Jhasmal’s Making Money

I decided to check my amazon affiliate to start working on it and I was surprised to see I had sold a book from www.jhasmal.com last week.  Even though the commission was only .32 cents it was exciting.  The ability to create a profit without any effort is what every web master dreams of.  The only thing left to do is turn that single .32 cent sale into multiple sales.

I like how Amazon lets you know what item has been sold.  By knowing the item it helps me get an idea of where the sale may have been committed on my web pages.

This sale helps me to verify that I’m on the right path with this website and I’m targeting the appropriate users.  Inside my pages I have links to books that I’ve read and I believe had a huge impact on me wanting to build my own inspirational web site.

Click the image below to make it larger.

Getting Aggressive With Adwords

It has almost been a month and I’m getting a little more aggressive on my marketing efforts for www.jhasmal.com.  I had to go in a do some adjustments on my Adwords campaign because I wasn’t getting as much traffic as I liked.  After doing some research I came across the idea of letting Google Adwords adjust the bid price for me.  I was a little nervous about that because I wasn’t sure of the results that I would get.  I knew I was paying too much by holding the number one place in search results a lot of times paying more than $1 for each click. I went ahead and let Adwords do the heavy lifting for me and I’m sure glad I did.

Below is a screen shot of the configuration I’ve chosen for Adwords.

The next image is a screen shot of 3/24/12 clicks.

Before making the change of letting Adwords manage my clicks I was only getting about 10 clicks a day on a $10 a day budget.

Google Analytics and jhasmal.com

To track my website I’m using Google Analytics and the reason is because it’s free and it’s a great tool.  My favorite feature of Google Analytics is the “In-Page Analytics”.  I use it to go page by page within the site and see the links that people are clicking on.  At the top of the page it will show you the page views and bounce rates.

I’ve been looking at the bounce rates comparing it to the adwords campaigns.  I noticed on Friday that bounce rate was 100% on one of the stories that is being linked to from an Adwords ad.  I need to figure out what to do about this to lower the bounce rate.  Either the adwords content in the ad is misleading or the web page doesn’t have enough good information.  It may be that the web page is one of my weakest content entry points and I need to not run an ad for it.

The image below is a week of traffic from Feb. 20 – 24, 2012 on www.jhasmal.com/stories.html.

Click the image to make it larger.

Starting adwords

I started putting together adwords campaigns as mentioned on my last post.  Since this has been the first week I’ve been watching and modifying the wording of the ad.  I’m trying to find the right text to get the reaction that I need for someone to click on the link.  I also want the right people to click on the link not just anyone.  To make sure I’m finding the right people I’m going down as far as I can on a niche.  My site contains short stories that are inspirational in nature so I want to find users who are looking for exactly that.

The images below are examples of the niche – click the image to enlarge each of them.

First Image – I’ve been focusing on the “CTR” score or click through rate.  As you can see the first one has a “CTR” of 1.08 and the second one has a “CTR” of 0.00.  I’ll have to go in and make some changes to the second one because it’s under performing.  I try to at least have a click through of 1.00 which Google recommends.

Second Image – Is more detailed of the keywords that are used in the Ad group – Wisdom Story.  As you can see there are phrases related to what my website is about.  Each of the keyword phrases has its own CTR score.  These scores show me which phrases I may need to remove.  It’s good to wait a couple of days before really messing with this because a phrase you are thinking about removing could become a higher performer based off who happened to see the phrase that day.

Basic online marketing plan

The other day I jotted down some quick notes for the website www.jhasmal.com.  These notes are part of my plan of action for 2012.  It took me about 20 minutes to come up with these items.  You don’t have to spend hours building a web plan because it should be modified as you go along.  Don’t worry about all of the details because sometimes you won’t have them, at least not at that very moment.

To show you how basic the plan can be I’ve posted below what I started with.  Each part of the plan will get more details as I go along each month.  I needed  a basic plan so I would know where I was headed.  I’ve already started building some of the Google Adwords campaigns.  Once I have more detail around each campaign I’ll give some examples of the Google ads that I have written.  The ads started running Monday so I don’t have a lot of numbers to show at this point.  Next week I’ll post the ads and then give you an idea of the performance and the niche that I’m looking for.

Promoting website – Online Marketing – Budget

• Google Adwords

$10 per day for 5 days = $50 – for each month

50 x 12 months = $600 per year

• Jhasmal.com Pens

Pens – give them away for free – $75??? – Purchased in December 2011

Online Marketing – Free

• Facebook Share/Like

User can hit the like button on each story to share with their friends if they are a facebook user.  The like will show up on their wall to be seen by their friends which will give more visibility to www.jhasmal.com.

• New Short Stories

Create one new short story every month for a total of 12 stories for 2012.

• Introduction of videos 2012

Create small short videos like an interview to help inspire people.

• Google+ button

Google+ button – http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Create Financial Income (ROI)

• Affiliate Marketing

Book sales (Amazon)

Audio books (MP3) sales (Amazon)

• Create Amazon Affiliate store to display on site

Embed Store code

The right online platform

All you need is an easy way to purchase and good brand standing but on the right platform.

Thing ugly truth about social media is finally starting to show.  Check out this article on Mashable about brands shutting down their Facebook stores.  It’s not really a surprise because when you think about it.  Most of the people that I know are looking at the site on their cell phones.  They spend a quick second looking at friends posts and then they get off the site.  The only time they look at the site on their computer is if they aren’t able to use their phone for some reason.  They never look at the ads on Facebook.  If I was in charge of a project that I had to decide on where to put the online marketing money I would work on creating an mobile phone “app” specifically for my company.  If you have an app you don’t have to worry about who’s going to social media and if they will make time to find you fan page.  If you have a good product with an easy way to purchase it people will buy if they have a good relationship with your company.

