Old client New Headache

I did some work for a guy in Canada a few months back. Nice guy, but man, trouble follows him. The last project was to promote an industry that is firmly planted in the gray area. It’s not sports gambling but is damn close. He came to me with a poorly done site, no real plan, no team, nothing in place. He wanted PPC work done but it was obvious that he could have the hottest paid search campaign on the planet but he didn’t realize what many people don’t, getting people to your site is easy, keeping them there is the hard part.  Now throw the fact that Google and Yahoo do not permit this kind of advertising, and some lousy designers and programmers that kept ripping him off and I had a $75 an hour migraine.

I ended up working for him for free for the last month because I felt bad for him, I do have a soft spot. It was a major source of stress for me. PPC became a small part of my job. Managing a designer, finding programmers, dealing with crooks, and fighting with Google and Yahoo to get ads approved took over. He has a frantic leap then look personality, he wanted everything done in 5 minutes and thought he was going to get rich, immediately. I became a shrink, teacher, manager, partner. It was a nightmare. He sort of faded away..

Well, you guessed it he contacted me again, with a new project. At first glance it looks like its a much more thought out idea, the site is sharp, the idea is relatively fresh. Now I have to decide, do I go back to work for him? Can I handle the stress? I know the money is there, but is it worth it. If nothing else, this could provide tons of material to write about. Decisions, decisions.

Starting an eCommerce Website with Magento : My Journey

I have been working in online marketing since Al Gore created the internet. I have marketed everything. I am an SEO expert, PPC, Social Media, etc. I know the ins-and-outs of marketing eCommerce sites. It has been in the back of my mind that I am really foolish for being so complacent that I continue to make money for other people. I should be doing this myself.

I currently work for a company that specializes in B2B ecomm sites. I work with them from inception up until they are rocking the sales. The pieces that I am missing are unfortunately very important parts of the puzzle. So, I have decided it’s time to take the plunge and do it myself. I am have decided to use Magento as the shopping cart, and I will use WordPress for the blog. I am loaded up with Magento modules, WordPress themes, all that stuff is covered.

The hard part about starting an eCommerce site is deciding what you are going to sell. It helps if you have your own products – but if you don’t – you need to create relationships with manufacturers that will give you a good price that you can mark up enough to make money with, but still stay competitive. Deciding on what you are going to sell is also difficult. Hopefully its something you enjoy. The problem is that even if you enjoy something, that doesn’t mean you are an expert. You also need to know if there is a market out there, and how competitive it is. I love music, but I am not an equipment expert, and I also do not have the relationships or capitol to start re-selling high end equipment. The advertising costs are also expensive, and the competition is stiff. I have been giving this a lot of thought.

I am not prepared to announce what the site is, and I will be vague in the theme of the site. Domain age is crucial in getting respect from the search engines, so part of the task was looking through my domains and pulling one that had some age on it. I have decided on a domain that works for the products I am going to sell. It doesn’t have the keyword in it which is unfortunate, but its a pretty good domain and its 8 years old. The domain has 27,000 page in Googles index, but those aren’t going to do much for me so I will probably lose those. The site isnt a high PR site so I am not too stressed about losing them. The amount of pages and the age of the domain at least tells me that Google will visit it frequently so I wont have too much of an indexing problem.

So, I am going to embark on the first part of the project and install Magento on the server. I might document the process that I go through to help out others who are thinking about taking on the same project. I plan on doing this all on my own with no outsourcing so that will be a challenge, but I have a huge advantage when it comes to the marketing of the site. The challenge is going to be opening up the relationships with the manufacturers of the products I plan to sell, the dropshipping, credit card processing etc.

I have been very lazy about keeping this blog up to date, but I will give it a shot and at least try to write short entries with any lessons learned.

If you would like to help contribute to the project, feel free to check out some of the advertisers on this blog. Any bit of revenue will help.

Free Money Making Information. How to make money online. Free Marketing Ebooks!

Gotcha…

I am so tired of the information marketing crap-flood that lands in my email box every day. You know the emails I am talking about, you landed here because you are the ideal target. Actually, I bet I could get you to fork over $27 in 200 words or less. You think you are savvy, but I could. I wont, but I could.

