Here is a snippet of an e-mail I got today.

……”I was looking at your website and it looks great.

I have to ask man…do you have any recommendations for a internet marketing ‘starter’? I’m sure you get asked that alot but I really really want to do something online, just a little lost on direction.

Any advice would be sooo helpful…….”

Here is a copy of my e-mail response to him. I realized he’s right, and this is what I generally tell folks that ask me where to get started.

“Hi [removed],
I’m sure it might sound evasive, but you’ll need to find something that fits your personality and resources. There are infinite ways to make money online. Also, by resources I mean not only money but skills and time, etc. By personality I’m thinking risk tolerance and interests.

Digitalpoint forums and Warrior forum are good resources for beginners. Abestweb is nice. Blackhatworld is good too. Wickedfire forum is pretty harsh. If you go there, only lurk for several weeks. They tend to be hard on newbies.

I would advise you to keep your money and avoid buying e-books, etc. All the information you can buy is available for free elsewhere. When I was getting started, I stumbled upon something that let me make enough to scrape by and spent about 3 months reading Digitalpoint forums. Like 14 hours per day….7 days per week. Now, I spend almost no time in forums. I just do the shit I know how to do to make money. But if my shit quits working, I go back to the forums.

Good luck bro!
Danger

P.S. When you’re ready to start building money making websites, get some good hosting and sign up for some affiliate networks.”

Now, I’m sure he just wanted me to tell him to do exactly this and that and cash in, but I’ve come to believe advice like that isn’t really practical. You gotta find something that fits you, that you will enjoy doing. Also, the internet is ever-changing and to be successful long-term requires broad enough knowledge that you can reinvent your business models often.

Kaizen is the secret. It’s a Japanese philosophy of constant and never ending improvement in all things, all facets of oneself or one’s business. I had practiced this philosophy for years before I even knew what the word meant. I am always trying to be a better man, a better father, a better friend, and a better business man.

How you can implement kaizen to make more money online?

1. Always be learning.
Expand your knowledge and skill in SEO practices, advertising strategies, web design, copy-writing, analytics, cash flow management, time management, etc.

2. Always be improving upon your successes (and failures).
Constantly split test and improve ads, landing pages, offers, traffic sources, keywords, business relationships, etc. etc. etc. Split test, improve, and track results in everything you do with internet marketing, forever!

3. Aways be networking.
If you can afford it, go to industry events and meet new people. Participate in local events and meetups. Most urban centers have affiliate or SEO meetups. If there isn’t one in your area, start one. You don’t need to be an expert to organize a monthly meetup.

4. Be relentless.
Never give up! Never surrender! If you have a setback, take a moment and try to figure out what went wrong. Learn from your mistakes. Then try again with a different or improved strategy. Live, eat, and breath IMPROVEMENT. As long as you’re constantly improving, you will eventually attain greatness.

In a big business corporate sense, kaizen often refers to aggressive cost cutting which sometimes has negative human impacts. For instance, lower level employees working all night (for free) to correct mistakes or meet deadlines. Cutting employee benefits, or reducing quality to increase profits is not congruent with my philosophy.

Be careful when dealing with people not to “glean the field”. This is a reference to a Christian belief that farmers should leave some remnant crops on their fields for the poor, widows and orphans to eat for free. Use the philosophy of kaizen to improve yourself and your life while continuing to live in abundance with others.

Do you already practice kaizen? Have I left something out? Tell us about it in the comments please!

So, personally I’ve been using Yahoo Search Marketing pretty heavily this last year and am anticipating the merger between MSN Adcenter and YSM with trepidation. In an attempt to boost my Adcenter skills I’ve been messing around with some campaigns on a few MSN accounts and increasing my skill level.

Being a fairly big fan of DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in my ads I was faced with the small challenge of having all my keywords show up in lowercase in my ads. MSN has an article about this subject where after the first paragraph, they mention that the quick and easy solution is to upload your keyword lists in all caps. That’s where I stopped reading.