Like they say on the apple commercial, “There’s an app for that.”

There’s no one size fits all web solution

When I’m writing for myself I really don’t give much consideration about meta information or the search engines.  I’m writing because I want to, it’s what I enjoy.  I think some of the true beauty of the web is being destroyed by the race of getting to the top of search engines.  You have companies selling items that are supposed to help you get to the top.  Some of this stuff you really need to weed through fact and fiction.  Some people are making money because they are selling ebooks to other marketers that really aren’t beneficial.  Some of the stuff in the books are so vague that you’ll never get any real results from it.  There is no one solution for all websites or businesses.

This stuff is hard, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.  You can’t build a million dollar website empire from scratch in one week.  Websites are like building a true company from the ground up.  You better be ready to put some serious time into it.  The reality is that you need to understand how your website is going to be beneficial.  If your website has no true benefit it won’t matter what you do to drive traffic to it.

Like www.jhasmal.com – I’m working to build a place where you can find anything that’s motivational.  I want people to instantly think of www.jhasmal.com whenever they have a need to find some type of motivational product or information.  I’m a long ways off from where I want to be but I’m building it in small steps.  When I was personally looking for motivational books and information it took me months.  I had to go to multiple sites to find the information and looking up authors name’s one by one.  This blog will be a place to teach the online marketing pieces of how I promoted www.jhasmal.com.

I spend a lot of time building flow diagrams on paper trying to understand how my sites will work together.  Currently I’m using amazon for my affiliate pieces to generate some income.  The focal of my site really won’t be to generate income but to use it to promote online teaching or on-site lectures in the future.  These site will be my platform or online resume to show that I know online marketing from true experience.

The pen project has started

I challenged myself at the beginning of the year to write personal letters to people in my life.  Some of these individuals will be family but others will be friends.  I’ve noticed that I’ve been consumed with the daily hassles of life and forgot to keep in touch.  In each letter there will be the attached pen that I used to personally write their letter.

These letters are a start to changing the way I communicate with them.  I’m really excited too… As I write the letters I will also encourage them to write a letter to someone else they may have not talked to in a while.  This will be my way of doing something positive in the world.  It’s nothing big but I want to try and do my part to promote positiveness.

This week I will be writing my first letter.

I’ll also encourage the people I write to come back and post to this blog and maybe tell who they decided to write their letter too.  I think it would be awesome to see how far of a reach this project will have.

Build yourself and be prepared

You have to be able to write if you are going to promote your own brand online.  Don’t sit around and wait for your personal career to try and define your success.  I made the mistake of waiting for 11 years to get the respect that I believe that I deserved inside the company.  I’ve learned a lot within the company but I could have done a lot more to help myself outside of the company but I didn’t.  You are truly the only person that can build the career that you want.  No one else cares what you want they only care about what they want.

Communicate your thoughts professionally and put yourself in a light that focuses on your strengths.

Do you have a hidden talent that you love?  If so work on it in your spare time non-stop.  You may be able to build something from it and you may not be able to.  You’ll never know until you try but you truly have nothing to lose.

Lately I’ve been doing some work on LinkedIn because it’s a way to truly network.  I was surprised to get an email from someone in HR for a job through it.  I wasn’t even actively looking but I was glad to know that someone was paying attention to the skills that I have.  Participate in some of the groups and express yourself.  Listen and understand what the groups are talking about.  Don’t make the mistake of trying to control the group go in with the attitude of trying to be someone who gives to the group.  If you give to the group people will take notice and you’ll never know what connections you’ll make in return.  People are always looking for someone who can help them get to the next level.  This could be in the form of a new job, business partner or an expert consultant and you could be that person.

The corporate world is definitely changing a lot.  Companies are moving the jobs over seas without a doubt.  As a professional you have to figure out a way to adapt.  You may think that it doesn’t affect you but it actually does.  How can you use your skills to combat this so in the future you are somewhat secure?  You may have to prepare yourself to be an online professional who works from home and has to travel to different countries.  If so, are you ready to make that happen?

Backlinks are the answer

Focusing on the links that come back to your site is critical when you are working to drive traffic to your website or blog. These links are often called backlinks when they are being referenced on the web. These links are probably one of the hardest things to build and are mostly over looked when it comes to the corporate web strategy.

I believe that Google uses backlinks in rankings because it’s something that can be measured over time. Most sites won’t have a lot of links pointing to them when they are first created which tells Google the site has little value to the web community at the moment. The more links a site has in theory the more important it is to search engines. It’s not only about the volume of links but also the quality of links.

You need to have links from sites that are considered to be top indexed sites. Receiving a link from a top indexed site gives your site some credability. You have to build content that is valuable which in return will create the backlinks you are looking for. In the early years of the web I remember reading articles suggesting you email other webmasters to ask for them to link to your site. In most cases web masters would never link back to you because you sent them an email. Creating backlinks is a tedious job because you really have to put some effort into it.

There was an article written about whether the press release was dead. The press release will never die as long as there is a need to get information out to many people (mostly journalists). Corporations send press releases to journalists who are on their email lists who write stories and videos about the company’s products (for free). Why would you get rid of a process or outlet that has worked for many years and it continues to work? If anything you will find a way to improve the press release. The journalist’s article on their blog or website helps to create the backlinks that large corporations need to drive their web rankings.

Too many web masters go for the small fries. When you are a web strategist for a corporation your job is to help get your site noticed. What if company web site got links from CNN, Fortune or Huffington Post? I mean a natural link and not a link advertisement. Your site would instantly get credability and pounded by traffic from these sites.