Hey Ben,

its Joe LaDouche here. I just got off the phone with  a guy who also floods you

with obnoxious emails!

I have lost the use of my left arm from excitement.  and he showed me a new

system that he has been quietly using to make 100 million dollars an hour for

the past 6 months. I talked to him for 3 hours and he literally blew my mind!

The information he shared with me is so revolutionary, I literally wet myself

and saw jesus in the pee stains on my jeans! He let me look over his shoulder

while he showed me how he could manipulate Google with his mind while

simultaneously funneling PPC money from his competitors to make his ad

show up on the inside of peoples eye lids when they sleep!

He has a FREE video up but its only going to be there for 10 more seconds

so you better get over there quick before this information is gone forever.

Just between you and me, the last time this guy put out an e-book, he

caused the earth to spin off it’s axis and toilets flushed in the opposite

direction.! Get over there before your head explodes and you get evicted.

Seriously, I know that you have spent your kids college fund $97 at a time

but this is the real deal, I know I said that last time, and the time before, and

the time after, but I swear to God… This time I’m serious.

Oh No! My margins are getting

smaller and smaller I might

have to start sending emails

one character

per

li

n

e

In my brief jaunt into the information marketing world, I did learn some interesting things, for sure. However, what I also learned was that even people – with an otherwise altruistic outlook, found nothing wrong with selling people common sense and advertising 101 in an e-book or membership site. I used to work in porn back when it was fun, I make no secret of that. Porn was the original business of reselling intangibles, and yes, the marketing is manipulative, but there is a big difference between convincing someone that they might be able to score with a chick who is out of their league is a far cry from convincing someone that if they fork over $997, you will tell them something that will change their life.

I manage to get almost any of these systems for free. If you know where to look you can find website communities that will share the cost of these workshops, ebooks, etc. Everyone kicks in $10 an buys it. Honestly, I have felt ripped off paying $10 for a $1000 product. Not everything I have checked out is garbage, there are definitely some smart people out there. Ryan Deiss is a clever guy to be sure. I enjoy reading his stuff.

I’m not going to bash anyone by name. I will tell you something that you should know if you are a customer of that group of gurus. One of them, and this is the Gods honest truth, is currently working with a big community of black hatters to create a completely fictional internet marketing genius, make this character a guru, and pimp his product for him. You know who the guy is who is doing this, he is one of the biggest names in the business, but I’m not going to name him because I don’t need the headache and I don’t like informants. However, just know, that the next time you get an email from your favorite online marketing guru and they mention that some guy they know is coming out of the shadows to reveal some amazing new product – there is a distinct possibility that its a scam. This isn’t speculation on my part, this is something I know as FACT. I have the chatlogs to prove it.

There really isn’t a purpose to this post other than for me to vent a little bit. I was checking my email from my phone and deleting all the information marketing emails and its been a long day, so I was a bit more annoyed than usual.

Think about it before you pull out your credit card. If the price ends with a 7 – take a breath and think back to all the other information products and systems you have bought in the past, now think about how many of them made you a million dollars.

I hope this information helped you. Actually, come to think of it, I might just out this Guru for the scam they are about to pull off. I will tell you who it is… For just $27

Quality Score in Google Adwords

I find that I don’t make posts on this blog because I feel like I need to write some long involved maniphesto and I just don’t have the time. So I don’t. I am not going to do that anymore. There is nothing wrong with a 3 sentence blog post.

I am working on a PPC campaign for an eye doctor. The focus is Lasik. I have been using dynamic keyword insertion in the ads and also on the pages. We are still working on the landing pages, so for the time being I have just been sending the traffic directly to the site. Even with the dynamic keywords on the site itself, the quality score has been at GOOD (7) with a few greats for long tail stuff.

The website is a new domain. The eye doctor owns a domain that is approximately 9 years old. We aliased it to the new site and I changed the PPC ads over to that domain.  No other changes made other than where the ads are pointing. Instantly the quality score went to GREAT on almost all the keywords.

The domain age is obviously a big factor in quality score.

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