Yes it’s true, I’ve gone ahead and decided to rename my blog to give it a more professional and brandable appearance. It wasn’t an easy choice to make because of all the work I’ve already done under the ErikKarey.com branding, but it was a move I feel that was essential to get this blog off its ass and producing again.

There were several reasons for the change of domains. First, as you might well know, I’ve let this blog decay over the past 4 months or so to a point where I haven’t made any new posts and those posts which do exist are constantly attacked by comment spammers. I can’t explain why it happened….but I lost interest and motivation…..not a good thing at all. So I’m confident that this name change will light a fire underneath my ass and help me resurrect this blog.

Secondly, by using EntrepreneursWealth.com as the domain and title, it provides more brandability and professionalism in my opinion. With this domain I feel it will allow me the possibility of expanding this site into more than just a personal blog about internet entrepreneurship. If I can get traffic and interest back up then I feel that I can eventually create a whole community based around internet entrepreneurship with this blog as its foundation.

Lastly, the name change simply distances this blog from its predecessor to a degree. It allows me to put the infrequent posting mistakes behind me and to once again start something great on a fresh new domain. Forget about my personal blog (for now)! My goal is to make this a top blog on the topic of internet business and entrepreneurship. I have a lot of plans for this blog over the next few months and hope that you will stick around and experience them.

For those of you that knew this blog as ErikKarey.com thanks for sticking with me and remember to update your RSS feed with the new URL. For those new readers welcome to EntrepreneursWealth.com! I hope you all enjoy!

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About

If you’ve ever been interested in PPC or CPA marketing then you MUST head over to CashTactics to read Ruck’s latest series entitled “The CPA Marketing Series” It’s only just begun over the past few days and already a wealth of information has been covered and knowledge has been shared. I’ve really been impressed with all of the information, strategies and knowledge that Ruck has shared with his readers.

This series is not the typical series of posts where everything is glossed over and just barely touched upon. So far each post in the series has gone in-depth explaining everything you need to know to get your PPC CPA campaign off the ground and profitable. I’ve been intently following this series and trying things out and I’m finally excited to get into PPC. As Ruck has said he’s only scratched the surface so far and has a lot more information in store for his readers.

I’m happy to have found CashTactics and even happier that there is someone out there that isn’t afraid to share their knowledge in an in-depth no topic left untouched manner. I highly recommend you take a look at this series if you are even remotely interested in PPC. I’d also recommend signing up for the forums at CashTactics as there is a lot of information in there, plus Ruck is pretty quick with helping you out there too!

Posts:

• The CPA Marketing Series And Affiliate Directory
• The CPA Marketing Series Primer
• CPA Marketing Series - Networks, Offers And Tools Overview
• CPA Marketing Series - Google PPC To CPA Introduction
• CPA Marketing Series - Choosing The Offer
• CPA Marketing Series - Keyword Research
• CPA Marketing Series - Domain Variation Examples

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I probably say this in most of the monthly reviews I post, but it’s hard to believe that February is already over! (even with an extra day) February turned out to be a busy month for me in a number of ways both online and in my day to day life. In terms of this blog, it’s been a relatively successful month, though I there are places that I would like to improve upon. So without further ado here’s my month in review and goals for March.

Income
Income seems to be the thing that interests most people so I’ll start out with that. In my February goals post I posted saying how I’d like to reach $1000 income for February, but unfortunately I didn’t make it. A few setbacks in my eBay affiliate sites made it a slightly slower month than I had hoped, but it still turned out to be a decent one:

eBay Affiliate - $500.62
Tribal Fusion - $204.98
———————————
TOTAL: $705.60

As I said above, I had a few setbacks with my eBay stores and wasn’t able to create the 6 new stores I had planned for February. Unfortunately my eBay earnings have been trailing off at the end of the month. Even so, I was happy to hit the $500 plateau for my eBay earnings and already have a $490 check on the way from Commission Junction. For March I’d like to reach at least $600 in commissions from my eBay stores and launch 3 new stores by month’s end.

RSS Readers
February has been an up and down month in terms of readership and I can certainly understand why. As I discussed back in the middle of January, I’ve decided to reduce my posting schedule and only write when I have something meaningful to say or have the time to post. However, this method has led to only 4 posts last month. Ideally I’d like to see myself posting around twice a week or 8-10 posts per month right now.

With only 4 posts last month, my RSS feed count tended to rise with the new content and then dropped in between posts. In February I hit a high of 118 readers and for March I’d like to see my readership level off around 125 which is quite doable provided I write more content!

