Internet Marketing with Allen Walton

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While I am deeply involved with the 30 Day Challenge, I do have to admit that I begin to wonder sometimes whether there is such an animal as ‘The Niche Life’? By that I mean, are there people that are really making a lot of money in small niches online. Or is it all hogwash?

Right now I really don’t know. I am very happy with the information I am gleaning from the 30 day challenge. And I am sure that it will help me in the future. But to find a niche that fits the parameters set out by Ed Dale in the challenge, I have to tell ya’ it ain’t easy my friend.

As you know I ended up choosing “Concert Promotions” and created a blog and a sub blog about the subject matter. Last night I spoke about day 17 I believe  when it was actually day 18, and that was about analyzing you efforts to that point. We were looking for at least 200 visitors to our blog and then to see what our rank in Google had reached and had we made any sales.

Not even close to 200 visitors yet. Maybe 45 so far. But then I do have to admit that the week of tech and family problems I experienced didn’t help the cause any and in fact hurt our efforts. Very little blogging has gone on and link building was non existent during that period. But still with the 30 day stuff, we have reached #20 rank on Google search.

What I’m building up to is the fact that I have decided to continue for a while at least with the concert promotions blogs, but I will quietly in the background look for another niche to work also. Once I find one, then I will recreate my efforts so far but with a different subject matter. I may not try to find such a small niche the second time. I may in fact reach out and look for one with a bit more traffic and more competition.

After finding and developing the new niche blog, I will announce it’s birth here and we can then watch the development of that one in conjunction with the Concert Promotions Blog.

By the way I finished a couple more days in the challenge and am up to day 22. The info I covered today was all about Google Adwords and how to set up an account and write your first ad. All very elementary and easy stuff.

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Here’s a 30 Day Challenge update. I was able to log on again today. So we are back up and running. I went and viewed the video for day 17 of the 30 Day Challenge. Yes I am way behind, but I’m not going to skip any days as that would not help us at all.

Day 17 is about looking at your results so far on the target blog we have set up. The idea is to take a look at the traffic we have generated with our new blog for our chosen keyword phrase and see if we have reached 200 unique visitors. Also we are suppose to check and see where we rank for a broad match and phrase match on Google. And thirdly, have we sold anything yet?

“Concert Promotions” for broad match is ranked 20th and phrase match is ranked 21. So for just a couple of blog entries, we are doing pretty well. But we do not have 200 unique visitors, nor have we sold anything yet. But that is ok. We have had some serious Internet issues and have put us way behind. Tomorrow I will press on and continue to catch up.

Once I do catch up, I will have a good idea if our chosen keywords are doing anything. If not, then we are then suppose to move on to another set of Keywords and select another affiliate product to sell. I already have one picked out. If we do ok with our first one, I will most likely still setup the 2nd one anyway.

So hang in there with me and I will get us caught up as soon as possible. Nice to be fully connected and not be buried with technical problems.

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The title is an attempt to lighten things up. Probably in poor taste, but that has never stopped me before. Got up Saturday morning and went to log on the Internet and start getting caught up with the 30 day challenge. When I did, I discovered that my brand new modem had died. Yep…It bit the dust. I contacted my IPS support and they concfirmed my modem was bad, and said I could trade it in on Monday for another new one..

Which I did, but that left me off the net for another almost 3 days. Cuz the new modem they gave me today was not put into the system. So I could not get it to work until I got a hold of support again tonight. After an hour on the phone, they finally got me up and running.

I’m really exhausted, so hopefully when I attempt to log on tomorrow, there will be no problems and I can get back on track with the 30 day challenge. One more note about the recent death in our family. The 5th person to die in 5 years. Been 1 death every year the last 5 years. Just crazy.

See ya tomorrow.

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I’m still out of town. I should be back moving forward by tomorrow night. As I said we had a family emergency. Without going to far into detail, We had a suicide in the family. And then the fallout over that has caused some situations.

Anyway, I’ll be back on the 30 day challenge path tomorrow. Hope it won’t take me too long to catch up. Not long ago I spoke about the challenge step that required writing an article and submitting to EzineArticles to develop a back link to our main challenge niche. I wrote one and submitted it. It was picked up by Google and ranked #12 for Concert Promotions. That put us #2 on the 2nd page with just one article link. Very cool.

The ride will get back on the road tomorrow night.

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I’ve been gone because we had a family emergency. I’m hoping everything is taken care of within the next couple of days. This has put me a couple of days behind in the challenge, but I’m sure I can catch up. Right now I’m sitting in the office of one of our stores writing this. So it will be short tonight.

No real news about our marketing efforts because of the family problems. Hopefully will be back on the ball tomorrow night. I do have to go get a wordpress spam filter. I opened up tonight and found over 200 pieces of pam in the comments box. I’d like to strangle somebody. But then i don’t want to have to ask to use the prison computer, so the filter probably is the best answer.

I hope we have something to put up tomorrow night that is interesting. We’ll just have to see.

