But I can’t stop visiting them.

Sometimes web surfing goes beyond a mere diversion and ventures into full-blown vice territory.  I know, I’m there now.  And I’m willing to wager the ‘net surfing habit probably has affected someone you know, too (nudge, nudge).

Habitual surfing of websites is responsible for businesses losing upwards of $200 billion in revenue every year in the United States alone.  Okay, I just made that statistic up, but I’m sure it’s a lot.  I know for a fact that I can easily sink a few hours every day randomly surfing the web, looking for something interesting.

The Big Payoff

And you know what?  I never find anything interesting.  At all.  It’s just one big waste of time, full of Obamadrama, stupid pictures, random stories about various people being idiots, and yet another half-assed Cracked.com top-10 list.

I still do it anyway.

So how do you break an internet addiction when you earn a fraction or your entire income from online sources?  You can’t just turn the computer off, can you?  I know doing so would kill me, and probably you too, so we won’t even explore that option.

Step 1 - Install RescueTime

RescueTime is an easy-to-use program that will automatically track what you’re doing on your computer - both online and off - and put it all in graph form.  Now you can finally quantify exactly how many hours of your life have been washed down the drain every week watching unfunny CollegeHumor videos.

Step 2 - Install LeechBlock

LeechBlock is a Firefox add-on that you can set to block access to a site.  You can either set up the plugin to block the offending sites completely, or just during a certain time period - like when you have to work.  But what’s to stop you from disabling the plugin?   Well, LeechBlock itself will stop you.  The plugin features password protection on the options panel.  Just pop in a randomly-generated password, and you’ll never gain access to those blocked sites again.  (Well, there are ways, but you have to jump through hoops).

Are you still using Internet Explorer?  Why?  Though I fear for your very soul, you can still block sites using IE7’s built-in Content Advisor feature.  It’s not as flexible as the LeechBlock solution, but it’ll do.  Alternatively, you can head to the K9 Web Protection site and marvel at how gigantic that child’s head is.  Seriously, that must have been the most painful birth ever.  Oh, they also offer website filtering software, or something.

In Conclusion

Stop wasting time.

Don’t get me wrong here, no one’s going to be throwing cash at you, but earning money online is not as difficult as some make it out to be.  Here’s the big secret to making money, online or offline: provide value.  If you don’t have anything of value to offer people, then don’t expect anyone to pay you anything.  This seems obvious to me, and maybe to you too, but it’s surprising how often I read blogs or forums where people seem to have skipped this step, and are getting frustrated.

Hint: advertising alone is not valuable.  If all you’re doing is buying PPC ads and direct-linking them to affiliate offers, don’t be surprised if you have a hard time scaling, or even turning a profit.  Professionals with a sizable bankroll who are experts at keyword research and ad copywriting might be able to get away with this strategy, but new internet entrepreneurs will experience a lot of frustration with this method.

Reality #4:  There are dozens of ways you can earn money online.

Here’s an easy alternative: sell a product or service directly.  It doesn’t matter what it is you sell, because someone out there will buy it - guaranteed.  Just look at all the crap for sale on eBay or craigslist.  Your best bet is to create your own product, just like Tim Ferris suggests in his book, the 4-Hour Work Week.

Or you can try selling services.  Know how to throw together a WordPress installation and modify a template?  Someone will pay you to do that.  Have you ever written a blog post?  Someone will pay you to do that, too.  Like to write?  Become a freelance writer, like Chris did, and you can earn a big pile of money.

What’s the best online business opportunity for you?  Here’s a quick rundown of seven ways to earn money online by starting your own business.  In reality, there’s a limitless number of ways to earn money online.

Just provide value.

Reality #3:  You can make money online fast.

True!

Now, can you make a lot of money online fast?  Eh, that’s a little tougher.  There’s no such thing as a get rich quick scheme that actually works.  The only money to be made there is selling this faulty dream to desperate souls who don’t know any better, which actually ain’t a bad idea if you’re okay with being a scumbag.

But it’s entirely possible to start earning enough income to live on within just three or four months of work.  I’ve done it by selling services, like SEO articles.  You can too.

Reality #2:  You don’t need a lot of start-up capital to make money online.

They say you gotta spend money to make money.  Not true, at least on the internet.  Actually, promotion is free if you’re a do-it-yourself kind of dude.  If you’re not, don’t worry.  There are plenty of professionals out there who will help you with web promotion on the cheap.

WordPress to run your sites is is also free, and is probably the best content management system available - even better than most of the paid solutions.  So are themes to style it for the most part (some premium wordpress themes are worth their low cost, I’ve found).  Reliable shared hosting is as cheap as $3 to $5 per month.  That’s pocket change, folks.

