Carolyn Middlebrook Is Not My Name

People often call me Carolyn Middlebrook which is incorrect, it’s spelled Caroline. There is a difference, in the UK at least. Over here there is a difference in pronunciation. You pronounce the last syllable in Carolyn like you would the last in Violin but with Caroline, it’s pronounced like line!

Why am I waffling on about my name? Um well actually, this is an SEO experiment. I have been noticing with interest that my search traffic has been climbing quite steadily over the last few months so obviously this blog now has the ability to generate search traffic but the vast majority of it is from single search terms - there’s not many terms that are searched for over and over which tells me that I’m not optimising too well.

So I’ve been reading a LOT about SEO over the last week or so and today I had a look through my search traffic for the last month and decided to just pick a term that is already getting some traffic and see if I can rank better for it. I chose Carolyn Middlebrook because it’s easy to write a post about :-)

At first I wondered why I would be ranking for it at all but it’s obvious really - people write Carolyn in the comments quite often - proof that all those lovely comments get ranked.

So this means that I’m probably going to be ranking for some highly dubious terms thanks to Mr Mark Mason and some recent comments he left in jest :-)

Oh and just in case you didn’t realise, my name isn’t Carolyn Middlebrook :) I hope I didn’t stuff the keyword in too many times! This is a pointless post for you guys so I’ve published it just minutes before the next post comes out so it doesn’t hog my front page for too long!

Use Your Knowledge to Sell Other People’s Stuff

Many bloggers are earning a pittance by just selling other people’s products via AdSense, private ad sales and affiliate marketing and I suggested that we package our knowledge into our own products that we sell directly.

By opening up our product sales to affiliates we can then harness the power of other bloggers thus massively extending our reach way beyond our individual blogs. In this post, I’m going to go full circle and suggest that as a product owner you can now start making a lot more money with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Is Very Broad

Last week I wrote a review of a $27 ebook about ClickBank. That is what I consider a ‘money post’. It’s not going to change the lives of my readers and it’s only real purpose is to make me money as an affiliate for that product. Will I get rich doing this? Well it would help if I inserted my affiliate links properly but even on the days when I do check my posts before publishing, selling the odd copy of a $27 product from a one-off review on my blog will not allow me to retire any time soon.

However, $27 is the low end of the market, especially in this particular niche. You may have heard some buzz last week over something called the Product Launch Formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker. This product was priced at $1997 and gave affiliates a 50% commission. That is a whole new ball game…

Selling High Priced Items

Readers who have been with me a while may remember my high paying niche experiment. I was trying to find a product such as PLF that would give me a $1000 commission to see if it would be harder to sell than a product with a $10 product, or somewhere in between. The experiment failed but the experience I have learned since then tells me that I don’t even need to conduct an experiment such as that because you don’t sell $27 ebooks in the same way that you sell $2000 courses.

Just about every big name in the Internet Marketing industry promoted PLF and none of them wrote a review of it on their blog! They wouldn’t have been able to because the product was available for all of 24 hours before being pulled off the market. They had to promote it without seeing it and they had to try to get an edge over every other affiliate out there who was promoting it at exactly the same time.

Your Own Product Is Your Edge

If you’ve ever bought a product in the Internet Marketing industry you will probably be familiar with the concept of a ‘bonus’. “Buy this product from me and I’ll throw in X, Y & Z as a bonus.” This is how the promotion of PLF worked. As a consumer, when you are about to spend two thousand dollars you want to get the most bang for your buck and pick the affiliate with the most appealing bonus package.

I was one of those consumers (or at least I tried, they have still not managed to process my credit card, looks like I have missed out) and one thing I found particularly useful was a blog that was put together by Dr Mani. He showcased all of the bonuses that PLF affiliates were offering.

What struck me as I looked through these is that almost every single bonus took the form of the knowledge of the affiliate. They threw in ebooks, courses, seminars, skype time, personal mentoring and coaching. Every one of those affiliates offered up their own knowledge in the form of their products as bonuses for people who bought PLF through their affiliate link.

Of course, those with the best products could put together better bonus packages than those with weaker products.

How Do You Compete With the Big Guys?

The second thing that struck me was that even if I was an affiliate for PLF or some similar product in the future, that I would never be able to compete with those guys. What product do I have? Well none yet but soon I’ll have my course on StumbleUpon.

However, what I remembered here was that I was looking at an extremely high priced product in just about the most competitive industry that there is. These guys, names like Ed Dale, Rich Shefren, Mike Filsaime, John Reese etc are the “big name guru’s” of the industry and have all had years and years of experience and have used that time to create unique and outstanding products.

