Hi everyone,

Just wanted to drop in a quick update about my $200 per day online challenge!

So far things are going well. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been going through PiePieGirl’s “One Week Marketing” to see if I can make $200 per day online with Squidoo.

I’m still on day 1 but already super excited about where this is going! PotPieGirl definitely seems to know her stuff when it comes to Squidoo as there’s tons of tips and tricks already I’m excited to use to make $200 per day online this month.

So, I was getting ready to start making some Squidoo lenses for some affiliate products and then realized… wait a minute… what am I actually gonna sell… and what keywords am I going to use??

It’s one thing to be all fired up about a product… but if everyone and their mom is competing for the ‘selling’ keywords for it, you’re going to have a real hard time trying to get ranked in Google search!

So at this point, I’m evaluating a few options (recommended as part of “One Week Marketing“) for doing market/niche/keyword research for my $200 per day online challenge.

One of them is the Micro Niche Finder. Two things stand out to me about Micro Niche Finder:

1. You can use it to find which keywords should be avoided due to high competition and which you should go after since they’re lower competition
2. Their commercial intent tools look helpful to figure out if people are even buying things related to this keyword. This has been a big problem for me in the past! I’ve gotten all excited about a low competition keyword – only to find it was low competition because no one’s buying anything!

I’ve definitely got a little more research to do before I commit to anything – but once I do, things will definitely pick up as I get rolling cranking out some Squidoo lenses! I’m super excited to actually get some lenses out there & ranked in Google search results!

As today’s question for part of my $200 per day online challenge, how do you do your niche keyword research? Do you use a special tool or just your brain? Tell me what you think below!

Hey guys (and girls too)!

Like I said in my last post, my action plan is to see if I can use PotPieGirl’s “5 steps to make $200 per day online” to actually make just $20 this month.

I know, it’s not a big “shoot for the stars” type of goal/plan, but what I’m looking for at the moment isn’t an instant online day job replacer, it’s just a simple few dollars to get back into the online world with and feel successful .

The 5 Step Plan to making $200 per day online – My progress:

So, I do have a bit of a confession to make – I actually completed have already step #1 – “Get the Basics” back in 2006 when I got into this making money online stuff in the very beginning and have definitely enjoyed all the resources at The Wealthy Affiliate and am still active in the forums there. In fact, there’s more than enough helpful stuff there to take you from $0 to $200 per day just within that forum! But for this test, I wanted to follow Pot Pie Girl’s 5 step action plan since I follow her blog and want to see some more of the actual methods she uses.

So, I’m on to step #2 – “Get a plan of Action“. Since I’m going to do this “by the book” (or maybe by the e-book?) I decided to actually take action, put down some money, and purchase Pot Pie Girl’s own One Week Marketing method. I decided to go for the $47 version but I’m sure there’s probably some great stuff in the $77 version also.

I just downloaded & unpacked it, so I’m pretty excited to see what it’s all about. Given the title, “One Week Marketing“, I’m thinking that if all goes well, I’ll be able to report some sort of success with this method here by a week from today – woohoo! I’ll make sure to update here again soon with my first steps of action!

In the meanwhile, if you have comments or questions about the “One Week Marketing” course, feel free to post them here!

So I was over browsing one of my favorite marketing friends Jennifer (PotPieGirl)’s site tonight, looking for some good tips to help me get back into the online marketing game and found this page:

5 Steps to make $200 a day online

Naturally, the whole post is a great read, but the thing that stood out to me was her step #2 – where she believes that 95% of online marketers fail at trying to make money. What is it?

Get a plan!

If you don’t have a plan, you have no direction. Like the saying goes – “Failure to plan is planning to fail”. Without a plan, there’s no reason to believe you’ll see any rewards of hard work, no matter how hard you work or how passionate you are.

Even if you do manage to achieve some level of results, they will be nothing compared to what you might have had if you just made a plan.

I’ve seen this come true in my own life – maybe you have as well?

Let’s say you’re going to throw a big birthday party for a friend – and you really want it to turn out well. Are you going to just wait until the last minute to throw ideas together  and hope everything all works out? Probably not!

If you’re like me, you’ll want to take some time, sit down, plan out when it’s going to be, where it’ll happen, who will be coming – and of course, what kind of food everyone will be enjoying.

None of these steps is really that difficult – but a plan requires at least 2 key steps to work:

1. It has to be well-defined.What exactly are you going to do? When will it happen? Who’s in charge of it? How will results be evaluated? Well-defined plans are easier to follow because they require less thinking, thus less time spent grinding your gears trying to figure out how to work the plan. Pay a little bit more effort up front to define your plan, and you’ll thank yourself on down the road as your momentum powers you to success!
2. You have to be committed. You may have the best plan ever but if you don’t commit to working the plan, you’ve only wasted your efforts. Instead, make sure that the plan is realistic. Making a plan to lose 50 pounds in a month is well-defined, but it sure ain’t realistic! If you keep your plans to stuff you know you can commit to, you’ll never have to worry about losing interest in the plan and walking away.