Once you’ve got a website up, all you need is an idea.  Those are free too.  Just make sure yours is a good one (See #5 above.)

Pro tip: avoid pay-per-click advertising unless you’ve got money to lose figuring out what works.

Reality #1:  Success in online business requires persistence.

You don’t have to be technically adept nor have a keen business mind, though both help.  There are plenty of sources that will teach you what you need to know about the technical and business aspects of internet entrepreneurship.

What you do need is patience, a willingness to learn, and the balls to keep with it when you’re struggling.

To sum it up: practice, baby.  Don’t give up, and don’t get discouraged if you’re not earning thousands in your sleep.  It takes time and effort to achieve, but it’s worth the effort - that is, if you like working in your PJ’s (I do).

• I got a new job.  In sales.  It was lame, and so
• I lost my new job 5 months later

Well, yeah, but that’s kind of a cop-out.  I mean, there are plenty of people who have full-time jobs, and they can still post a blog every once in a while.

I also

• Started a full-time business

So I’ve been pretty busy acquiring new clients and working on projects.

Hm.  Was there anything else?  Oh, yeah…

• My mom died.

Yeah, that sucked.

I realize that no one actually reads this blog, and thus there is no one to care about this post, but I thought I’d let the unthinking void know that, since I have a little more free time, I’ll be keeping this site updated.

Enjoy, void!

How did this happen? Why has this particular phrase, of all possible combination of words in the English language, been so thoroughly driven into the ground? Who is responsible for this scourge of hackneyed boilerplate?

I’m blaming the Copyblogger, Brian Clark. And, more specifically, his legion of mindless readers.

Let’s take a closer look at some Google searches for the Copyblogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work and his follow-up 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates and see how many results we can come up with:

• Who Else Wants [X]: 640,000 results
• Here is a Method that is Helping [X] to [Y]: 16,100
• Here’s a Quick Way to [X]: 20,200
• What Everyone Ought to Know About [X]: 93,400
• Have a [X] You Can Be Proud Of: 380,000
• If You Don’t [X] Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later: 18,000
• Do You Recognize the [X] Early Warning Signs of [Y]?: 72,700

What’s the total number of sure-fire headlines that suck? Countless millions, no doubt!

So, obviously, I’m picking Mr. Clark a little bit. It’s not his fault that the headlines he wrote about have become so grotesquely popular. They aren’t his headlines, after all. Most of them were written by icons of copywriting like Ogilvy and Caples and used to sell snake oil dozens of years before Brian was born. There are plenty of copywriters out there use those same 10 or 15 headlines, and they’ve never even heard of Copyblogger dot com. Hard to believe, I know!

And it’s certainly not the fault of Copyblogger readers that they’re hacks who couldn’t come up with an original thought if their lives depended on it.

Wait, yes it is.

Cloak Affiliate Links - This plugin is necessary if you care about how your links look to visitors. Instead of displaying awful-looking affiliate links, like “http://wrdz72.notascam.buynow.com=?aff=12345“, this plugin will make your affiliate links look much more natural, readable, and non-threatening. It’s not perfect - the plugin does leave a couple numbers at the end (no big deal) - but it’s much nicer than the soup of letters and numbers most affiliate links resemble.

Star Ratings - A simple, straight-to-the-point rating system plugin, useful if you plan on reviewing products on your landing page and want a visual representation of how good you think the product is. All you have to do is install the plugin, and enter a code such as [ rating: 2.5 ] and the plugin will generate a nice little string of stars, like so - Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Landing Sites - Whenever a user visits a webpage from a search engine such as Google, they first typed in a few keywords based on what they were looking for. This plugin will recognize what keywords were used, and then generate a list of related posts based on that phrase. The point is to make your landing pages more relevant to a user’s needs. For instance, if your landing page was found when someone typed “poodle fur clippers” in the Google search box, then this plugin can display a list of posts you wrote related to poodles, like “poodle training” or “poodle clothes”. Nice.

Search Engine Word Highlighting - This plugin uses a similiar idea from Landing Sites, but takes it in a different direction. This plugin will take the keywords that people searched for to find your landing page, and will highlight the keywords in your content. That way your visitors can be certain they’ve found a webpage relevant to their search.

The traffic does, in fact, convert. Yesterday I recorded my first affiliate commission based solely on free advertising methods. Now, I’m not going to paint the town red with the $20 I earned from that conversion, but it does prove a point: article marketing works, even for noobs.

What I think is even better than making $20 with no investment of my own money is that article marketing appears to be sustainable over the long term. As long as search engines exist, there will be people who are able to rank highly in the SERPs and thus drive targeted traffic to a sales page.

