Profits With Chris

I am one of these guys who tries to do way too many things at once. I can’t help it because I’m easily bored – I think I’m just “programmed” that way genetically.

Now this is not all bad – the biggest benefit I get out of this is diversification even though this is not my original intention.

But it can also mean a lot of unfinished projects. Actually I should qualify that. Let me distinguish between definite projects and ongoing projects.

Definite Projects

These are like making an ebook. You plan it then you start it and hopefully you finish it. Even if finishing it becomes difficult, eventually you achieve it and get a great sense of satisfaction.

Sure there is some ongoing maintenance but there is still more or less a definite beginning, middle and end.

Ongoing Projects

I’m talking here about projects that need a lot of constant maintenance. To some extent, content sites fit this bill but the worst culprit is a blog.

A blog needs regular updates, especially if it looks like a blog and has a date stamp on it. Visitors and search engines both expect regular updates and if you don’t give them then the traffic will desert you.

Spring Cleaning & Paretos’ Principle

And this my biggest problem. I have over 50 domains and many blogs. I don’t necessarily regret this.

It seems that I work best by testing the waters in several projects. Some are winners and some are not. Even if you have less projects than I do, I think the same can be said for anyone.

Have you heard of Pareto’s Principle?

This basically says that 20% of what you do brings you 80% of the results. The exact figures are the issue of some disagreement but it is mostly correct.

Even a little spring cleaning and ditching the losers can be a great benefit. You can concentrate better on existing projects and achieve much more.

So today I decided to ditch 3 blogs. They were on subjects close to my heart but not enough that I could keep updating them regularly. Better to ditch them than waste any more time and energy on them.

So my advice to you is to start ditching your loser projects – do not get personally attached to them! What is the point of updating a personal blog if you get no readers? You may as well keep a diary at home instead!

Diversification is important. Discover below what I learned and how I intend to diversify in future in the adult affiliate industry.

Simple Ways To Diversify

At the basic level that means not concentrating on a single niche or using a single affiliate program. Can you image the carnage if Clickbank went bust or Google went bust and down went their Adsense program? Or what is you promote a natural cure for hair loss and suddenly a drug was invented without side effects and better than anything else?

The Adult Affiliate Industry

Another way to diversify is to get into affiliate industries that you might not have considered before. One of them is the adult industry. Some people have would not get into this industry for ethical or religious reasons and that’s fair enough. But if you don’t have any objection then why not?

My Story

A few years ago when I was an actor in the adult entertainment industry (just kidding!)……my first foray into any kind of internet marketing was about 5 years ago when somehow I stumbled upon the Netpond forum.

Remember, like you probably as well, I had these preconceived notions about making money on the internet and how it was probably all a scam and a load of BS.

Anyway, I learned about it and made my own “freesite”. This was basically a simple one page site with pictures (either you buy your own licensed content or you use free pics provided by paysites) and you put animated banners all over the page too.

I progressed from there and made several blogs on an excellent freehost called Thumblogger. This is kind of like a supercharged Blogger with lots of features that the guys at Google could learn from.

I made a few sales here and there but nothing to write home about.

What I Learned

I learned a hell of a lot from the adult affiliate industry that I still use today in my traditional, non-adult affiliate marketing.

For example, if you have banners, always put a descriptive text description beneath it – you will be much more likely to generate a click. I’m amazed at how few people actually do this outside of adult.

Another thing I learned is that people are more likely to open up their wallet if they are after something quite rare and have a strong urge for it. This is why you’ll find paysites for some kind of unbelievable kink that you’ve never heard or imagined of before! In the traditional world, I’ve had much better results by avoid huge niches like forex and “make money”. Instead I go for much tighter niches, especially where the prospect really wants something. This is why the health niche is excellent – there are a myriad of thousands of diseases and conditions out there and many people looking on the internet for cures.

The State Of Adult Today

Back to diversification. My old adult projects I have long since abandoned out of lack of interest. You see, it can be quite difficult to come up with sordid descriptions all day long to update your blog with! Now that I am a little older and wiser, I would probably choose to outsource this work instead for some very measly price. So I decided to head back over to Netpond and get reacquainted, as I like to do every year or so.

