Sweet dancing Jehova, I haven’t posted since before Christmas!

While you’re busy whiping the look of utter disbelief and dismay off your face, let me tell you what I’ve been up to:

-Nothing.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s what’s coming up!

The Content Network Cure is continuing to evolve and grow into something bigger and better than I ever thought it would.  Sometime this weekend you should be seeing a totally new site going up with more content and resourced to help with mastering this tricky tool.

What I’m most excited about is a free Q&A video series I’ll be working on.  You’ll be able to submit questions on the site, and we’ll probably pull some questions from the customer support emails as well.  The videos might be hosted on YouTube for easy sharing, or I may just host them myself and make them easy to link to.  Either way, free vids!

The CNC affiliate program will be discontinued for the time being.  I want to work all the bugs out of the new site before I even try to incorporate an affiliate system.  Besides, there may just be a bigger ticket item on the horizon for you to promote.  No promises, I’m just sayin’…

If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see from the Content Network Cure in the future, or ways for me to grow the business in general, please leave your comments below.

Welcome to day 3 of the case study.  If you’ve missed what’s been going on, you can catch up here, here and here.

Disaster struck.  My #2 ranking on my primary keyword has turned into not ranking at all.  I’ve only had 3 clicks on my affiliate link and no sales.  I don’t know if I’ve overdone it using my primary keyword or what, but I’m not showing up, so I’m not getting any traffic.  If I’ve really killed my traffic, than it’s going to take another couple days to recover.

I’ve completed all the steps in the report, so I’m done as far as the case study is concerned.  I can wait until the end of the day to see of a sale comes in, but for the purposes of the case study, things aren’t looking good.  Like I said, I may have overdone it with the use of my primary keyword, so my current situation is probably my fault.  Given my terrific initial rankings, I would say that this is definitely viable method, just be sure to only include your keyword were Kevin explicitly tells you to.

I’ll keep working on this site, as I’m sure I can turn things around relatively quickly.

Ok, we’re about 36 hours into the case study.  I completed the work for day 2 late last night, which included another blog post, pinging, an article and some social bookmarking.  Including the work I did for day 1, I’ve put in a total of 2 hours- that’s it.  The blog has been indexed in Google, and is currently ranking #2 for the primary keyword phrase. I’ve received a total of 2 clicks on my affiliate link so far.  I really should have installed analytics on this blog so I could have a better guage of traffic.

One spot where I strayed slightly from the report is in the social bookmarking.  Kevin suggests using a service called Social Marker to make things a big easier.  I somewhat prefer Only Wire for their higher degree of automation, although they don’t work with as many higher quality sites, so I found myself still manually submitting a few bookmarks.

As far as SEO is concerned, we’re off to a roaring start.  In 36 hours, I’ve gone from nothing to getting indexed in Google and ranking #2 for my primary keyword phrase, I’m shocked and delighted.  If nothing else, Kevin’s report shows you an excellent way to pick a primary keyword and optimize for it in any niche.

I have a holiday party tonight, so I may have to postpone day 3 of the case study until tomorrow.  I’ll try to find time as I’m excited for this final step- Squidoo.  I haven’t had much luck wth Squidoo in the past, but admittedly my tinkering with them was truly half-assed.  I’m hoping the integrity of a case study, along with Kevin’s report telling me the right way to leverage it, will be motivation enough to do it up right.

Here’s my progress so far in my case study on Kevin Riley’s report for making quick cash in 3 days.  I know I said I would post again last night, but I was up so late actually following through on my promise to complete the first step that I figured this could wait till morning.  As I expected, the work only took about an hour, so I wish I hadn’t procrastinated until 11:30 last night.

I’m doing everything exactly as laid out in the report, despite knowing some tips and tricks that might help.  The only thing I’ve left out was an optional email blast if you have a mailing list related to the topic of the product you’re promoting.  I do have such a list, but I wanted to approach this from scratch.  I figure someone with an Internet Marketing related mailing list probably doesn’t need to be using free tactics only, so it was skipped for the sake of authenticity.

The blog is set up at http://learnhowtocreateanonlinebusiness.blogspot.com.  I’m linking it here for reference purposes only.  This link shouldn’t affect indexing or ranking since all links from my this blog are nofollow (Ya hear that, comment spammers?!?).  I’m not indexed in Google yet, but I’ve had one click through on my affiliate link so far, so it’s probably be from Blogger internal referral traffic.  It’s a slow start, but it’s only day 1.

Today is more writing, pinging and some social bookmarking.  I’ll post again tonight or tomorrow morning with my progress.

