I hope this isn't too long of a read. I have been playing online poker the past few years, so my home has been the twoplustwo forums. Since I spend so much time there, that was where I originally posted this. I thought I should post it here though, since this will hopefully be my new home. I hope some of you find it interesting to follow along with a beginner. Also, maybe this will shed some light to some of you that are thinking about taking the plunge. I had given internet marketing a passing thought a few years ago, but what peaked my interest again and got me rolling this time was maxtower's post here at twoplustwo: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...d.php?t=282753 A little over a week ago I read that post and decided to start experimenting with Internet Marketing. For a long time, I thought IM was a sham. I didn't think ANYONE clicked on google ads. I never do. I didn't think ANYONE would fall for the goofy sales pitch on a "landing page". I never did. Plus, it seemed like a there were an unusually large percentage of ads and sales pages that targeted internet marketers. It seemed like a pyramid scheme. "Buy this guide for just $27 and learn how I made $10,000 in one month just by building a website!" I never bought a guide, but I always imagined what it would say: "Step 1: Sell a guide telling people how they too to can make $10,000 in one month by selling guides on how to make $10,000 in one month." So, anyway, I thought it was all bullplop. But, then I thought about the people that I've told I played poker for a living and their reaction. They all think the same thing. They think: "There is no way anyone can make a living gambling. The people you see on TV may have gotten lucky in a few tournaments, but all their money comes from sponsorships. If you could make money at it, why isn't everyone doing it?" I would always become frustrated at their close-mindedness, especially when I tried to explain the numbers to them and they wouldn't listen. But here I was, thinking that same way about internet marketing. So, after reading some more, I decided to dive in and try everything at once. Here is a rundown of everything I've done in the past week and how much it's cost. I'll keep an update of how much I've made as time progresses. I figured designing and coding a site would take the most time. And, once I had that done, I could just copy the files over to any domain name/host I wanted. So, on Aug. 26th, I setup a my first site for free at l4rge.com and started designing. You can still view that first site here: www.propoker.l4rge.com. Obviously, I have a lot of work to do After becoming a little more confident and learning a few tricks about web design, I bought 4 domain names and got some real hosting: snggrinder.com - to make a poker website. This seemed perfect since I have been picking up a few students to coach/stake and I have been sending the same articles/advice/videos to them for a while. xboxremedy.info - since .info sites are the cheapest, and my dad recently bought an Xbox guide from one of these sites and successfully used it to fix their xbox. buypetsupplies.info - my girlfriend would only be interested in the internet if it has something to do with pets. savingongas.info - just for the heck of it. Web hosting from globat - unlimited storage/bandwidth I think, and came with $50 in yahoo marketing credit and $30 in google adwords credit. So far I have designed every site (with the exception of savingongas.info) from scratch with my own html/css/php, which I knew very little about before last week. There are things called CMS - Content Managemetn Systems - that make the work a lot easier, so that you really don't need any html/coding knowledge. The CMS I'm using for savingongas.info is called Wordpress. You could also use joomla, drupal, or any of the long list found here http://cmstester.com/list-of-cms-platforms/. This is what I've been involved with the past week: -learning html/css/php, i'm still learning those, and also need to learn javascript soon I think -writing articles, more content = better search result placement -making videos, learning camstudio and which encoding results in best quality with smallest size -affiliate sites, commission junction, clickbank, adsense, poker sites. there are lots different types of affiliates that all have different pay terms. -linkbuilding, the more sites that link your site and the higher quality those sites are, the better your site gets ranked. so i've been trying to trade links with other sites around the web. -graphic/web design, the coding part of making a website is easy. designing a good header/logo and having a good looking layout is much harder. there are a lot of steps involved in simply making text look 3d in a logo. I've using the Gimp (like photoshop, but free) and reading lots of tutorials. I still suck at it. Profit/Expenses: week 1 Expenses... propoker.l4rge.com - free snggrinder.com - $12 buypetsupplies.info - $2 xboxremedy.info - $2 savingongas.info - $2 webhosting - $50 aweber - $19/mo 1 month, i tried finding a free list-building/emailing tool but couldn't find a good one. $19 learning tool advertisement - $35 (adsense and yahoo require a minimum deposit to activate the bonus money I got from globat, $15. I also hosted a $25 freeroll on fulltilt to advertise my poker site.) (time if i paid myself - 70 hours at minimum wage of $5.25/hr, $367, I should be working at mcdonalds...) Profit... adsense - $0.82 clickbank - $0 poker affiliates - $0 amazon/ebay/other affiliates - $0 I'll keep this thread updated as I go along if there is any interest. I remember a while back a group was started on here for everyone to share ideas and progress with something like this, but it seems to have died out. Please critique/criticize my work. It looked like maxtower's post may be inspiring a few other people. If anyone wants to get in touch over aim and trade thoughts, my aim name is dufman247.
