Only Four Hours

I’m trying to lose about 8kgs by the end of next month in preparation for a Bangkok Fun Run so every day I’m listening to different MP3’s at the gym.

This week I’ve run for three hours and have listened to interviews from PPC-Coach and from Perry Marshall.

I enjoy listening to anything I can about the PPC industry but I really question the value of these interviews. Certainly they can be inspiring to hear 21 year olds raking in over $1,000 a day but you’ll be amazed at how little’s actually communicated.

It’s quite obvious that these super-affiliates don’t intend to share anything of real value in their interviews and they all pretty much run along the same lines. These affiliates would make great politicians as they are extremely skilled in talking for an hour without saying anything. It makes me very nervous to ever meet people like this at networking events.

To save you some time, here’s the gist of any interviews you might come across.

Q “How did you become successful?”

A “Well I started out building campaigns, and most of them failed, but then after a while some were profitable and I’ve just grown from there”

Q “How much money are you actually making?”

A “Well I’m not really sure but it’s about the sum of the square of the matrix hypothesis avocado”

Q “How many campaigns are you actually running?”

A “Well it’s directly proportional to the sum of the square of the matrix hypothesis avocado”

Q “What are you promoting right now?”

A “We are involved in many markets right now, some are making great money, others are not”

Q “How do you spend your time?”

A “I work crazy hours, most of that is spent building campaigns, researching and tweaking campaigns”

Q “How do you tweak campaigns?”

A “I tend to go through them and find things that work and things that don’t work. If it isn’t working I either make changes, or i drop it”

Q “How do you conduct your research?”

A “The internet is your friend. I always study all about campaigns before I launch them.”

Q “What’s the secret of being successful?”

A “Work hard and don’t give up”

Q “Do you promote rebill campaigns?”

A “Erm, well … I sort of do .. but nothing unethical … but .. erm.. people should read the terms when they order anything online anyway. I do kind of promote them but I’m doing it ethically, please don’t hate me for saying that”

Popularity: 12% [?]

I’ve been advertising (albeit unsuccessfully) on Facebook Ads for the past 2 weeks but decided today to apply for a business account rather than use my personal one.

There are a few advantages in doing this …

• I like to think that Facebook treats registered businesses a little better than hobbyist advertisers. I’ve not heard any evidence supporting this but I can’t see how using a business account could ever be worse than a personal account
• Although I certainly plan to run my ad campaigns ethically, it’s not unheard of for Facebook to close down advertisers accounts. If these are connected to a persons personal Facebook profile then there’s a risk that this too may be closed down.
• By registering with a business name you’re able to realize a $100 coupon from Visa Business Network. Registering here is free and seeing as I’ve flushed away a few hundred dollars in ad spends this past week, a bonus $100 will help to offset this loss
• Increased account limits. It’s been suggested to me that Facebook treats advertisers who have high account limits better than regular account holders. Apparently Facebook send higher quality traffic to your ads in the hope that you’ll increase your spends each day. I’m a little cynical about this myself but have nothing to lose in applying anyway. I’m going to ask for a $10,000 a day spending limit although I’ll not come close to that for a very long time.

A friend told me recently that he knows of people who applied for an increased spending limit and found all their ads on their account disapproved the next day. I’ve decided to open the business account and to apply for the increased spending limit on the same day. If it draws attention to my account whilst there’s no active campaigns set up then I’m at least protecting myself from this happening to me.

I’ve heard that if you redeem your Visa Business Network coupon for a personal account, you put your Facebook account at risk of closure. As with so much gossip online I’ve no idea how true this is, but I’m not taking any chances.

All I’ve done so far is …

1. Opened up a new Facebook Advertising Account
2. Joined The Visa Business Network and claimed my $100 Facebook Coupon (they also provide a $75 Yahoo Search Marketing Coupon too)
3. Sent an email to affiliates@facebook.com to request an account limit increase. I also mentioned that I’ve chosen to move from my personal account o a business account just to clarify to them that I’m not deceptively trying to operate multiple advertising accounts.

Popularity: 54% [?]

I found this article very interesting. I’ve met many PPC-Practitioners and SEO-Practitioners who really seem to hate their counterparts.

Personally I don’t see anything wrong with doing both. SEO takes a lot longer to undertake but, once it’s working, all traffic to your site is effectively free. I like the idea of running PPC campaigns to test a market out. if it becomes profitable then it may be a sign to build a more elaborate website and to conduct SEO on that afterwards.