The same might not be said about pay per click, though I’m sure that point is arguable. It seems to me that the cost of PPC advertising will continue to go up, pushing out more and more independent advertisers and leaving only the major players with huge bankrolls to fight over the desirable keywords. This is already happening in some niches, and I see that trend growing.

For readers who are unfamiliar with article marketing, the idea is to submit short essays to highly-visited article directories. These articles eventually appear in the Google or Yahoo search engine results pages based on the keywords those users search for. Ultimately the people who read your article will follow a link to your web page and (hopefully) buy your product or sign up for the service you wrote about in your article.

I’ve been focusing some attention on EzineArticles, a premiere public article directory, to see what kind of results I would get with them. So far the 3 articles I submitted have received a total of 74 combined views, and the link to my website has been clicked 12 times.

Now, granted, my foray into article marketing is still relatively new; I’m sure that 74 views on EzineArticles is laughable compared to some veteran article authors. But still - I’m seeing an average CTR of around 16.2% for my articles. In comparison, a successful PPC advertising campaign on AdWords might result in a click-through of 3 - 5%, and a highly targeted and very well done campaign could get to 16% CTR or higher.

It’s exciting that a new user such as myself can - at no cost - produce results similar to a very well run AdWords campaign.

But… do those visitors convert? None have so far, but time will tell.

I could, for instance, spend some time trolling Google to find all of the article directories out there - there’s probably around 700 unique article submission directories. That’s quite a daunting task and would likely require a ton of research. And of course, there’s more involved than just finding the directories. Submitting articles manually takes time, especially if you want to submit your article to more than five sites at once. Keeping track of what articles you’ve submitted and to which directories you’ve submitted them to is almost as big a job, and would require some Excel wizardry, no doubt.

Another other option is to pick my top ten favorite directories and simply hope that’s good enough; affiliate marketing requires a little bit more than hope alone, though. It requires planning, hard work, and a lot of testing. Laziness is not the strategy of success.

I have found a way to overcome these problems, however. A couple days ago I purchased submission software which automates the article submission process - Article Submitter Gold. This article submission software has a list of 650+ article submission sites, it allows you to store your articles internally, and it can submit to all of these article directories - simultaneously if you like.

The coolest part is that there’s a free version of Article Submitter which gives you a smaller database of article directories; it’s a great way to get familiar with the software to see if it meets your needs.  Brad Callen, the author of the software, gives you training videos and a clearly-written PDF manual; icing on the cake!  I was impressed enough to buy Article Submitter after just a couple hours of use.

Time is money, and the cost of the software is outweighed by the time it would require me to manually accomplish everything this software does automatically.

I have paused my (former) primary campaign indefinitely. It’s a niche in the financial industry which is very competitive; too competitive for me. I knew how hard it would be to be successful before I got into that market, but I still wanted to see if it was possible. And it nearly was! I ended up spending around $160 and made back $117 over a 7 day period. If I had been approved for the publisher I originally applied to - who offered higher commissions - I would be ahead by around $100. The fallback publisher I ended up with did not have nearly as high of a commission, despite the fact that my website converted at a high rate. One ad was converting at around 30%! It was simply too expensive to send PPC traffic there. It also didn’t help that my emailed questions to an affiliate manager went unanswered.

If I can’t earn back enough money to pay for even the advertising fees, there is no point in continuing the campaign. In the future when I have more capital to work with I’ll try again, because I think I can eventually get it working. I’m focusing on more profitable endeavors until then.

Today also marks my first foray into Yahoo Search Marketing. My initial impressions are positive. For this particular product I’m promoting I am receiving 1.5x - 1.7x more traffic than from Google. Although the CTR is slightly lower than AdWords, the fact that I’m getting more impressions means that my Yahoo ad has nearly twice as many clicks as my Google ad. It remains to be seen if the traffic converts, however I’m cautiously optimistic.

I may find myself using Yahoo PPC more - especially if I’m in the black at the end of the day.

That being said.. I am overall in the red this month. My total ad spend for August has been $174, however I’ve only earned back $115. Part of this difference is due to testing of Google ad variations, especially the headlines. I also was checking link locations and sizes on my landing pages to see what offers converted and what failed to convert.

I am relatively pleased with how things are going, despite the fact that I’ve lost money. Exhaustive research and pre-planning just can’t tell you how your campaigns will perform in the real world. There really is no other way to learn how to enter a market - you just have to try and see what happens. This is the first time I’ve made a serious attempt at internet marketing, and the fact that I was actually able to generate $115 in sales is encouraging.

The next few weeks are going to be interesting.