PRH Solutions Blog

My list building efforts are continuing. My Music and Band Ezine email list has grown to 40 users from mainly two free methods I’ve been using: forum posts and craigslist announcements. I do plan to purchase an opt in list next month which will fill my list of subscribers out to 5000. After all, I need to have a decent subscriber base if I’m going to sell advertising.

I would like to take this opportunity to announce a new service I’m offering. Have you ever heard of Social Bookmarking? This has really come on strong over the past year. The idea of Social Bookmarking is that someone can post links to websites they are interested in on a central website that is a repository for thousands of similar links. These repository websites are known for having links to websites that cover various topics, so other people can go to these repository websites and find a huge collection of links to websites that pertain to whichever topic(s) they are interested in.

To get a better idea of a Social Bookmarking site, I suggest you take a look at www.digg.com or www.stumbleupon.com. These are two good examples of Social Bookmarking sites.

Getting back to my announcement: I am offering a service that will submit Your website to 800 Social Bookmarking sites. This will greatly reduce the time you would need to spend manually submitting entries to these sites by yourself. This is a great way to increase the chances of people finding your site on the web, which is one of the important ways to promote your business online.

If you would like more information on this service, please check this link out:
http://www.prhsolutions.com/services. Look for the heading titled “Social Bookmarking to 800 websites”.

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Greetings - I hope you’re doing well. Here’s an update on my business efforts as of late:

My list building efforts for my Music and Band Ezine have been paying off - my list is growing and lately, all of the added email addresses have been through free methods! I’ve been making forum posts to generate awareness and interest in my ezine.

The more I work with internet marketing and trying affiliate programs and the like, the more of a believer I become in the email list. I think I’ve had my breakthrough. To give you an example, I recently sent an affiliate offer for a music website to my email list. I had been running banner ads for offers similar to this one on my blogs for months with no response. ONE email sent to my list with this offer generated a sale. Keeping in mind that my list is on the small side, you can still see the potential. If I had a list of 1000, 2000, 3000 or more - I shudder to think of the possiblities. I’m building towards those numbers.

I received my first $50 payment from Vindale, the online survey website! I signed up for Vindale for free and have been taking product evaulation surveys periodically. They post all product evaluations for which you are eligible, so you can choose which ones you want to take. They list the dollar amounts that you receive for completing each product evaluation. Many of these evaluations require some initial purchase from you, but it is usually less than the money you receive once the survey is completed.

I haven’t tried Vindale very earnestly, so I could have probably made $50 and more in far less time. One thing to remember about Vindale is that you need to be organized. Every time you sign up for a product evaluation, you are registering for a company’s service in some sort of trial period. The trial periods typically last 5-10 days. You need to cancel the service yourself before the trial period ends, or you will begin to be billed for keeping the service active. Keeping track of the program(s) you sign up for and their respective cancel by dates will make a huge difference. You don’t want to lose track of your sign ups and start losing money on product evaluations instead of making it, right?

To give you a better idea, here’s what happened on one of my recent Vindale evaluations: I signed up for an evaluation of a detox product. I had to give basic info (Name, Address) and a valid credit card to sign up for the evaluation. I was charged a small amount for the sample bottle of detox pills, which were mailed to my house. I was allowed to try the program for 10 days, after which I could continue if I paid an extra fee. I of course cancelled the program by the deadline, so I didn’t incur any other charges. Once I completed the survey, I was paid the appropriate compensation.

That’s what I have for now. I’m working more and more on building email lists, and I advise you to try the same! If you’d like help with building a list, check out this site for a reference:
http://www.theebookstar.com/getpaid/

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• Girl Bee

Who knew it would take a hurricane to make me more productive?

As I type this I am still at my brother’s house out of state, away from Louisiana due to Hurricane Gustav. Thank God we were largely spared damage from that storm, save for some power outages and reduced availability of grocery store items.

I figured that since I was going to be away from home for several days, and I still had internet access, I would work on building up the email list for my Music and Band Ezine. I’ve previously tried to build this email list through PPC campaigns on www.miva.com. I haven’t been successful so far with this method, and I suspect I need to further test and tweak my ads and keywords. To save me some money for the time being, I tried the following approach:

1) Sign up for music and musician related forums
2) Include the http://www.musicandband.com url in the signature line of my profile in these forums.
3) Create posts in these forums, respond to questions in other posts in these forums.