Anyway, this article below is an enlightening read for those of you scared to put money into PPC.

The Paid Advertising Syndrome On Digital Point | Finch Sells: “”

Popularity: 6% [?]

After migrating a lot of websites over to my WiredTree hosting account I’ve decided to put 36 domain names of mine up for sale.

Some of these domains really are excellent and I’m sure somebody with experience in selling domains could make a great profit from some of them.

Being practical though, 36 domains costs me $360 a year in unnecessary registration fees and for now I’d prefer the cash.

I may be reluctant to say goodbye to a few domains as I’ve held on to some for a long time with the intention of using them, so, even though I’ve listed a minimum selling price for each domain, I’m not committing to anything just yet.

My favorite domains of the group are:

AllVideos.biz, AllScreensavers.biz, AllSoftware.biz and AllGames.biz

I actually have custom-built sites on these domains and planned to monetize them with Zango’s pay-per-install service. Unfortunately I never quite got the hand of marketing them and probably won’t return to them in the future.

IsBlogged.com, AreBlogged.com, IsReviewed.com, AreCompared.com

I bought these because they’ll be fantastic with subdomains e.g. Viagra.IsReviewed.com, Cellphones.AreCompared.com etc. however now I’m actually making landing pages for affiliate offers, I’m preferring to buy one .com domains for each page.

CheckForSpam.com Check4Spam.com

It was a sad day for me when the site I had custom-built for this domain got irreparably hacked and I gave up on it. With the need to control spam increasingly important, these domains could be of great long-term value.

You can view all the domain details here.

Please Contact Me if you’d like to make me an offer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Although I’m pleased with my web hosting at WiredTree, I’m also a little paranoid about how often my websites are online.

Sure WiredTree has 24/7 monitoring services but just recently the entire WiredTree server went offline (this was for scheduled maintenance). At this time I didn’t receive any email alerts telling my sites were down so I’ve been looking for an additional monitoring service too.

There are a lot of services out there but most of the free services only check your sites every 30 minutes (or longer) or are restricted to just one or two sites.

Uptime Dog is completely free to register for and checks all your websites every 2 minutes from two separate locations.

If any of your sites fail you’ll be sent an email immediately.

The only thing Uptime Dog ask for in return is that you link to their website.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Ferris considers hiring a virtual assistant essential, however, I’m reluctant to hire one.

Our most recent job posting on oDesk has returned 86 applicants in the last 4 days so it’s vital to be able to filter out the weak candidates as efficiently as possible in order to dedicate time to a few on our shortlist.

My goal usually is to be able to shortlist 10 applicants for any posting in order to provide them with a test.

Continue Reading →

Popularity: 17% [?]

It just so happens that Tanner Morrison has written a great article about how best to configure Firefox (and its goldmine of add-ins) so that, when traveling you can have complete access to your instant messengers, twitter, Gmail accounts regardless of whose computer you’re using.

The article forgets to remind readers that by visiting Portable Apps you can download a version of Firefox that you can install and run from a USB drive. If you do this and follow Morrison’s advice you should have no problem setting yourself up with a functional workstation on any computer you get access to.

I have a lot to add to this article, but until I do so, it covers enough to get everybody started.

Keep Your World Together With Firefox :

Popularity: 3% [?]

Based upon advice in The 4-hour Workweek I’ve modified my voicemail message today to …

Hi, This is the voicemail of Martin Pavion at The True Potential Group Incorporated. I’m not available right now so please either:

Thank You

I’ve deliberately not provided my cellphone number because, the only people who’ll ever need to contact me urgently will already have it.

Now that this message is in place, I’m a lot happier logging into Skype now. Previously, when I’d been busy, I’d leave Skype unchecked for days, knowing that as soon as I switched it on I’d face a queue of messages where customers would expect me to stay up past midnight to return their call.

Popularity: 3% [?]

[Software: Windows / Mac / Unix, FREE]

I was discussing the idea of remote working with a programmer friend of mine and he lamented about how one of his days was disrupted because a particular password was embedded in a Windows Messenger chat log on his home computer and he couldn’t access it from where he was working.

The solution to this seems to be a free program called Dexrex which has versions for Windows, Unix and OS X.

Dexrex works in the background and logs all your messenger chats to your online account that you can access at any time.

I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it’s working great.

Popularity: 5% [?]