Personal
As I mentioned at the start of this post, February was a very busy month for me personally as well. At my job we launched a new version of our software which entailed a lot work from everyone on staff. That coupled with the fact that I had bronchitis for a good week made for a stressful few weeks. I’ve also found myself increasingly tired after work and need to figure out how to re-energize myself for the evening where I think I have the most potential to work on my internet ventures and where I have the most time to spend with those close to me.

Overall I’m happy with what February brought me, but not content with it. I know I can do better and produce more and that’s my overall goal for March. If you have a post reviewing your February or outlining your March goals feel free to leave a link as a comment on this post!

Good luck in March everyone!

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I’ve been using Entrecard now for about a month and have raked in right around 600 credits as it stands right now. Instead of using them myself, I’d like to give them away as part of a contest! (how nice of me?)

So what do you have to do to enter? It’s quite simple! All you need to do is subscribe to my RSS feed and leave a comment on this posting saying you’ve done so. If you are already subscribed, please just leave a comment and I will still give you an entry! If you’d like a bonus entry, please subscribe to my feed via Email and I will give you an additional entry! Just leave a comment saying you’ve done so.

Now what is it that you win? Well obviously the winner will receive my 600 entrecard credits as well as any credits I accrue from now until the end of the contest. In addition to the credits I’ll be throwing in 1 month of advertising on my blog in the form of a 125×125 banner. I will also be linking to your blog in the post announcing the winner.

The contest will run until Friday, March 7th, 2008 at which point I will randomly select a winner, write up a post about the contest and contact the winner via email.

Good luck in the contest and thanks for reading!

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As you’ve seen over the past month or two, the eBay affiliate program has been my major money maker. However, in keeping with the general consensus of the make money online community, I’m trying to diversify my money making techniques and not put “all of my eggs in one basket”. So with that being said I recently made my first plunge into the world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) affiliate marketing and I thought I would share the experience with you.

Affiliate Offers
Not wanting to dump a lot of money into my first attempt at PPC marketing I decided I would set a small daily budget of $25 per day. My first step was to find an offer to promote and for that I need to join a few affiliate networks. I applied to several of them, but found the signup process easiest at RocketProfit and was accepted within a day. After logging into my account I found that they had a number of different offers and decided to focus on offers that require the least input from the user, zip code and email submission offers. These offers just require the user to input either their zip code or email for me to get paid and seemed like they would be easy to promote.

Keywords
So I found an offer that I liked that “awarded” the user a $250 gift card to a certain store if they provided their email. From here I went to a few of my favorite FREE keyword research tools including SEO Book’s Keyword Tool, Free Wordtracker and even Google’s Adword Keyword Tool. I used all of these services to create a keyword listing that I thought were highly targeted to the reward being given by my affiliate offer. The best part about the offer I was promoting was that there was one HIGHLY related keyword that had little to no competition and a good amount of searches per day and I focused my campaign around this.

Landing Pages
After deciding on some keywords I fired up Dreamweaver and coded myself a landing page and supporting pages. I made sure to code them in valid table-less XHTML transitional code, making sure to put my keywords in H1 and H2 tags. By doing this I trying to make my landing page and supporting pages as dense as possible for the keywords I was targeting which I later found out was very important.

Major things to incorporate into your landing page and supporting pages:

• Put Keywords in H1 & H2 Tags
• Provide unique content
• Link to Outside Related Sources
• Provide a Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms page
• Make use of the Alt and Title tags

I think the one of the biggest things I learned from this first plunge into PPC marketing was that the creation of a solid landing page is important. If you plan to use Google Adwords for your PPC marketing you need to provide not only a simple landing page, but also a lot of related data and content to achieve a good Quality Score. I ended up re-working my landing page 5 to 6 times before I was able to have Google give me an “OK” quality score. It was hardly an easy task, but in the end it allowed me to get $0.10 to $0.15 cost per click prices.

Adwords
After designing my landing pages and uploading them to my webhost I moved on to setting up my campaign in Adwords. I entered all of my keywords, my $25 daily budget and max Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of $0.15. I also setup 4 different versions of my advertisements. I wanted to test out which call to action and text in my ad would produce the best Click-Through-Rate (CTR). After that I let it start up and meticulously watched the numbers come in.

As you can see from my above screenshot, I ended up spending $24.36 on my campaign in 1 day with a CTR that is less than desirable. In my estimation those who were searching for my keyword weren’t necessarily interested in the offer I was promoting, but I also think the campaign need a lot more tweaking and the landing page needed to push them into the offer more.

