This weeks rant is less random and more geared to affiliate marketing than what i think I’ll be writing about most weeks. AdWords really annoyed me beyond belief. Everyone knows Google has refined their search, AdSense, and AdWord platforms to ensure quality. This is nice for the general public, but for us advertisers it has just made it that much harder to take advantage of the system. AdWords frustrates me the most because I have found it almost impossible to get nice cheap hits and also run the majority of leads that networks provide. Strict guidelines and quality scores make running ads effectively very hard and time consuming. I am no expert when it comes to this type of advertising and won’t claim to know every in and out of Adwords CPC network, but I can say that I have never ran a campaign without some type of issue with what I was advertising. Most of the type it was an issue with quality score. Quality score is an annoying scale that gives you an idea of how your key terms relate to the content on your site. Sounds nice, but sucks when you are trying to direct link your leads. I guess all this stuff just annoys me because I always get free AdWords vouchers and never make any money with them. It sucks, but it’s free and can’t complain about free stuff right?
     Now I know that you read through that last paragraph thinking that I am stuck here and don’t know what to do to fix these problems. Well no I know what to do, it is just that I would rather do it the easy way than the difficult way. Its annoying to me to have to make a landing page for everything. Landing pages are nice if you know what your are doing with them and you can greatly increase your quality score with them If you can create them the right way. Just, who wants to sit there and great all these landing pages all the time in hopes that your campaign will work? Then there is the issue of the rules versus offered ads. Many of the leads that networks offered are not allowed to be advertised on AdWords. An example of this would be those Smoke-51 ads. It is hard to even use the word smoke in your text ads let alone get the website approved. You really have to be super creative and know what you are doing in order to get an ad like this to pass and be showed throughout Google. In this case you would need to step away from the bigger networks like AdWords and even AdCenter. Truthfully most advertisers stay away from them anyways and go for the smaller networks because they are less strict on their campaigns. Of course you run the risk of being limited on the size of your campaigns because you are running them on a smaller network. However, it is another way to get around the annoyance of AdWords rules.

     Let me know if any of you have some useful books or web pages on the subject and i’ll be sure to update everyone with a post.

     I have a dilemma. I might be afraid of making money. I said MIGHT BE. It is either that or my pride is getting in the way of earning an income with CPA marketing. In my case, I have been trying to start legit and by the book in order to make a nice steady income, but the truth of the matter is that its tough as hell to do that when you have no cash to back up your mistakes. Coming to the realization that my lack of funds is ultimately causing me to be scared to test the market, I ask myself I should start smaller and cheesier. In order to make a few bucks now, should I go and try E-Whoring or run Craigslist Job scams? This questions has been nagging at me for some time now and I feel like my pride is basically the only reason why I haven’t been subjecting myself to a less than respectable means of making money.

     First I would like to describe my thoughts on why it is so difficult to remain honest with no money to back it up. Real marketing consists of tests, research, leads, and statistics. You have to be able to use all the information given to you and put it to use for you in such a way that would give you the best opportunity to make a little profit. testing takes money and time. If you believe what they say then time also equals money so you are just getting hit twice there too. You may have a flawless method that has a lot of potential to make you money, but if you don’t put it to use in the right niche then you are screwed! Takes time to fine out what niche will serve your method the best and time is expensive. Now I feel that knowledge is a use factor in this time equals money formula. The more knowledge you have about marketing then the less mistakes you will ultimately make in the long run. Less mistakes equals less time spent looking for the right formula to make money. I kinda like to think of this like how I was in high school knowing I had pretty good grades so a good SAT score wasn’t as important to me as it was to a person with sub-par grades. Knowledge and money kind of counter balance each other. More knowledge you have less cash you need and vice versa. I fall in the category of needing a little cash to get something going.

     Now that I have identified myself in the “need cash” category, I have to make a choice. Do I stay legit and struggle or do I make a sacrifice and go after horny people for a living? It’s a good questions right? well maybe its not. Maybe there is something I am missing in all of this. Well there is. What is blackhat? My definition of blackhat may be different from yours and I may be lumping a lot of things into one category. Think about it when you read these blogs from “superstar” marketers. You think they are blackhat guys? Do you think they are totally legit? HELL NO! These guys are for the most part fallowing the rules, but they are stretching the rules as far as they can without getting caught. Some people like to call this grayhat marketing. Over the past year I have come to the realization that nothing is really as nice and clean as it seams. There are always little loopholes that people use in order to take advantage. This is where I need to be. There is a line between fraud and legit. Luckily that line is really thick and isn’t straight because different companies and different people have conflicting views on where the line is drawn. Most affiliate networks will look the other way as long as you are bring them some cash. If the advertiser comes to the network then there may be some disiplinary action, but until then you can get away with the little stuff that may give you a nice edge.

     You might have just read this and thought,” Is he done yet?” or “If you knew this was the case, how come you wrote about it?”. The simple answer to that question is this. We read the success stories about people making five grand a day and they think one of 2 things. Either the guy is cheating his ass off or he is a genius with a great network of methods. Truth is that most of these guys are no smarter than you or me. They just grew a pair and took the extra step. They learned the rules and figured out how they could be skewed in such a manor that would help their cause. Anything wrong with that? not at all. You aren’t sitting there talking to half naked 50 year old men trying to get them to fill out leads all day and you are not stealing from innocent people. Simply using the system to your advantage and raking in a little extra cash.

     So, I guess the question has changed. To be or not to be…legit? No… more like, when you gonna get off your ass and just do it?

     Well first off I want to explain this concept. It is pretty simple to get, but why not make it even easier. I am going to write a a post every week about things that bother me about the web.  Hopefully it will lead to ideas on how to improve your own web creations .  Simple enough, right?  Okay, here we go.

     I guess the best way to start this up is with the BIGGEST thing that bothers me.  Like most of you, I have aspirations of making it big on the net so that I can have a great income while doing the least amount of work possible to have that money.  I am an idea type of person and I constantly stay up at night thinking of different website concepts or ways to improve what I already have.  All this work and all these failed ideas has frustrated me to no end.  I accept the fact that it’s tough to make it big with an idea, BUT when I see the likes of FormSpring.Me and Twitter.com I just wanna quit.  I mean how did I not think of FormSpring?  Possibly because its a website based on the most simple idea done in the most inappropriate way imaginable.   Nevermind the fact that all you do is ask questions and thats the whole concept, but the fact that you can be anonymous is totally crazy. You get these teen girls hammered by teen/perverted boys with inappropriate and rude questions.  As if their self confidence isn’t low enough, why would u need to make a site where a person can ask why they are so ugly and never be able to know who sent it.  Either way you slice it.  Its a dumb idea that made someone rich and I am sitting here thinking of complex ideas that will never bee seen by anymore than a few thousand people.

Lesson Learned: Dumb Down! People are simple and sometimes the most simple ideas are the most successful. You are smart and sometimes you are just a little smarter than people visiting your site. Make it easy and get your point across simply. Also don’t think something is a dumb idea before you research it. I wouldn’t have thought in a million years that a site like FormSpring wasn’t already a popular idea. So, get an idea and go through with it. If it exists then improve on it and give it your own twist. Create your own stupid idea and make yourself a bunch of money.