My Internet Marketing Adventures

One of the prizes that I won as part of Bloggin-ads.com's "One Heck of a Giveaway" Contest in January was 200 pages from OneBuckWiki.com. OBW uses a similar model to Graham Langdon's Million Dollar Wiki, only the pages currently sell for $1 instead of MDW's $100 per page price tag. How do these pay per page wikis work? From MDW's FAQ page we read:

Every page is dedicated to a unique word or phrase. The content on each page is controlled by the page’s owner. Owners use the site, and specifically their page, as a vehicle to generate traffic, revenue or publicity.

And from the same FAQ re Why Buy A Page?:

There are many of benefits in purchasing a page. As a page owner you:

* Secure an exclusive niche in a growing micro-economy.
* Raise awareness of your website, product, or service.
* Own a keyword or phrase that perfectly represents and brands your business.
* Cultivate a heightened web presence.
* Share traffic generated by the entire community.
* Join a resourceful community of motivated entrepreneurs.
* Receive storage space on our server for your page's content.
* Link quality content to your relevant website for better SEO.

There are also many ways to directly earn a profit from owning a page.

* Sell products or services off your page.
* Sell ad spots or use Google AdSense.
* Resell your wiki page (developed or not) at a later date.

So I was pretty happy when Max, from Zedomax.com sent me a congratulatory email and I started on the task of picking keywords that I wanted. It took hours to come up with about 190 keywords and keyword phrases! Some of my chosen words related to sites that I have started or will start in the near future and other keywords I lifted from the MDW's most popular list.

Even if One Buck Wiki never reaches critical mass and my 200 keywords languish and fail to develop any real value, the exercise of choosing them was a valuable one. I've been so focused on the Entrecard / blogger aspect of my internet marketing adventures that I needed to pull back and remember that blogging is just a small part of a larger picture.

I've been busy reorganizing blogs and structuring my internet marketing adventures. Entrecard is still my main activity and I've now expanded to a full 20 active Entrecard accounts. 11 of them fall under the Biz Beacon umbrella and are designed with the Entrecard community as the main audience. I'm using The Entrecarder as my main blog for recording what I've been up to with Entrecard and won't duplicate too much here on this blog.

I've mentioned before that one of my goals is to drive traffic to Ready Health Products' website and to that end I've restructured how I'm working with Project Wonderful. I had a skyscraper of 6 125x125 boxes on the Entrecarder site and it ended up being a lot of work to manage it. I had followed the advice of others and set the minimum cost at "free" and only had a few days when the bids got up over $.03, with maybe 27 cents being the best day. At the same time I was bidding on a number of sites and got some decent traffic through to the Ready Health Products site. Pretty cost effective for a small budget, seeing as how I spent about $2 (net) over the course of a week. Still, I wasn't really ready to run an indepth campaign and so I took the skyscraper away and emptied out my funds and let my PW account sit idle for a few days.

Honestly, I was getting bogged down with all the card dropping and maintenance of the Entrecard sites and wasn't overly enthused with this whole approach. I was a bit flattered when "coincidentally" someone started using my idea for guessing locations that were presented using Google Earth. In fact, I started rejecting ads and stopped dropping cards, sold off my Entrecredit stash, and was ready to take a break from everything Entrecard-related. (As has been common for me, I get my best ideas in the early morning and have had to learn to not make decisions when I'm tired at night.) It was just a day or two later that I realized that I had an asset--multiple established Entrecard accounts--and I just needed to reframe how I was approaching things.

That's how the Biz Beacon Advertising Co-op came to be. I had another 7-10 ideas for blogs that were in various stages of development (most of them brand new) and I quickly set about the process of registering them, finding or creating a graphic for the Entrecard, and getting them all tied together in a group of 20 blogs. The idea was to provide a service that might be needed on Entrecard...the ability to do a scheduled ad blast across 20 blogs. Full details can be found on the Coop site. No one has taken me up on the offer yet, but that's ok...I can put my own ads on the Co-op sites at no expense.

It's funny how random things can happen as if they were orchestrated. Just as Entrecard was experiencing some VERY slow response times, we caught wind of Spottt, the new link trading concept from AdBrite. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who took advantage of the break from Entrecard to check out this new service. I signed up for a couple of accounts for my different blogs and was amazed at the number of impressions that I got in the first few days. What does that mean for my traffic? Nothing. I'm not tracking traffic and haven't made it a focus yet. Naturally, the guys at Entrecard see Spottt as a competitor, but I don't see it that way. Why not have both on your site(s)? That's what I decided to do, in addition to an ad that someone can purchase by the week via the Co-op and the Project Wonderful ad, which defaults to an ad for Ready Health Products when no one has ponied up for the minimum bid amount.

AdToll also made a splash recently by unveiling their Peel Away ads, which caused me to try one out on the What Do YOU See? site. I find it interesting that some of the purists in the blogger community would prefer that a blog have no ads on it whatsoever. I don't like a page full of obnoxious ads anymore than the next guy, but even PBS has learned that a little income from ads can go a long way towards paying the bills. I intend to keep trying ad programs in order to see what works best for me. But before I go too far down that road I know that I have to continue to create content, refine the look of my blogs, and get listed with directories, etc. And in the back of my mind is that nagging little voice whispering "SEO...SEO is the way to go." I'll get there one day. The huge broad market is full of opportunity and my ultimate goal is to press beyond the blogger community and present sites that will add value to the masses of search engine driven consumers.

I'm not the nurturing type who fusses over plants. My typical approach to growing things is to get them started and move on. Oh, I'll water and weed the garden often enough. (It's under a foot of snow at the moment.) But I think the plants know that I'm not really committed to their success. As I look at my internet marketing activities, I am hoping that they know that I DO care about their success. I care because I see them as little money trees, albeit just barely sprouting at the moment.

Part of the reason that I'm choosing to look at my blogs this way is that I have 20+ active blogs in my orchard and will likely continue to plant more. That's 20+ money trees that I am hoping will mature and bear fruit for at least several seasons. It helps to envision these sproutling blogs as future money trees so that I don't expect too much of them in the short run. I need to feed them and care for them if they are to mature and develop.

I know that what I am doing is somewhat unconventional...and that's ok with me. I find it both challenging and satisfying to have so many different blogs and am energized by the opportunities I encounter each day. I am confident that my little money trees will bear fruit if I am diligent in caring for them. And I am grateful for the advice and knowledge that I am gleaning from my fellow gardeners.