SEO and Marketing

The other day I was doing a bit of arbitrage which involved driving traffic I bought with Adwords onto a landing page selling a particular product. This can be quite tricky but if you get your maths + niche right, you can make some nice cash. So I targeted a bunch of related sites running Adsense. Paid for a bunch of clicks and sold a few products. I have made a little profit so I was happy. Now why would not the websites I advertised on cut out the middle man (Google) and sell the products themselves, directly?

Have you ever thought about this? Why do people advertise with Adwords? Why do they pay you 50c for every click? Or even $5/click! (Considering that Google also keep certain % of the money) How can they afford to do this? Its quite simple really. They are able to generate more money from that visitor than 50c. These companies either sell their own service/product or simply do what I do and redirect people to their affiliates page. So why would you want to your incredibly profitable visitor to go somewhere else for a few cents even though you could have converted them yourself?

Have a look at your Adsense ads. (Don’t click on them. Manually enter the urls) What are these companies selling? Try and see if you can sell their product/service directly to your visitors via an affiliate program. I myself need to sit down and come up with something for this blog when I get a bit of time off from my main projects.

Have a look what Shoemoney has to say about Adsense on blogs:

Have you seen “Revolution”? Its an inspiring movie that has been released not that long ago. I watched it the other month and I must say, found it quite touching. Even though this is not my kind of movie. Anyhow, I am not here to discuss the film. I want to talk about the marketing concept that was used to monetize this movie. The video bellow explains the new ticket sales concept quite well:

I can say this concept was a massive concept for these guys. I’m sure you can research the exact figure on your own if I intrigued you enough.

So I decided to try the same approach online. I picked my best selling Ebook that sold like crazy not that long ago. I knew it was a quality product because I have sold 100 limited copies within a few days and not only had 0 complaints, I had people contact me to say thank you. I did not just stop there however. I have bundled the Ebook with more tools and bonuses in order to turn it into a truly great product. I then gave it away for free and asked the “buyers” to pay for it afterwards if they found the product useful. There was no set price either. I asked them as to pay as much or as little as they want, depending on how satisfied they were with the product.

50 copies later do you know how much money I have made? $0! Not a penny! I had people contact me to say thank you. I had some people say they will pay me later as soon as they get more paypal founds. Some said they would send me a cheque… But at the end of the day I got nothing.

You are probably thinking… There are plenty of open source projects that rely on donations from its users. I myself started my online journey with a project that relied on donations because I never even heard of Adsense etc back then… However what I tried with my ebook was slightly different. I knew that my “customers” had the money, I knew that they were willing to pay for this product before, I encouraged them to pay at least something, I made my concept clear and I even followed up some time later.

PS: Obviously they was not a scientific experiment. It was small scale and not so random in terms of customer demographics etc.

Try searching on Google for “30 minute backlinks” or “seo elite” or any other popular product. Look at the sponsored search ads. What do you see? “Don’t buy seo elite”, “seo elite is a scam”, “30 minute backlinks scam”, “30 minute backlinks a waste of money” etc. Try visiting one of these sites. Can you see it now? They are not trying to stop you from buying the product. In fact they are trying to sell you the product… by telling you it’s a scam? Believe it or not some of these people make $30.000/month+ on pretty much auto pilot.

Here is how they do it:
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Ahhh the power of viral marketing. A successful viral marketing campaign can make you a millionaire overnight. I will not be talking about creating viral material however. Quite frankly if i was any good at that i doubt i would have been here writing this blog post right now. However, what i am good at is generating traffic from somebody else’s viral material.

You will need to be quick and you will need to be able to spot great material before it goes viral. Lets talk about viral videos for example. If a video posted on YouTube does extremely well and generates a lot of views you can assume that it will also do well on sites like Digg and Videosift. If another video appears on Google videos movers and shakers list we can assume it is a sign of a “shooting star” video that people are interested in it. Why would this video not do well on other sites?

What i have been doing for a number of projects i worked on, was taking that middle man position. I would take viral material from one person and show it to others via my own domain. The reason i decided to use videos as an example is because in most cases you don’t have to worry about copyrights, videos are easy to embed into your website and finally there is an existing market/infrastructure for entertaining videos.

You need an eye for such material. This will require quite a bit of practice and research. You will need to know what works and what does not. See what videos make it to the front page of videosift for example. See if you can notice any trends. Then try and spot such material on other sites such as YouTube and intercept it before someone else submits it to Digg.

Using this method i was able to hit front pages of huge websites day after day, generating huge streams of traffic. My domains would jump to PR6/7 like there is no tomorrow. And the best of all, this method will bring you huge long term benefits in the way any sort of linkbait would.

PS: I’m sorry if this post was slightly vague or lacked step by step instructions. Its just this method appeared in one of my Ebooks and me going any deeper into this subject would not be fair to those who have purchased that Ebook.
PPS: Oh and this Ebook is no longer for sale either.

If you have not heard already adtoll.com is giving away free $20 for all new advertisers no strings attached. Join up before its too late. I just did myself. I can’t really tell how how well this worked because I’m yet to set up a campaign. But yet again… even if my ads fail miserably I’m not losing a penny. Good luck!

PS: You will see your $20 appear in credits straight after being assigned an account manager.

-edit- You are too late now.