I don’t have to compete with those guys and neither do you. For starters, the Internet Marketing industry is a tough one and there are plenty of other niches out there that don’t have gurus like that to compete with. I’m still hoping to set up a niche site this year that will be nothing to do with IM or making money online but in that niche I want to create my own product and make some decent money.

We All Start At The Beginning

Whatever niche we are in, we don’t have to compete at the top level and even if that is our ultimate aim we all have to start somewhere. Blogging in particular is a tough venture to excel at simply because it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to get a new blog off the ground.

But its also easy to forget that everybody starts out at the bottom and so we can forget those guys at the top and start out by chasing the commission on that $27 ebook. Maybe next time it will be a $97 ebook or a $297 course and so on. My StumbleUpon course seems trivial to me when I compare it to the kinds of bonuses that were being offered for PLF but it doesn’t matter because it’s a start.

Every success story, online or offline has to start somewhere. Most of the great successes have a string of failures and minor successes behind them. Sure there are those people that seem to burst onto a scene out of nowhere, like the winners of reality TV shows for example, but most of us can get where we want to be by taking that first step and just getting started.

Recapping The Strategy

There’s lots of ways to make money blogging, and many of them revolve around selling other people’s products. However, when we create our own products we create something that is exclusive to us. We have at our disposal a product that nobody else can offer. When we wish to step beyond simple affiliate links embedded in review posts we can use our own products as leverage to give us an edge over competitors in our niche.

101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic

When I checked my February stats I noticed a spike of traffic had come in from a site called Design Shack. A little investigation revealed that this is a CSS Gallery and prompted me to investigate if there were any others out there. There are! Lots of them… and they are a great source of traffic and one-way backlinks to your site.

What are CSS Galleries?

Ok first up, what is CSS? (Skip to the next paragraph if you already know this.) CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is the industry standard way of styling websites. If you use WordPress, every theme will have a style sheet built into it. The styling controls the look and feel of the design - the colours, the fonts, layout, spacing and so on.

A CSS Gallery (they are also known as CSS directories) is a website that showcases websites that demonstrate good design. They are a great source of inspiration if you are a web designer looking for ideas. As I discovered, they also happen to be a nice source of traffic if your site happens to get featured on one of them…

You Need a Unique Site Design

Before I go any further I need to just point out that this strategy will only work for you if your site design is unique. This means that if you are using one of the many free WordPress themes you cannot submit that. However, if you have spent money on having a theme custom designed for you then this strategy could get you some bonus traffic to soften the blow a little.

These CSS Galleries typically have various categories so you can submit any kind of site - it does not have to be a blog. As long as the design used on your site can’t also be found on a bunch of others it will be fine to submit to most of these galleries.

Traffic & Backlinks

I picked up on this idea because of the traffic that the listing on the CSS Directory mentioned above sent me. Looking at the stats it would seem that the majority of the traffic came in a rush at the beginning when the site was first listed. I imagine that most of these sites list new submissions on the front page and it would be those that get the most traffic.

Let’s not forget though that each of these is providing you a one-way backlink and the vast majority of them are do-follow. Having backlinks to your site gives it authority over time which can help it rank better in the search engines. However, unless your site happens to be about CSS or web design in some way you’ll find that these particular links are not highly relevant to your niche so they won’t be quite as good as say a deep link from a fellow blogger.

Let me go back to the traffic benefit for one moment… I noticed that several of the CSS Galleries that I have been looking at also have blogs and all the latest designs get pushed to the RSS feed. Some of them have thousands of readers so getting featured could bring a nice influx of traffic.

CSS Gallery / Directory List

I have spent a few hours trawling the Internet to find as many of these sites as I can and I managed to find 101! I’ve also noted down the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking but remember that is only valid at the time of posting and if you’re reading this some time after I posted it those stats may be out of date.

Here is the list:

Tips for Submission

Don’t submit to all of the galleries in one sitting. That might be a few too many backlinks in one go for Google and it will probably make your eyes bleed anyway. Note that not all of the galleries listed accept all sites. For example I saw one that specialised in horizontally scrolling web designs so take a moment to look around the site and check that your design is suitable.

I plan to submit my blog to as many as these as I feel is appropriate / can be bothered with. I’ll do this gradually over the remainder of the month so it will be interesting to see if any of them pop up in my March stats.