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Concert Promotions blog that I have set out as my 30 day challenge project has acquired a new face this evening. Day 15 assignment was to create a Weebly site based on your chosen keyword. The idea being is it is another step in building an authority site back link to help your main site rank better. So I stepped up and built a new site on Weebly.com tonight naturally called Concert Promotions.

If you’d like to go see the site, and I suggest you do, you’ll notice the header is a picture that really has nothing to do with music. But I thought it was so beautiful, I couldn’t pass it up. If you go look at the site and the new post I put up there, I’d like to hear what you think of the header.

Here’s the site link Concert Promotions at weebly.

Day 16 assignment was to post an EzineArticle article about your niche and then link back to your main site in your author’s resource box. I did that in about 10 minutes using the Instant Article Wizard Pro software program that is featured on our tools page. I tell you, if you need to do an article and you don’t feel like spending a lot of time writing your own, IAWP is great. And the way it’s set up, you don’t have to worry about plagiarism, because you get research snippets back and formed in paragraphs. Then you select the paragraphs you want to use and you even can rewrite them if you want. It’s way cool.

So that brings us to day 17 which was designated a day or rest and a chance for people who might be behind to catch up. Yea for that.

I want everyone to know that the list building exit program that you see when you leave this site, offers a newsletter that we will be starting soon. And you can just select it if you are interested in receiving it. You don’t have to check anything else. Also you can un-check anything that is pre-checked if you are not interested in those offers.

That’s about it for tonight. Have to get some sleep and give this old brain some rest.

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You know you have arrived when the spammers find you. I have been getting a few comments as you have seen I’m sure. But just the last couple of days I have started getting 20 to 25 comments…all from spammers with outlandish comments concerning drugs from outside the United States and a bunch of other stuff I won’t even mention. While it only takes a minute to zap them, it’s a bit annoying to say the least.

I didn’t make it to day 15 lesson on the 30 day challenge site last night, as I was just too tired. Well I didn’t get it done today either. Which also means I haven’t done day 16 either. I hope to get some rest tonight and get both lessons done tomorrow.

As I mentioned yesterday, my 30 day challenge niche is ‘Concert Promotions‘ and Google had ranked me as high as #14 which is on the 2nd page. I checked this morning and I was ranked #4 on the first page. Man was that cool. But nothing ever remains the same so tonight we have fallen back to #17…still 2nd page, but we will have to get some more stuff going and add things to the blog and still build some more links to the blog to get us back up there again.

I have a lead generating program I’m looking at now and may have it up and running by tomorrow. If I do, then you’ll see how that works. You’ll see it here. Better hit the sack now if I’m going to get anything done tomorrow.

P.S.   I just noticed, that it appears as though the lead generation program has come alive. you will notice it when you leave our site. One of the pre-checked newsletters, in fact the first one, is our upcoming newsletter we will be starting.  So if you’d like to be on our list and receive it then fill in the form and you be put on our list for the news letter.

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Today is day 15 of the 30 day challenge. That is officially half way home. But I say almost cause we’ve had some sickness hit the family today and so I haven’t been able to get day 15 done yet. But I will this evening.

So let’s recap what has been going on with the challenge. The first few days was all about research. Researching for - a Niche, a valuable Keyword and what the competition might be for your proposed niche idea.  The criteria was a bit narrow for my liking, but then I’m not running the challenge, so I decided if I was going to do it, then do it right. So I did my research. We were give a tool called ‘Market Samurai’ to use in our testing. Some bugs at first, but turned out to be a life saver.

I settled in quite late I might add, with the Niche ‘Concert Promotions‘…….To back up a second, the rules or guidelines I should say, were to find a Niche that had no more than 30,000 competing webpages for your specific keyword. But that keyword had to have daily searches  of about 100 a day only. I don’t know if you have tried this or not, but it ain’t easy my friend to adhere to those guidelines now a days.

Once we got all the research done we were introduced to ‘WordPress Direct’ which is a program that let’s you pick a theme template and then with just about one click of the button, install a completely search engine optimized wordpress blog. Regardless of what you may have heard you don’t have to have a passion for a Niche to blog about it. Concert Promotions is not a passion of mine. But I needed to select something to get started with as I was falling behind. I even thought how interesting it would be to do a blog about something I wasn’t passionate about and see how well I do with it.

After getting that done, then it was time to setup some bookmarking capabilities to announce to the world that I was on line. After that, we were instructed to put up a Squidoo lens about our blog and write a hubpage about it also. We opened a Tumblr account and announced our presence there too. I’m not sure where we go tonight to get something done. I’m convinced it will be fun and interesting though.

Okay, the idea behind all of this 30 day stuff as I have told you, is to get up a blog and promote it, get it ranked well in Google and other search engines, drive traffic to our site and sell an affiliate product and make our first $10 online. I just got my site up last night. Hasn’t been 24 hours even yet. And being a very impatient person, I said to myself…..self..let’s go see if we have been ranked at all or if Google has not found us as of yet. Remember we are trying to get good ranking for one Keyword that has about 100 searches a day and not more than 30,000 competing webpages…30,000 is still a lot though.