Results
As I said above I ended up spending a little over $24 on my PPC campaign in the first day and logging into my RocketProfit account I found that I earned almost $30.

So doing some quick math is would seem as though I earned just about $6.00. Now this is hardly worth all of the time I put in to pick keywords, create a landing page and do all of the testing, but it was a good learning experience. Looking at the data in RocketProfit would also suggest that those making it to my landing page only went all the way through to the actual offer 30% of the time while only 30% of those people actually completed the offer. To me it’s clear that my landing page needed to make them WANT to complete the offer more.

Conclusion
As I said above, this was a good learning experience, but the question is would I do it again or will I continue learning about the world of PPC marketing? I’m honestly not sure. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be an effective PPC marketer, but I do know that I will continue to read up on PPC marketing techniques and when I have the extra time I could see myself trying this all again. Until then I have several projects to focus on as well as my eBay affiliate stores.

Please consider sharing your PPC stories by leaving a comment and feel free to ask any questions you may have and I will do my best to answer them.

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It’s been an interesting month for me and my blog. Personally I’ve found myself swamped with work to do and it seems like I’ve had little time to sit down and relax. In terms of this blog, I once again found myself taking an extended break from blogging and came to terms with my blogging failures. With all of this behind me I’ve started posting again, albeit inconsistently, and I’m happy to see my RSS count climbing. It’s sitting at an even 100 readers today which finally achieves my goal I initially set back in November. Below I’ll review January in more detail and give you my goals for the coming month.

Income
January was a pretty good month for income for me. I’ve started to get into the eBay affiliate program using the phpBayPro plugin and I’ve continued to gain money from CPM ads on JustPressPlay. Here’s a breakdown of my income for January:

eBay Affiliate - $461.64
Tribal Fusion - $211.34
RocketProfit - $4.23
———————————
TOTAL: $677.21

Be aware that although a majority of this is profit there was probably around $130 used to cover server costs and domain registrations for the month. As for what I would like to accomplish in February, I would like to increase my eBay affiliate earnings. Currently I have 4 niche sites started, but I’d like to build it out to around 10 stores by the end of the month and I think this could get me close to $1000 profit for February if I keep up with it all. Overall I’d love to hit the $1000/mo mark for February and I think it’s a very attainable goal.

RSS Readers
As I mentioned above, today my feedcount finally says 100 and by doing so it crosses that goal of my list. Now my obvious goal is to build upon that and by the end of February I really like to see it in the neighborhood of 150-175. Will it happen? I’m not positive. Promoting this blog has never been my #1 goal. I enjoy writing here and I enjoy it even more when people comment on and read what I have to say, but my main goal is to start projects that will earn me money consistently. So for February I am going to push for at least 150 subscribers and do what I can to make it happen.

Posting
Posting is obviously a sore subject for me. As I wrote in my blogging failure post, I don’t want to give up on this blog but realize that I can’t focus all of my attention here either. I enjoy writing here and it’s a great way to open up and share my experience, but I don’t have the time to post every day. So from now on I am going to be posting when I have something to share or say. I know that doesn’t follow the conventional wisdom of “post consistently”, but I’m going to try it out and see how it works.

Personal
On a personal note I know that I’ve outlined a lot of things to accomplish for myself in regards to my website projects and I’ve also said how busy work is, but one thing I would like to do is take some time out to relax and enjoy the “fruits of my labor”. By that I mean taking some time and doing things I enjoy and spending time with the people in my life. As of late it just seems like it’s been one busy day after another with the weekends offering little relief.

So there is my January in a nutshell and my goals for the upcoming month. I have high hopes for what I can accomplish in the coming month and I look forward to sharing it with everyone.

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Yesterday I was browsing the net and stumbled across an article and video blog on 45n5 entitled “The Best SEO Advice You Will Ever Hear” Mark, owner of 45n5, talks about how SEO isn’t worth your time and it’s the “Lazy person’s game”. Immediately, I felt this was kind of a BS argument. Being able to rank your website in the top 10 for any semi-competitive keyword is NOT a task the lazy. It’s hard work to do link building, on-page SEO and all the research necessary to target the right keywords.

Mark went on to compare SEO to the lottery by saying “Round up all of the people that win $100,000 per year via the lottery and all the people that make more than $100,000 via SEO and my bet is there will be more lottery winners.” Honestly this is a poor comparison as the lottery is just a game of luck while SEO is more of a skill or job. Simply buying lottery ticket after lottery ticket until you hit win $100,000 doesn’t require any skill. The people that do succeed at SEO are the people who know what they are doing, they aren’t lucky; they are good at what they do!