Free = A Bigger Audience? Not Necessarily…

It’s easier to give something away than it is to sell it right? That was the thinking behind the distribution of my ebook that I summarised yesterday but today I read something that made me think that I might have got it all wrong. Is is possible that I could have got more downloads by selling the book instead of giving it away?

It’s Not Just About Me (or You)

In my summary of the marketing of my ebook I concluded that my own contribution only accounted for perhaps 10% of the results achieved. The other 90% was all down to other people. The vast majority of the traffic that I received promoting the ebook came from other bloggers promoting it on my behalf. They did not have to do this as there was nothing in it for them - and that is where I might have got it all wrong!

My initial thinking was that if I charged for the book that nobody would promote it for me. In fact there were a couple of people who didn’t realise it was a free book at first and told me they would only mention it on their blog if I paid their advertising rates. However, they quickly changed their minds when they realised it was free so this enforced my belief that it would be easier to promote a free book than a paid one.

Money Can Be Shared

Today I have been catching up on one of the membership sites that I belong to called Teaching Sells. This is about creating interactive learning environments and I have been reading about business models. One of the models suggested was to make the paid course very cheap and then make the majority of the money off back-end affiliate sales.

One of the questions that was posed, was if the real revenue was to be generated from affiliate sales, why not make the initial course (that promotes the affiliate) free instead of charging for it? Surely it would be much easier to get more prospects if you gave the course away for free? This is the exact mindset that I had when it came to my ebook.

I hope Brian and Tony don’t mind if I quote a line from their course….

By creating a course worth paying for, you give yourself an advantage that other affiliate marketers don’t have. People and organizations that already have traffic are highly motivated to promote your paid course when you give them 75% to 100% of the course fee.

And there it is! By allowing other people to become affiliates for your product, suddenly there is something in it for them to promote you. I was very lucky that ShoeMoney mentioned my ebook as he is a very busy guy and doesn’t talk about ebooks very much on his blog. I also wrote to some other big names who didn’t get back to me. I wonder if the situation would have been different if my ebook had a cover price which they stood to gain a large percentage of the commission from?

It’s All About Leverage

I have heard people talking about leverage so many times and yet for some reason it just didn’t sink in until today when I read that paragraph in the Teaching Sells course. The idea behind using leverage to sell products is that you don’t try and go it alone - you leverage the audiences that other people have access to.

For instance, there is another UK marketer called Lee McIntyre who gained quite a lot of publicity when he burst onto the scene with an ebook about eBay. It wasn’t so much that book that got him the publicity, it was the fact that he was able to make over $7k in profits in 30 days starting from nothing - no RSS readers, no mailing list, nothing. How did he do it? He leveraged the power of other people’s audiences. They promoted his ebook for him (getting a nice commission) and thus it got promoted to a massive audience that he did not have access to on his own. Lee has now started a membership site called Standing Start Profits which shows other people how to do the same thing!

I think one of the problems that many newcomers (including myself) make is that they try to go it alone. The thinking is that you need to build a website and get readers and get traffic etc so you can sell something from it. This is limited thinking, especially when there are already many people working in your niche with well established blog audiences and mailing lists full of people who just might be interested in your product.

Paid Content Has a Higher Perceived Value

Here is something else that I didn’t really consider at first. In the eyes of many people “free = crap” so when you charge money for something the perceived value goes up. Of course this is not always true as many free products are very good and many paid products are total rubbish!

There is another subtle advantage for charging for content also. If somebody has paid for an info product, they are far more inclined to actually work through it to get their money’s worth from it. For example, many people have seen my list of free Internet marketing related ebooks and yet I wonder how many people have actually read them all? Well, I published it and I haven’t even read all the books on that list!

When something is free people often ask the question, “what’s the catch?” and they assume that their an ulterior motive to the content - usually there is! My ebook was no exception as of course I wanted people to read it and then sign up to BlueHost via my affiliate link. The trouble is that I suspect many people just skimmed the book and didn’t take much real notice of it simply because it was free.

I said in my summary post that I had an estimated overall conversion rate of just 0.2%. This is the ratio of people who signed up to my chosen affiliate out of those who downloaded the book. I wonder if I had charged for it and then asked affiliates to promote it for me if I would have seen a higher conversion rate? I’ll never know.

StumbleUpon Traffic - Ebook Review

StumbleUpon Traffic is a new ebook by Matthew Sherborne who brought us Instant Money Reports (reviewed here) which was about making money from short reports. This new ebook is about leveraging the power of StumbleUpon to send traffic.