I’ve been working with some fairly large keyword lists. My latest campaign had 48,000 keywords. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like doing this by hand. Also, being a cheap bastard, I’d rather avoid paying for a solution. So I wound up trying a few free tools. The first two failed in one way or another. But Keyword Pad got the job done quickly and effectively. It’s free and I’m not getting paid to blog this. I just wanted a break from my other stuff and felt like blogging something.

The steps to follow are:
1. Import your keyword list.
2. Click “Modify” and select “First Letters to Uppercase” from the drop down menu.
3. Buy me a beer next time you see me.

One small issue is that within keyword phrases, you may prefer not to capitalize some words like “to” “in” “of” etc. This Thing Will Capitalize All Of The Words In Every Keyword Phrase. I didn’t bother with this secondary problem and decided to move on to other things. Got a better solution, great! Let us know in the comments.

Here is a screenshot:

I live a few hours from Denver and am getting ready to head out this morning. I’ll be getting there about noon so will miss some of the 1st day. Affiliate Convention is a pretty small affair and hasn’t been the best received in the community.

I debated at some length whether I would attend again this year. But decided I might as well. I met a few people last year that justified it. I’m really only going for the networking, but I’ll sit in on a few sessions as well. Sure, you can make friends in the industry long distance, but nothing really compares to shaking someone’s hand in person and sharing some experiences like lunch, dinner, or a drunken bender that lasts into the night.

Sorry, I haven’t been updating my blog very often, frankly it is because I’ve been too busy with my family. We just had our 5th child 10 weeks ago. Also, if I’ve been at my computer, I’ve generally been working on scaling up my stuff. I used to give updates about my income monthly and have really been remiss about that.

Here is a general update: Things have been pretty steady over the last year. Increasing a little bit every month. Last month I made about $8,600.00 net on about $16,000.00 gross. I have a goal of making $30K net in September. Cash flow has been one of the biggest factors limiting the rate I can scale things. I’ve finally reached the point where I have enough business capital to scale things as fast as I can do the work.

I just wrote a pretty big e-mail to a friend who hasn’t had much success getting volume out of Yahoo PPC. These days, I’m not doing huge volume, but am paying for about 500 clicks/visitors per day via YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing). Here are some of the highlights from the e-mail I sent him:

Some of what I do is:

1 . Start with a high CTR by pausing low CTR keywords and possibly overbidding

2.  Start with many diverse ads (10-15) some of which use DKI and usually my winning ad has DKI. I will write my own ads first then I’ll look at my competition and borrow common elements and mix and match them. I might copy 1 or 2 ads from the competition, but not always. Only if I get brain fried and need a couple more in the mix. I’ve never used my competition’s ad as the winner. Note that the more ads you start with, the more money you have to lose on the campaign to start out with, but the more likely you are to strike gold.

3. After my winning ad has established it’s quality index of 4 to 5 bars I’ll start backing down my bid

4. I back the bid off by no more than $.02 at a time. In some niches I may be starting with a bid of $1.50 or more and back it off every 30 minutes until I have at least a break even or a profit. So I’m losing money generally for about 3 days to a week(building ad quality), then breaking even or slight profit for about 1-2 weeks(building keyword history), then backing off on my bid more to attain a sustainable profit. If I’m losing money with the campaign I’ll limit my daily spend to about $30-$50

Note that the most important factors are split testing many ads, and having lots of keywords.

Another thing is that if you lower the bid on a keyword often it kills the volume on that keyword. Even returning to the previous higher bid doesn’t fix it. So back them down slowly. Because I make more money on different days/hours of the week I’ll back the bid down so I’m still making money at the worst time of the day/week and then use the ‘Campaign settings’-'Ad Scheduling’ to boost my bid back up for the more profitable times of the week. This does seem to be an important factor in maintaining volume.