Well here is the results as of an hour ago..again less than 24 hours online……Google has ranked my new Concert Promotions blog at #14 and #15 for phrase “Concert Promotions”, which is on the second page. It blew my mind. Less than 24 hours up and running and I’m ranked 14 and 15….that’s jumping ahead of over 30,000 websites that have to do with Concert Promotions. And we still have 2 more weeks of doing stuff to improve our sites.

I don’t know about you but I find this amazing. Far outdistanced my expectations I must say! Day 15 exercise is ahead of me and I better get to it, before I get too tired.

Till Tomorrow.

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Concert Promotions is my 30 day challenge niche that I settled on after what seemed like hours trying to find a niche that met the criteria set out by Ed Dale in the beginning. As you know I got sick and got way behind. Well, I put it in gear and have completely caught up. We are at day 14.

Tomorrow day 15 starts and I’ll be interested in seeing what that’s about. I am really glad I have joined this challenge. I really have learned a lot. Mostly so far how to blend everything together to make your efforts go farther and be worth more in the end.

Tonight I created a Squidoo lens about Concert promotions and a Hubpage also. And on top of that, I added a Tumblr account and made my first post on it. I’m really benefiting from all the instruction on how to optimize everything so that all your work ties in together.

Concert Promotions is the link to my new 30 day challenge blog. I just got it to working this morning. I had done some work on the same niche, but with another theme. The theme turned out to be no good so I spent almost a day trying to figure out why my post wouldn’t show up. Then someone suggested trying a different theme, and bingo it worked. So I was able to move on from there and get caught up.

You’ll see the highlighted link to my new blog just above. Click on it and go see how it looks. It should open in a new window.  One thing cool is that it’s going to be a permanent link to that blog site. So now I know how to set up permanent links and how to better develop link building which will result in better page ranking from the search engines. Which in turns drives more traffic to your site and that’s what it’s all about basically.

Tomorrow I will give a synopsis of what has all transpired since I started the 30 day challenge. Again the idea is that by the end of the 30 days we make a sale from our new blog and see how high we can get indexed by the search engine for our main keyword.

Headin to bed….my ole butt is draggin and need to get some sleep. Hope you are enjoying this blog as we stroll down marketing street usa. Or I guess I should say marketing world.

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Are these really the top 5 tips for Internet Marketers? Hell I don’t know. But I do know that if you screw any of these up you are going to have one heck of a time making money online.

First one is really simple….Baby you got to have a plan!!! You need some reference guide by which to navigate the online waters. If you were a ship leaving San Francisco and were told to pull into China somewhere and you didn’t have any maps to guide you. No Chop Suey for you. Having a plan is at the very least necessary to get you out of port. The plan doesn’t have to be great in the beginning, because you can fine tune it as you go. But it will help you get out beyond the breakwater at least.

The quality of your plan will rest on tip or action item number two. In Real Estate…it’s location, location, location…….but here in the commercial waters of the Internet…it’s Research, Research, Research. If you don’t know where the hungry customers are, then having the greatest product in the world is useless. To find those hungry masses, you must get into doing research. And quality research at that.

Keyword research!

Customer research!

Market demand research.

But how do you know what to use or where to go to do the research, or even have much of an idea what that research means once you have a stack of numbers. Well, that leads us to tip number three. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you want to know what a millionaire knows, then take him to lunch.”  That’s really akin to saying find successful people and emulate them. Find out what they do and then you do the same things. maybe not on the same scale because you are just starting out. But at least get some activity going based on solid ground.

Now that leaves us with four and five. Let’s see I may need to make these up………..oh I remember. Break everything down into small bite size pieces. Don’t look at your project as one grandiose endeavor, or it may turn out to appear far too daunting of a task for you to handle. You know how you eat an elephant, right?  Yep, one bite at a time. So break your project down into many small pieces and tackle them one at a time. That way you will be able to build upon success after success after success.

Tip five is really important. You must have persistence and test. Test everything you do. For example, if you are running a pay per click campaign. The run two slightly different ads. After a suitable time period, whichever one is performing the best, it then becomes the control ad. Get rid of the loser ad, and replace it with another ad and let those two go at it. Again after a suitable amount of time, keep the winner and dump the loser and replace and test again.

It’s very important that you don’t give up. You must keep on keeping on as they say. Making money on the Internet is not a wham bam thank you mam process. After all, what you are attempting to do, whether you know it or not, is develop a business. Even though it may not be a brick and mortar building, it still is a business and if done right, can make you a lot more money with less risk than that stationary building down the block. And here’s the absolutely best part……Drum roll please…..You can sit at your computer and conduct business in your underwear. If that isn’t the greatest…..Well, if you have a regular job and are doing the online marketing thing in your spare time, try going to work tomorrow in your underwear and see what the boss says.

I know what my boss will say tomorrow when he sees me in my underwear…..Lookin’ Good Allen, because he’ll be speaking to me from the mirror, I am my boss!

Those may not actually be the top 5 tips, but they are up there close , so pay attention and go get em.

P.S. I hope you liked the video from the 30 day challenge. If you want to see some more let me know and I’ll put some more up here for you to see.

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