There is no doubting the power of StumbleUpon as a source of traffic. It has been my single biggest source of traffic each and every month and has sent me almost 40,000 visitors since the inception of this blog last August. You’ll find other similar stories all over the blogosphere. One way to almost guarantee some StumbleUpon traffic is to blog about StumbleUpon so as a result there is already a ton of free information out there including on this blog. Can Matthews ebook offer us anything that hasn’t already been said?

Ebook Details

StumbleUpon Traffic is a 49 page PDF report costing $9 so it’s not expensive. It has an awfully long sales page for a $9 ebook but I’m starting to expect these things now! One gripe I have with the presentation of the ebook is that it does not have bookmarks embedded in the PDF. Actually I don’t see many ebooks with bookmarks, I wish more authors would put in the effort to create them.

The Content of the Ebook

The first dozen pages of the ebook were introductory, explaining why StumbleUpon is beneficial, how to sign up and how to use the toolbar as a Stumbler. While I suppose this information is necessary, I felt that it took up too much of the book - 25%. If the rest of the ebook had been more in depth I would have been okay with this, but I felt that 25% was just too big a chunk of the content to dedicate to something that is not going to be read for a second time.

Matthew gives a certain amount of space to the subject of StumbleUpon friends but I felt that he wasn’t really emphasising the right points. He didn’t explain exactly how having more friends gives your submissions more authority as a Stumbler. He also didn’t really explain fans. He tells us about the 200 person friend limit but doesn’t really give any advice about how to decide who goes into that friend’s list and how to attract more fans.

There’s quite a lot of discussion about the StumbleUpon profile, choosing the image your avatar and making your profile look appealing to others. He shows us the StumbleRank website which is interesting but not really useful in terms of generating traffic which is the goal we are after. He also talked a little about joining StumbleUpon Groups in the name of ‘increasing exposure’ but doesn’t really explain how this tactic helps gain traffic.

There’s more discussion about adding friends and Matthew advises us to “get on the good side of some active and top stumblers”. The theory is that if you add somebody as a friend they might add you back and so if you friend the top Stumblers you’ll have high profile friends. This is not a tactic I would recommend. I’ve read interviews with top stumblers and they get that a lot and they don’t like it! There are far better ways of getting fans and its far more important to get fans in your niche than just some random person from the top stumbler list.

The next topic to be addressed is the content of your site and here we have some ideas for writing the kind of content that does well on StumbleUpon. This section is pretty good but of course it’s all been said before. One thing that surprises me here is that the copy immediately moves from the content of your pages to submission guidelines but he doesn’t raise the question of whether or not to submit your own pages to the StumbleUpon network. Later in the book a formula is suggested for limiting your own submissions but personally I don’t submit any of my own pages any more.

There’s a small section about sending a page to a friend but once again the mechanics are discussed without really explaining the ethics or reasoning behind it. I personally find Stumble requests to be a little annoying when I get a lot of them especially when people don’t bother to get my name right!

Towards the end there is a fairly good section on the topic of monetizing StumbleUpon traffic but a couple of pages were dedicated to just listing affiliate networks such as ClickBank and Azoogle Ads. Two pages was simply unnecessary here and could easily have been added in the form of text links in an Appendix.

The book finishes off with a section called ‘Blackhat Stumbling’ and I actually found this the most interesting simply because I had never heard of most of it. Of course I would never use any of those techniques so it’s all rather moot anyway!

Missed Opportunities

Throughout the book I felt like Matthew did know his subject material but kept glossing over topics that could have been expanded upon and chose to focus on the obvious stuff that is already well covered in the blogosphere. For example, he briefly mentions the Stumbleupon Sandbox but doesn’t really say what it is, only that traffic can just stop. In actual fact there are several reasons why StumbleUpon Traffic could come to a halt and these are not mentioned in the ebook.

The sales letter boasts techniques that will practically guarantee a site will go viral yet I didn’t find anything in the book that really explained the viral nature of StumbleUpon. The book simply did not live up to its promise here.

The overall feel that I got from the book was that it was padded out which I find crazy as so much has been written about StumbleUpon that I can’t believe Matthew didn’t have more to say. I also felt as though the book has been rushed. He has not even had one of those funky covers designed for it. Now that’s not a necessity but this ebook comes from the guy who wrote the ebook on writing ebooks so he is not even following his own advice here.

I really wanted to be able to recommend StumbleUpon traffic because I am an affiliate so I stand to make a few bucks from it but I just can’t. There is probably more quality content in the links I have put in this post than there is in the ebook. Matthews earlier book on making money with short reports is way better and I still highly recommend that one.