Well the adult industry has been hit harder than most recently. Although there are a range of sites and therefore avenues of promotion (such as freesites, video tube sites, galleries and blogs) the mainstay of the industry is in promoting paysite memberships. The adult webmaster hopes that joe prn surfer will click on a banner and eventually purchase a monthly membership for which you will take lifetime commissions.

The problem is that these memberships are usually about 20 to 30 dollars a month and many people have cancelled their memberships and are no longer interested in new ones as they tighten their belts due to the recession. This has hit the adult industry very hard and even many seasoned pros are only making $500 a month. That might seem like a lot to some of you but I’m talking here about some of the best adult marketers out there who used to make thousands every month.

The other problem is that this industry has been struggling year on year because of the amount of free content available. Conversion rates have been diving over time and many people are slowly pulling out and getting into traditional marketing.

There are still ways to make money from this industry and all is not lost. Webcam signups and adult dating site memberships are considerably cheaper than paysite signups so these are still doing OK. Producers have been hit badly but making your own content either as a paysite or a simple licensed content provider will still make you cash. Like the traditional online industry, overheads are still far lower than a business based on the street and selling physical products.

I still intend to diversify and enter this industry again but I think it will pay well to just sit and watch for a year and wait for the economy to turn before committing any time or money again to this interesting industry.

So if you’ve been following my earlier posts here, here and here then you should have already selected a niche, written the site articles and published your new content site. Although you’ll add new articles to the site maybe once a month to keep Google happy, you’ve essentially completed the content and now have an asset that will convert any traffic you drive to it into buyers. The only thing you need now is traffic! So where should you get it from?

Long Term Traffic Building

Many people spend a lot of time creating something and much less promoting it in order to get traffic. Actually, you should be doing the reverse and spending at least 3 times the effort in getting traffic. Without traffic you will not make any money. And the more traffic you send the more money you will make. It’s like hiring a part-time salesman to sell cars instead of hiring three full-timers instead.

Building traffic for the long term requires multiple strategies. Some of these include press releases, reciprocal link exchange with other webmasters, directory submission, article marketing, social bookmarking, blog commenting and more.

Meanwhile, all we really want right now is to just get some initial traffic to our site, to make sure that it converts OK and to confirm that this is a niche worth pursuing and even possibly creating our own product for in the future. My favourite way to do this is via article marketing.

Article Marketing

The great thing about article marketing is that it is 100% free and high targeted. The only better forms of traffic are from the search engines or via PPC. Right now, the search engines don’t know about us and PPC can be unprofitable for a content site (it is better suited to a landing page). Article marketing will drive targeted traffic to our site (some of which will come originally via the search engines) and will get our site name out there ready for search engines to spider. It can also have some backlink value although my belief is that this is totally overrated and pretty much worthless.

In my opinion, there is only one article directory worth its salt and that is Ezinearticles. Sure, there are others like Searchwarp and Goarticles but none of these rank as high in the search engines as EZA. In many ways, I see EZA as a strange anomoly that is there to be exploited and we are lucky to have them in many ways. I would have to radically change my site starting strategies if this company did not exist.

I recommend that you submit 30 articles to start with. First, use a keyword tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Free Wordtracker to get 30 keywords that are between 3 and 4 words in length each. Next write each article around the subject of each keyword. Be sure to include the keyword at least once in the title and in the opening paragraph and write between 250 and 350 words. Because you have already written the content site then these articles should be really easy to write.

Remember, your best work is on your content site. Don’t sweat it writing these articles for EZA. They should be readable and in good English but otherwise they don’t need to be works of art.

At the footer of each article you can link to your site. Write something compelling like “Are you worried that you’ll lose all your hair? Beat this condition and get regrow your old hair here “. If you want to see an example of some of the articles that I have written then take a look here.

Conclusion

So that’s it – you now have a money making content site out there. You now need to generate long term traffic to your site. You also need to rinse and repeat this process for several other niches. Keep doing this and you can have a part-time income that turns into a full-time income within months. That is my plan and I have every confidence that it will come true.

Next time, I want to talk to you about creating your own product.