SEO and the result of it (organic traffic) is a great thing and the higher you rank in the SERPs the more traffic you are going to get and the more users you can convert into paying customers. Relying on organic traffic is not taking the easy way out nor is it a bad business practice. In fact, I think it’s a rather good business practice. I would rather users find me versus hunting them down through PPC or any other method.

All that being said, I’ll can agree to a point with Mark and say that SEO shouldn’t be your only concern when building a website. You need to produce quality content, you need to be giving value to your visitors and you need to focus on all of the other things that influence your SEO as well. Focus on exchanging links, creating linkable content, and promoting yourself through social networking and forums. All of these things in combination will undoubtedly influence your SERPs ranking. From there take a look at what you can do on-page to make your SERPs ranking even better.

When it comes down to it, creating and managing a site is a complicated task with a lot of different aspects to it. The overall moral of this story is to give everything attention and don’t over-analyzing any ONE aspect of your website.

Good Luck!

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About 2 months ago I read a post over on EarnersBlog where Stuart outlined the process for creating a WordPress powered eBay affiliate store and was inspired to try it out. The general idea behind it is use WordPress to create a niche store running the phpBayPro plugin ($39 to purchase) and earn commissions through Commission Junction, who handles eBay’s affiliate program. It sounded simple enough and Stuart was convincing enough that I gave the process a try and I’m glad that I did.

Over the past month I’ve setup a total of 2 niche sites running the phpBayPro plugin and Wordpress and I’ve found the whole process to be quick and profitable. Below you can see a screenshot of my earnings for the past 20 days.

I know it’s not a blow you away number like $10,000 or anything, but it’s a modest sum of around $300 over 20 days which averages out to $15/day. But, the best part about this is that I’m making this off of just 2 sites which means each niche store is earning over $150/mo. Over the next 2 months I’m planning to launch and promote another 10-20 of these stores and if I can keep an average of $150/mo per store I could end up generating over $3,000/mo from my niche eBay stores.

What is even better is the fact that I recently developed phpBayAds (eBay Affiliate Ad Units) and I’m starting to generate cash using these ads on a number of websites that I own. I know one of the rules that you always read about making money online is to “never put all of your eggs in one basket”, but another rule that I like to follow is “strike while the iron is hot”. If this process can generate a good income over the next few months then I will maximize this revenue and when it starts to dwindle I will move on to new concepts. Right now it’s clear that the eBay affiliate arena is hot and I plan to cash in on it.

One thing to remember about making money through the eBay affiliate program is that it all hinges on your ability to drive traffic to your sites. The hardest part of creating these niche stores is getting people to visit them. Currently I’m driving around 40-70 unique visitors a day to my stores and as long as it’s targeted quality traffic you will definitely see conversions.

Good Luck!

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Wow, it’s been another month since I’ve posted on my blog and I’ll admit, I feel like I’ve failed with regards to blogging. I took an extended break back in July and made the goal to post with more frequency. I took a one month break in October and again I vowed to be more consistent. And now I find myself in that same predicament, just 2 months later. So the question I have to ask myself now is do I have what it takes to be a blogger?

When I first got into blogging it was an extremely exciting day. I saw what others were doing with their own blogs and wanted to be part of it. Since then I’ve racked up just about 100 posts and generated over 700 comments (not a bad ratio). Yet, my inconsistency is killing me and this blog. Just when I reach record numbers for unique visitors, I shoot myself in the foot and disappear from the blogosphere. So what do I do?

I’ve thought a lot about this blog over the past month or so and the thought of just totally abandoning it had come to my mind. However, I don’t think I could ever do that. I’ve put too much time into this blog writing posts, responding to comments, and designing its current theme to just throw it all away. So then I got to thinking how I can make this blog survive.

It’s obvious that what I am doing right now just isn’t working. Trying to post on a daily basis, with a quality article just isn’t going to happen at this point in my life. I have way too many things to do in the day and not enough time to do them all. So the thought has crossed my mind to post sporadically over the course of the month (say 1-3 times per week) with updates on my money making, articles on techniques, etc, etc. I think this would be a much more manageable task for me and not put the pressure on me daily to come up with a genuine quality article.

What does everyone think of this strategy? All I’ve ever read regarding a blog posting schedule is consistency, consistency, consistency. So that leaves me to wonder can posting sporadically work? Will my RSS readership and unique visitors count still increase? Is anyone else using a similar posting strategy?