If you build a campaign and nothing is happening, go to ‘Campaigns’ – ‘Editorial status’. Your keywords and ads may be under review. These reviews are either very fast or may take up to 3 days in my experience. You may also be waiting for a review of your landing page without knowing it. To test this, I may set my daily spending limit to say $10 and raise my keyword bid to as high as $5. If you still aren’t getting impressions, it’s a review you’re waiting for.

Assuming you aren’t waiting on reviews, if you still aren’t getting impressions. Just bid more. I’ll raise my bid by $.10 every 30 minutes until I see impressions. Then I’ll leave it there until I get some clicks. Then I’ll start backing it off very slowly. Set your daily spending limit at the beginning to protect yourself against over spending.

There is a lot more to what I do, but I don’t want to bore you too much right now. I hope you find something helpful here. Never give up! Always be refining your campaigns/landing pages

Although I am not an Amazon affiliate, my wife and mother-in-law both are. My mother-in-law especially has hundreds of blog posts and at least many dozens if not hundreds of Amazon links in place on her blogs.

Colorado affiliates including myself successfully lobbied to get affiliates removed from HB-1193. Lawmakers excluded affiliates from the bill and passed it. Amazon must have decided they didn’t like the bill and decided to fire all Colorado based affiliates.

The biggest crime here is that Amazon is leaving all links in place and accepting sales from these Colorado affiliates. So affiliates who have spent years building up businesses may have 1000′s of links in place over many websites through which customers are still flowing to Amazon. The only thing Amazon has changed is that they are no longer paying Colorado affiliates their hard earned money. I’m praying for a class action lawsuit. Anyone know a good lawyer?

Below the Fail-ometer is a copy of the letter my family members received yesterday:
“The Fail-ometer”

“Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado’s new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill. [3 links removed]

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.
Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team”

Hey folks. We all know Dennis is a great guy who never hurt anybody. He never did anything wrong, broke any rules, or scammed anybody.

I’m taking up the cause to show him a little charity but I can’t do it without your help. I’m taking up a collection to get him a little present that should help him stick around in our industry. Just a little something that will make his life easier when he goes to industry events.

What is it?

Drum roll………

It’s…..

The Spit Sock Hood!

If you don’t know why Dennis Yu needs a spit sock hood, I present several reasons:
Here is the article Dennis wrote that started it all. Followed by responses from Shoemoney, ppc.bz, Uber, Nickycakes, John Chow, Trevor Nash-Keller, and more.

Now seriously folks. I’m worried about the guy. He’s gonna keep showing up and he’s gonna need lots of spit sock hoods.

Now they only cost $3.95 for one or $44.64 for 12 of them. Donate any amount you feel comfortable with and my hand to God, I’ll put your donations together and ship as many Spit Sock Hoods as we can afford straight to BlitzLocal’s offices located between the dumpster and recycling bin behind Chuck-E-Cheese in some bad neighborhood in Denver.

If this little fundraiser is successful, we may hold a follow-up fundraiser to get him some much needed supplies like this book:

Does anyone else have some nice gift suggestions?

There was a strong grassroots movement of affiliates opposing the Colorado affiliate tax. Many people wrote letters, made phone calls, and showed up to testify in person.

HB 1193 was modified on 02/08/10 eliminating affiliates from it’s terminology. Lawmakers succeeded in preserving 100′s of jobs that are pumping money into Colorado’s economy.

UPDATE: Well Amazon decided to fire affiliates anyway and keep their business at the same time.

November was OK. I didn’t scale up too much, but did make a little more money than last month. I’m only working on campaigns that I feel will have a long stable life. I want to be in a position to take months off as my wife is due to give birth on about April 5th.

November money spent:
$5,179.30

November money earned:
$13,153.32
$151.76 referral income from Market Leverage
=$13,305.08 total gross profit

$8,125.78 total net profit for November

Looking forward to December my goal is to net $15,000.  My strategy to achieve it is to focus on increasing ROI….specifically I’m working on reducing my CPC and using the surplus to fund new campaigns. Also, I’m working on increasing CTR and Conversion rates.

Go back in time and see my affiliate marketing profits for July through October 2009.