CDub Marketing

When I started this blog, just about two months ago, I intended it to be part of my affiliate marketing project. I still haven’t posted a progress report on that yet, but I did want to talk about the best of the affiliate networks I looked at, Pepperjam.

There are many affiliate networks out there, and when you are just getting started, it is difficult to know which is the best company to partner with, if you want to make money online. I had looked at some of the bigger names, but I chose Pepperjam because they seemed like an honest reliable company. And I can honestly say, I am very glad to be working with them.

Pepperjam Network has top quality customer service. My day job is in a customer service field, and I tell you from experience that the level of service a customer gets is directly related to the top down emphasis placed on service by a company’s management. Pepperjam clearly believes that providing consistently high level customer service is how they will differentiate themselves from their competitors, and it really works for me. From the day I first signed up, I’ve had the same person working with me on my account. She is both fast to respond, and extremely knowledgeable about her product, so that I get high quality advice and answers from her.

Shortly after I signed up with them, the Inc. 500 list for 2008 was released, and it named Pepperjam as one of the top 100 fastest privately-held companies in the US. While that is impressive, it is even more so when you realize this is their third year in a row on that list! When you break down their growth ranking into categories, you see they are:

the #1 fastest growing affiliate marketing network
the #1 fastest growing full-service internet marketing agency
the #1 fastest growing interactive marketing agency
the #1 fastest growing search-engine marketing firm the #2 fastest growing company within the State of Pennsylvania
the #1 fastest growing “advertising / marketing” company within the State of Pennsylvania (#5 in the United States)

In my opinion, this type of explosive growth is exactly what I am looking for in a business partner, so I signed up as soon as I could. If you agree, click their link on the sidebar to learn more. If you sign up with Pepperjam before the end of September, they will pay you a $10 bonus just for signing up! So there is never going to be a better time to get started than right now.

This is the first of the month, so it is the day Entrecard users show the list of their top droppers.  I see many people have really nice presentations for this, with the icon of each of the top ten istes.  By next month, I am going to figure out how to do this, but for now, here you are:

Big thanks to everyone on this list, for their support of my blog.

You might ask, “why are the totals so low? Where are the people who dropped 30 cards?” The answer is in the post below. I have continuing challenges with the technical part of this, so September will be the month I get that all sorted out.

As I have said all along, this has been a learning experince for me.  What I am learning about now, (and reporting to you) are the challenges associated with Free Hosting.

My last post was very popular.  So popular that it drew 30 comments!  While I am very excited about this, after the first seven, I stopped being able to get in to see them.  I have been working with the hosting provider on this, but it is not resolved yet.

I do hope to get this resolved, so that I can follow through on my offer to everyone who is interested.  So I will keep you all updated.  But I do want to say thank you very much to everyone who commented on that post.  I really appreciate seeing that people do read what I write here.  Thanks.

Last month, I mentioned I am working on a project called “Double Your Way to a Million.” Some people had commented that they wanted to give it a try, so I have some exciting news!!!

First, the basic rules to “doubling” are easy: you start with found money; you can’t take a part-time job, or do things that seem like work; you can’t sell things you already own, but instead need to look for opportunities to add value.

So the hardest part is getting started. Once you read the eBook (more on this below), you will see that the first several steps are mot likely to be completed by finding loose change on the ground. This is fine, and even a little bit fun at first, but it gets old fast. So how do you bring in money in a way that meets the doubling rules? I have found a way, and I will share it with you.

In the early parts of my doubling project, I got my best results with Send Earnings. They have a website where you get paid to take surveys and complete offers. Many of the offers are free, so it worked with the rules. But they are sloooow to pay. It took a long time to get that first check, several months after I had earned it.

Then I realized, I can offer the same thing, but with BIGGER and FASTER PAYOUTS!!! You don’t have to struggle through the early steps as you Double Your Way to a Million. Team up with me, and I will get you through the first part fast!

If you are interested (and if you are still reading, I bet you are), I will set you up with easy, free offers to complete, and I will pay you fast!

When I wrote about this before, I wasn’t really sure how to get the eBook out to people, but now I have an idea. Whey you leave a comment, WordPress shows me the email address you put in, while hiding it from everyone else. So drop me a comment to say you are interested, and I will send you the “Double Your Way to a Million” eBook, along with an email with your first offers.

Dropper                  # of drops
your hand in mine          28
Bizphere                        26
Dynamics AX associate   25
Prove Me Wrong            23
AdsenseAddict              21
The Matthias Chronicles 21
Ideas For Women Blog   20
Metallman’s Reverie      20
Article Specialist           20
Race To 1 Million          20

When you consider I didn’t even join Entrecard until after July 2nd, there are some pretty high totals here.

Thanks to everyone!