I was so impressed with how quick I threw together watchben10online.info and how good it looked (in firefox). I was all pumped up about wordpress Then I open up internet explorer just to make sure there weren't any incompatibilities. I expected everything to be ok since it was built with wordpress. This is the exact same page viewed on the left in IE and on the right in firefox. I effed everything up in the theme editor. Now I don't know where to start to go about fixing that. I don't think it would be as big of a problem with snggrinder.com, considering the likely viewer base and the types of computers/browsers they run. In total, I've had about 100 clicks on my clickbank hoplinks. 0 sales. It's cost me about $25 in paid advertising through yahoo and google adwords, which was all bonus money I got for signing up with the hosting company, but it's still frustrating. I haven't made any money through adsense today or yesterday. Total is about $3 so far. Right now my projects are: snggrinder.com self designed/written poker strategy site with articles, videos, forums, etc. I find this site the easiest to work on since I know the most about it. And I think it's the most useful to it's visitors with decent content. I have 2 poker-related clickbank banners on the right-hand site that have gotten me more clickthroughs than paid advertising. No affiliate sales, but I've made most of my google adsense money through this site. Most of my traffic has come from twoplustwo and pocketfives, or direct links from a freeroll i ran on fulltilt with the title snggrinder.com. I guess the online poker market is so saturated that it's going to be hard to start getting organic search engine traffic for a while. pokerjuke.com another poker site. i want to try keeping it similar contentwise to snggrinder, but be more focused on all forms of poker, and i wanted to test it on wordpress. I didn't want to just move snggrinder to wordpress and lose all the layout design and work i put into that. watchben10online.info wordpress site with cartoon network Ben 10 episodes. I noticed a lot of these sites selling on sitepoint and DP forums, and they seemed to be making $20-$30/mo through adsense/zango. They also seemed easy to make since there really isn't much content. I chose Ben 10 because it seemed like there were a decent # of searches for it on google, but i wouldn't be competing with more popular shows/sites. The videos also don't get taken down as often due to copyright infringement. Also, it seems like the cartoon/anime crowd spends a lot of time online. tvmoviedownloads.info I made this site to push some movie download sites from clickbank. I was going to just redirect the domain straight to their sales page by doing a 301 redirect from a .htaccess file. Then i was going to promote it through ezine articles. It seems like those sites don't publish your article though unless your link contains content. So, I'm trying to turn this into a site with content on how to turn your computer into a home theater system. xboxremedy.info + /remedy + /3booterror + /dirtydiscerror this was one of my first sites. it seemed like xbox guides were popular and selling good on clickbank so i loaded up a few standard landing pages and started advertising through adsense, just to get my feet wet. with something popular though, you have a lot of tough competition. i've had about 40 clickthroughs, no sales. pages are pretty bland, i haven't done much with it since the beginning. buypetsupplies.info + /mastiffguide + /mastiffguidereview another one like xboxremedy. this one i chose because it wasn't popular at all so i could bid less for ads,and be ranked higher. savingongas.info this one i'm using to test wordpress and automatic content updates. I hear google penalizes you for automatic content, but i wanted to try it out. i saw other sites doing it and it looked professional. Right now, I think my best bets are to get out of the adwords/ppc landing pages and such, and focus on content sites with clickbank ads and google adsense on the side. I think I need a more professional design on snggrinder and tvmoviedownloads.info, along with some good content. If I start getting a lot of traffic to the ben 10 site, i'm going to throw up a few more of those. I'll try to get some new series that are coming out so i can be ahead of the curve. It looks like you can make decent money through those with zango and adsense if you get traffic. I think landing pages might be worth it once I can make them more professional looking and get better at copywriting. I tried a little of each gravity. Xbox remedy has super-high gravity and there is a lot of help for affiliates because the guy that launched it posts on digitalpoint. A few people said to look for things with between 50-100 gravity because it meant they sell well but you aren't facing too much competition, that's why I chose the movie downloads. And the dog review guides had a very low gravity, but when I did a search for "how to train tibetan mastiff" there were no google ads. So I figured if I tried all 3 of those I'd find which was best for me. All-in-all, this has been frustrating. Little things like getting that banner centered on both firefox and internet explorer take me 2-3 hours because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm hoping once I become more familiar with it, things like that will speed up and I can spend more of my time on more productive things.