, but that does not mean I am going cheap (or better: too cheap) in how I do things. I want to be most efficient as possible. Here is what I do for all my accounting and archiving of business data.

For my business accounting I use Quicken 2007 Home & Business. It’s not as complex and difficult to learn compared to QuickBooks. It’s cheaper than QuickBooks, but does everything I need for my Internet business. The only thing I wish it would have is the ability to get my data directly out of PayPal. I have to export it from PayPal first and them import it into Quicken. Quicken 2008 Home & Business is supposed to have that feature. If I get a good deal I might upgrade or wait out another year. Overall I am pretty happy with Quicken. Many people bitch about it, but often I do think these guys don’t take the time to learn the essentials and think it has to be the magic bullet that solves all the problems. You still need some basic math skills and the ability to think.

The second piece I use is a high-speed color scanner made by Fujitsu. The Fujitsu Scansnap S510 Color Image Scanner is a dual-sided scanner that can scan up to 18 pages, both sided in ~1 minute. It comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat Standard 8 (that is the software that allows you to create PDF files and not just read them / pretty cool ). The thing I really like is the small foot print of this scanner. You fold it open and it turns itself on. It has a document feeder so that you can just load it and let it scan. Smaller receipts – even in size of the ones you get from a gas station (=very small) go through the feeder just fine (I do those by hand and not through the main document feeder). The software that is included allows to make the PDFs searchable. This piece is awesome. If I need my receipt for Quicken, I just search the database and it finds the receipt for me. I am still in the process of scanning the paper work for 2002 to 2005, but once I am done I can shred all the paper and free up an entire filing cabinet and get rid of it. The scanner is not cheap, but the time and space I am saving is worth it. Don’t buy the Neat Receipt Scanner and software in case you heard about it. It’s not reliable enough and not as fast.

This setup for my home office works out very well for me. As long as you keep up with filing and accounting these tasks almost become a pleasure to do (no, not really, but they are less tedious now). What tools do you use that make your business life easier? Anything you can recommend?

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