RevResponse is a new advertising network that lets you offer great free magazines to the readers of your website. If this sounds cool to you, go to their site right now at www.RevResponse.com. Other ad networks may throw around the word “partner”, but RevResponse takes it to the next step by actually being your partner. They can provide content for your website or RSS feed in addition to the free magazines. Unlike other marketing sites, they give you the freedom to find banners, webtools and online content that directly compliments what you were already doing. This is a real partnership.

In addition, they have a huge promotion going on Right Now!

They will pay you $50 to join, if you do it now, and follow these steps:

1 - Sign up with RevResponse by clicking this link.

2 - Email Karen at kschubert(at)netline.com about this $50 July promotion.

3 - Write up a review of the RevResponse program on your site. It must be at least 200 words and include at least one link to RevResponse.com. (like this review)

4 - Send Karen a link to your review.

5 - Login to RevResponse and tell them where to send your $50! (paypal or check)

But as you may be reading this on Thursday, this deal ends today!!! This is a direct call to action, so please do act now.

Good luck, and I will post later on how this worked out for me.

This is from the genius painter Win Jones. For more of his brilliant work, please visit www.WinJones.com.

I haven’t posted for way too long because I have been working on the behind the scenes part of this website. I was having issues with this wordpress theme (that I am still using). It has some things I don’t really like, and I found one that I thought I liked better, so I changed themes. Some of you who come here often may have noticed that I changed and then changed back again.

The reason I had to give up on the new blue theme I ran this last week was I couldn’t figure out how to use it properly. It came with a really cool two by two block for 125 square ads. But I was not able to edit it to get the ads in. I worked on it for a while, then decided I need to get a Wordpress book and study up, because I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for online. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment. I was very grateful for the large number of comments that came in on my last post.

As far as comments, the other thing I was struggling with was SezWho. I was back and forth with SezWho tech support and we finally decided there was an issue with my hosting provider. I have never been able to get the Askimet plugin for wordpress to work, and the same issue is keeping SezWho from working as well. I was very excited about SezWho giving me credit for leaving comments on other blogs, but I am still working with my webhost to get them to support it. As I have said before, this is my first ever website, and I am learning as I go. I think I may need to upgrade from my free hosting provider to a paid service that gives me the support I need.

I do want to update this site more frequently, so I am going to get on a better schedule now. Thanks for reading.

As I have said before, the main purpose of this blog is to document my own learning process as I try to learn internet marketing. I had wanted to get into this for some time, but I was just reading and not doing. So to break out of analysis paralysis, I started the site and have been learning by doing.

I had been commenting on other blogs and leaving links back to here. I could track how those were building in Yahoo, but even as of today, I was invisible to Google. I had heard there was something called a “sitemap” that Google wanted from me, and so I put figuring that out high on my to do list.

At the same time, I have been fooling around with EntreCard. From reading the stats they generate, it looks like a couple hundred people a day come by here through the EntreCard process. So I thought, why not set up Adsense, and see if that amount of traffic whizzing by here at high speeds would be enough to generate some sweet Adsense cash. I went to Adsense and set up an account. It was really easy, maybe especially because I already had a Gmail account.

One thing I learned was you have to get a minimum of $100 in your Adsense account before you get a payout. That sounds high to me, but what do I know? So far, I have been doing this for about a week. The other thing I learned was, if you are invisible to Google, you get no ads. You can set up the Adsense box, but it will just be Public Service Announcements, until Google decides you are worth placing ads with.

That was cool with me, as basically everything I am doing here is on a trial basis. So I tried it out. One thing I learned very quickly was why the WordPress Theme pages kept using the phrase “Adsense friendly”. The theme I am using now is called “Grunge Banner”. I think it looks cool, so I used it as my starter site theme. I see now that it is not very Adsense friendly, because I put up a pretty small ad, but the box sort of hangs off the right margin in an ugly way. I am going to need to address this.

So I get the script for the ad loaded and there is my Public Service Announcement, and everything is going pretty well according to plan. I came back today and thought, “lets try the sitemap and see what happens.” I read about it on the Google webtools page, and got the basic idea. However, it seemed like they expected you to go off and write this xml page to upload. That sounded way to technical, so I searched up some help and found XML-Sitemaps.com. They have a super cool and super easy (which I guess is double super) free webtool that will crawl your site and give you the code for your sitemap. Cut and paste and then your done.

So I did it, hit refresh, and boom! Now I have an extra-sweet paid ad right there in my Adsense box. Like I said, learning by doing is the way to go.

So I was thinking I was going to take off the “What is your website worth?” because it was both silly and depressing. Then today it jumped up from $17 to $384.

So I am back to thinking that it is fun and I will keep it there for a while.

Now, to put this in context, I went to their website (you can click on the box and it will take you there) and I checked the “worth” of one of my favorite websites, John Cole’s Balloon Juice. This is a political blog that I love very much and I read daily. While John Cole is a great guy, I think he would be shocked to know that his website is worth $4,373,928.00. I think he would gladly sell the entire Balloon Juice empire to the first person who offered him even half of that amount.

But it is fun to track your progress, so I am leaving it up for now.