I then worked on Blog Carnivals:

1) Navigated to http://www.blogcarnival.com
2) Using my account (sign up is free for anyone), I searched the blog carnivals for music related carnivals
3) Made posts in music related blog carnivals from an “ezine sign up” post I made on my Music and Band blog.

Between the above two techniques, I have doubled the size of my email list in just a few days! Now, in all honesty, I don’t have a huge list at the moment (less than 50), but I still think the fact that I was able to double that list is something worth mentioning.

I’ve discussed other business opportunities recently, like paid surveys. I have taken a slight break from them as I work on building my email list. I do plan on continuing with www.vindale.com in the near future and will keep you posted.

I’ve been experimenting with banner ads on http://www.theebookstar.com for several months now. While I’ve found some banner ads have a higher clickthrough rate than others, I haven’t stumbled on the proverbial cash cow yet. The issue I’m having is that the website http://www.theebookstar.com is an emall type of store that is selling a variety of products. The focus on any one subject isn’t there, so the traffic visiting this site likely isn’t much targeted. It has been my experience that the ideal business model for a website is to focus on a specific target or group of people and then deliver content that matches that targeted group of people.

While I adjust, tweak, and test my banner experiments, I’ve decided to take the plunge into the world of e-publishing. I plan on launching my Music and Band Ezine from http://www.musicandband.com towards the end of 2008 or early 2009. I’m in the process now of putting together an email address list. Why am I doing this? I am a musician, for starters. I have played music almost my entire life and I truly find enjoyment in both playing music and performing for people. I have never played professionally, but I have played in numerous venues and for various sized groups. I feel like I can put together a community of people interested in music where helpful information can be shared. You’re welcome to join in, if you’re interested:

http://www.musicandband.com/?page_id=205

So, my plan currently is to continue with the banner advertising and promoting of affiliate offers as a sideline. My article writing and work on the Music and Band Ezine will start to take more of a primary place for me. I encourage you to check out http://www.musicandband.com from time to time. If nothing else, it should be interesting to watch.

Hello there - its time that I give you an update to what I’ve been doing lately.

My efforts with Google Payload, aka Google Arbitrage have run their course. I didn’t get a long term source of income from this system. The proponents of Google Arbitrage claim it is THE way to make money online. How many times have you heard that

Blogs remain to be a part of my efforts. I’ve changed my approach with my Workout Ebooks blog. Instead of the relentless pace of one new post every day, I decided to try running a blog carnival on the home page. A blog carnival is a collection of blog posts on a various topic. My Workout Ebooks blog carnival has several articles and is posted every week on my Workout Ebooks page.

Recently I’ve taken an interest in paid survey programs. Several companies offer you money or other benefits like free merchandise to participate in online surveys. In some cases, these surveys involve signing up for a trial period of a service and then evaluating your experience with that merchant.

I’ve so far signed up for online video rentals, free insurance quotes, and efax services. The surveys are pretty easy to take and my time involvement on this hasn’t been too great. The challenge is to complete enough of these evaluations in a month to make it worthwhile. Another consideration is to keep track of the evaluation periods for the merchants, because without cancelling, the free trials turn into a monthly expense for you that will exceed the money you receive for the survey.

I suggest you look into paid surveys and product evaluations as a fun way to make some quick cash. My good friend Eric has created a site listing several reputable programs for making money for surveys at https://paydotcom.com/a.page.php?id=53617&u=hcbeggar

I’m focusing on paid surveys for now and will keep in touch!

-Paul

One of the websites I host is www.neworleansmagic.com. My father owns and runs this website. The site has been online for close to a year now, and has gotten an average amount of traffic. The website offers children’s magic kits for sale, as well as a larger catalog for finding specialty advertising products for you or your business.

One of the pages on www.neworleansmagic.com is a Contact Us page, which is typical of many websites. The Contact Us page has a form where a person can enter their name, address, email, etc information and the form generates an email to the website owner. In this case, my dad gets the email from the www.neworleansmagic.com contact page.