This morning I clicked a link in a tweet from Kevin Riley.  Kevin has put out some terrific products on product creation and internet business, one of which helped me write The Content Network Cure.  The link in Kevin’s tweet was to a YouTube video promoting a his free report called How to Make a Bundle of Cash in 3 Days.  It’s a mouthful of a title, but intriguing enough to tickle my curiosity.

The report is being given away free as part of the 12 Days of Christmas Give Away- skip the video, it’s intolerably cheesy.  I grabbed my copy and did a quick skim through to see what it’s about and it got my wheels turning.  I’ll refrain from giving away too much of the report’s content, since you should really grab a copy for yourself, but I want to cover the gist and conduct a case study on its step-by-step plan to see how well it works.

The report is, at its core, about how to promote Kevin’s products as an affiliate using tactics that are completely free.  These tactics can of course be used for any affiliate program, but his products are set up for instant commissions paid directly to your PayPal account, which is totally sweet.  This method can also be effective if you have products of your own that could use a little SEO boost.

The method is about using blogs, pinging, article marketing, social bookmarking and squidoo to get a page indexed, get referral traffic and make sales in a quick and painless manner.  That list might make it sound like a lot of work, but each step in the 3 step process should take less than an hour.  These aren’t new tactics- the value is in the streamlined process that walks you through an effective way to use them all together.

I’ll start testing the method outlined in this report this evening, and keep you updated on my progress.  The next three blog posts will be a case study in how to make some quick cash as an affiliate in 3 days.

Stay tuned and wish me luck!

A while back I posted that I would be updating my Content Network Cure report.  I had been testing a new tactic and was planning some software that would support it, but plans have changed.  Instead of creating software and making a larger, more expensive product, I decided to find a free solution that would do the same thing as the software and keep the price of th report at just $10.

I’m calling the new tactic Site Targeting on the Cheap- and it basically explains how you can litterally pick and choose which sites in Google’s content network you want your ad to be shown on, without paying the higher CPCs of traditional site targeting.  Combine this new tactic with site exclusion and some good bid optimization and you’re looking at some serious efficiency.

It’s no secret that my company, Subatomic Media, runs its website on Wordpress.  I love Wordpress.  Not only is it a great CMS, but it offers immense versatility in presentation and functionality through its themes and plugins.

There are plugins that provide analytics, plugins that act as form submission tools, and my new favorite has to be the one that turns your simple little blog into a real live store- seriously check it out.  I turned my brother’s information website into an e-store in like 5 minutes.

Although I like the current look of SubatomicMedia.com, with our awesome facelift here, I was thinking that something that really pushes the limits of Wordpress would be excellent.  If any of you have a suggestion of an existing Wordpress theme or a could build us a new one, I’m all ears.  Leave your info in the comment section below.

I’m in the planning stages of a major update to my ebook, The Content Network Cure.  I’ve been developing some new strategies that will help improve conversions rates while lowing costs- not bad, eh?

This update will include a piece of software and a brief report on how best to use it.  I may or may not bundle it together with the original ebook, and I may lump the new report into the ebook as part of a new edition.  Like I said, I’m still in the planning stages.

I’m currently testing the new strategy myself, and it appears to be solid, so I can’t wait to pass it along to you!

I’ve been so caught up in the building and running of Subatomic Media that I’ve been totally neglecting my affiliate marketing efforts.  I used to really enjoy it and was pocketing several thousand dollars a month doing it, but building a real, scalable business takes a lot of energy and focus!  Not to mention the fact that we seem to be reaching a point on saturation in PPC for promoting products from Clickbank of CJ- there are just too many damn affiliates out there to simply dabble in it and make the same kind of money I used to.

I could raise my game.  I could start employing all the advanced tactics I’ve been developing as well as learning from others, but I’m not sure I’m interested anymore.  To make good money as an affiliate these days, you need to constantly be building web sites, building mailing lists, writing copy, writing code, and on and on.  With all the work required, what’s the advantage of being an affiliate?

I’ve started ratcheting down my affiliate campaigns and focusing more on bringing in new business for my agency.  At least with Subatomic, all the copy is written, the page built, the tools purchased.  All I really need is to keep leads for new business coming in, and keep my clients happy.  If you ask me, that’s a lot less work than the affiliate game is becoming.

What are your thoughts?  Is affiliate marketing becoming more trouble than it’s worth?  Are the hobbyists looking to make a few extra bucks being pushed out of the market by each other, the “super affiliates”, or both?  Is being an affiliate better than a business owner?

Weigh in with your comments below.

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