When it all comes down to it, I can’t justify scrapping what work I’ve done here. Honestly I like being able to post my thoughts, findings, and goals (when I have the time). In the end I might not have what it takes to be a full-time “problogger” but that was never really my goal in the first place. My real goal is to become a full-time internet entrepreneur making a living from my websites and web businesses and that I am still fully committed to.

Thanks for your continued support!

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Recently I read a post over at Blogging Fingers, where Matt proposed an idea where he creates a simple storefront using Wordpress to sell products through affiliate links. His ultimate thinking is to cash in off the site for the next month to 2 months (prime holiday shopping time) and then sell the blog/site in late January for the standard 10x monthly profit. Assuming he can get $100/mo or so during the holidays he could be sitting on $1000 come January.

At the end of his post, Matt challenged anyone who was up for it to do the same thing and see what they could do in terms of profit per month as well as the overall sales figure in January. So given the challenge, little risk and potential profit, I decided to take that challenge and develop my own niche storefront.

1. Pick the Right Niche
The first step is to find the right niche to exploit. One of the keys to picking a good niche will be to find one that is exciting and the reader will need to buy a product to get involved with the topic. Matt talked about this in his post too. It’s important that those viewing your site will be in BUY mode, not just reading mode. This niche blog won’t be like other blogs with tons of content. It will be limited content and lots of affiliate links and images. The key is to push the reader into the buy.

Another important aspect to think about when it comes to picking your niche is how web-savvy your intended customer is. Chances are you should stay far away from the technology niches because those who know anything about technology will likely know a little bit about web sales and steer clear of your semi-obvious affiliate site. Make sure to spend a bit of time picking the right niche, it will be the hinge for all the sites success.

2. Buy The Domain
Once you have a niche, you’re going to need to buy a domain. Try and pick a domain which is keyword rich and further emphasizes the fact that your blog is actually a store (a place to buy). Domains with shop, online, discount, and store coupled with your keywords should do well.

3. Setup the Site
I think Matt had the right idea when he chose Wordpress for his storefront. It’s perfect because it’s already a fully featured script capable of almost anything. Couple that with the fact that there are a plethora of plugins available and the thousands of themes and you can put a store together in no time. What I recommend is to install the latest Wordpress, find a relatively simple Wordpress theme (2 columns, 1 main header) and install the All-In-One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator. This should make the blog nice and SEO friendly and give you the best chance of establishing some organic traffic.

Once you have the blog setup (design completed and domain setup) you should start adding content. I would recommend that you write 2-3 simple review style posts detailing specific products with affiliate text links embedded within the post. I’ve found that it’s giving a better CTR than plain old affiliate image boxes.

4. Choose an Affiliate
In terms of which affiliate program to use, you can choose any you like and that fits your niche. In both Matt’s and my case we used Amazon’s affiliate program to place both links and product boxes on our sites to sell the products. I would recommend you try this first as we did. I am going to let this method run for another couple days and gauge how many sales it generates and move on from there. If I don’t see enough revenue coming in I am planning on switching over to eBay’s affiliate program to see how it differs. (note: Amazon’s affiliate cookie only lasts for 24 hours only, while eBay’s lasts 7 days)

5. Promote It
In order to keep the costs that it takes to create this site low, the only methods I am going to use to drive traffic to the site are going to be free. This will include the use of social networking traffic, primarily StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Squidoo, etc and other sources such as forum postings, craigslist, blog commenting, etc. So far, 1.5 days into the sites operation I’ve driven close to 1,000 unique visitors to the site and I’m eagerly awaiting the update of my affiliate statistics.

How Much Time & Money?
The great part about this holiday niche site idea is that that the only real cost involved is the $8 it cost me to register a domain name with GoDaddy. Of course you will need hosting, but I already have several hosting accounts so I just tossed it on one of those accounts as an Addon domain. In terms of how long it took me to set the site up, it took the better part of a day. This included all of the steps I listed above. Besides that, I continue to make a single post per day on the blog highlighting a new product and I also spend a bit of time each day promoting it as I’ve listed above.

Conclusion
The way you have to think about this is that it’s a guaranteed win no matter what. You spend $8 and some of your time creating a site that will undoubtedly sell for at least $25 no matter the sales statistics and you learn a lot about site creation, affiliate marketing and traffic building. That plus the possibility of making well over 20 times your initial investment makes this something that you should definitely try. Matt encouraged me to give it a try and now I’ll encourage you to do the same. If you go ahead and create your own site and sell it in January, I’ll link to your progress and sales post in January.

Good Luck!

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