Recently, my dad told me he has started getting a huge volume of email from his website. Within a week, the total count of email from the contact page of www.neworleansmagic.com was over 4000! My first thought was someone had released a virus affecting the email onto the website. Upon examining some of the incoming emails, we noticed that in fact the emails seemingly had valid information in them, and they weren’t all copies of the same email…at that point, it didn’t look like a virus.

After a check of the website statistics, I noticed that another website added a link to www.neworleansmagic.com, using some of the text from the site that mentioned completing the contact form for a catalog and free sample. The website in question appears to be a collection of free offers from websites (There’s that F word that everyone loves). This website has an entry for www.neworleansmagic.com under a page listing free offers for kids. I did some checking on alexa.com and found that the page of freebies has a traffic rank in the 70,000 range, which is VERY good. Alexa.com is a site that collects traffic information on much of the websites on the internet. Alexa ranks sites based on how much traffic they receive. For example, Yahoo.com is ranked #1 on their site for the most visitors in a period of time. My page www.prhsolutions.com typically falls within the 2,000,000 area of the ranks.

So here we are, a website with a huge amount of visitors and it is linking to my father’s website. People are already coming to this site looking for FREE offers, and a portion of them click on the link to my father’s page, which brings them to the enter contact information page and boom, in come the emails.

Now, the challenge is how to channel this flow of traffic. I’d classify that as a “good” problem I just wanted to illustrate to you the power of links and what just one link can do for your website and your business.

I’m regrouping with running Adbrite in place of my Adsense absence (say that five times fast: Adsense absence). It’s a little tricky to figure out what criteria is being used to pull some of the ads that are seen on my sites. Of course, Adsense sometimes pulled up some strange ads too. In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, the concept behind advertising systems like Adsense, Adbrite and their counterparts is that they place advertising on a website that has a subject similar to the subject of the site on which they are placed. My Workout Ebooks blog would typically display ads focused on exercise and fitness related topics. The idea is that the advertising matches the content, so a visitor to the site would be more inclined to take an interest in the ad and (dare we
hope) click the ad link to generate some sweet moolah.

Ok, that’s where I’ve been. Now for a little on where I’m going, and the reason for the title of this post.

I purchased an ebook sales site, http://www.theebookstar.com, over a year ago. With some article marketing, PPC Advertising, and simple linking strategies, the site has begun to have a steady flow of monthly traffic. With traffic has come a somewhat steady flow of sales. I was taking a look through the site the other day and realized I hadn’t utilized one of the income streams it offered: banner ads. It appears that the site includes functionality to host banner ads on a rotating basis.

In the past, I have tried banner advertising to promote http://www.theebookstar.com. The results were not very noteworthy. However, in that case, I was possibly relying too heavily on banner ads for generating immediate sales. Now, the situation is reversed…I own the site running the ad and I’m using banners that are promoting affiliate programs I belong to through Commission Junction. In my first day of doing this, I’m already getting clicks. We’ll see how it goes.

The recurring theme through all of this is the more traffic your site has, the higher the potential for income is.

I recently had my Google Adsense account suspended. I’ve noticed that Google is really mysterious about their reasoning behind suspending an account. I can imagine my recent experiments with arbitrage may have aroused their attention. While the proponents of arbitrage, like Google Payload, ardently defend it as a valid business method, it appears to me that arbitrage is indeed a slippery slope.

Nonetheless, I’m pressing on. While Google is arguably the top dog in many aspects of the internet, they are not the only game in town. Simply perform a web search under “PPC Ad Networks” and you’ll find other options. One that has recently caught my attention is Adbrite. I’m beginning to incorporate Adbrite into several of my websites. Adbrite is similar to Google Adsense. You can sign up for free and start adding code to run ads on your sites in minutes. Here’s a link to get started with Adbrite:

In spite of my Google experience (and their apparent ranking slap to my Workout Ebooks website http://www.prhsolutions.com/workoutebooks), I remain hopeful to generate a steady income online through various methods, including PPC network advertising.

I’m still working with my eBay sales…want to buy a New Orleans Jazz Fest 2004 Poster? Click here!