So where’s my plan?

My plan is simple. I want to see if I can use Jennifer’s 5 Steps to make $200 a day online post to make money online.

What will I be selling? Don’t know yet! I’ll probably go with Clickbank, Amazon, or Commission Junction. What I do know is that I won’t be selling anything that seems shady or that I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling (or selling to) my friends in real life. So probably no “Make Money Online” products, Lotto/betting systems, or full movie download sites/products.

How will I be selling it? Well, Jennifer’s guide recommends Squidoo, and maybe some articles or niche sites, so I’ll start with Squidoo and see how it goes from there.

How much do I want to make? Just 20$ this month. That’s it! Not even a hundred bucks, just a simple $20 bill. Since today’s June 1st, that gives me a full month to see if I can make just $20 using a plan that’s designed to make 10x that in a day! If I end up beating my goal, so much the better!

Most Importantly, what do I want to learn? I want to learn the process. How to go from not even having a squidoo account to finding a hungry market, finding the keyword they’re using for searching for products to buy, setting up a Squidoo lense for it, optimizing the lense – and then getting enough traffic to start making sales.

So! That’s it for now. I’m going to get started bright and early tomorrow morning and start in on the plan. I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes and what I’m learning along the way so you can hurl encouragement or jeers my way!

Ever had a great idea, got everything together and started on it, only to get distracted, busy, or bored with it a short time later?

Yeah, you could pretty much say that’s what’s happened with Pushing the Free Line (PTFL) over the last 2 years.

I began this blog-site back in 2009 as a way to help keep tabs on all the free internet marketing & SEO stuff that’s being given away every day online.

But some times life gets in the way – shortly after I began, things got really busy for me – it happens sometimes, you know? And of course, we all DO want to make time good distractions – family, friends, hobbies, relaxing and the like… so it really can be hard trying to make time to do the things we really want to do for our online businesses!

But, I want you all to know – I’m finally back! I’ve spent some time reorganizing my life & my priorities – and I’m ready to get back into all things online marketing. Ready to pick up where I left off. Ready to make new friends! And most importantly, ready to push the free line even further by consistently bringing you the freshest, most useful internet marketing & content out there to put straight to work in your business!

So… are you ready to take your marketing & online businesses to the next level?

I sure am.

While we haven’t exactly been told what it is quite yet, Jeff Vacek over at GoBeProductivenow.com is going to be giving away $697 worth of free personal productivity training over the next week.

As it looks, the exact nature of the content will be based on what issues people are most interested in solving when it comes to personal roadblocks to achieving more time or money…

…so if you have a particular issue that seems to interfere with focusing & making money with your business… or having the time to do so, you’ll likely want to comment on his blog so that he can integrate your feedback for his training.

This sort of approach definitely reminds of me Eben Pagan’s Wake Up Productive blog, which I’ve gotten a lot from, even though I haven’t actually gone through his course (yet) – and it looks like it has the potential to be some pretty cool stuff. I’ll update again later this week, once the training gets sent over.

I recently came across blogger Shane over at AskShane.org and was really impressed not only by the content he offers for the successful internet marketers-to-be, but also by the angle he takes in his posts. Rather than a lot of “oh, you just need some crazy secret tactics to succeed”, he’s genuine in his advice about what it takes to really become successful online.

I think this view is really helpful not only to get a realistic view on the fact that making money online over the long term isn’t always just push-button easy…. but also because I would hope a lot of us internet marketer entrepreneurs desire to have an internet business that’s stable enough to withstand the test of time and changing technology, market conditions, and other variables.

Anyways, check out his post here – http://www.askshane.org/daily-tips/my-blueprint-for-quitting-your-day-job.php – and let me know what you think. Are there any parts of your own business blueprint (if you have one) that you also find to be critical to your success so far?

As we all know, one key aspect of marketing involves delivering exactly what your customer wants.

However, if you’ve been using Google Analytics or another analytics suite (and if not, why aren’t you??) and have ever seen your “Bounce Rate” at a number that’s higher than it seems like it should be… what do you do?

Well, you could go out and split-test to infinity to try to find out exactly why people are leaving… but you could easily miss the very factors that are causing people to leave – simply because they might not be things you’d even think of (Maybe it’s not the hideous brown/chartreuse color scheme you’re using – it’s the fact that your page takes 8 seconds to load while your competitors’ only takes 2 seconds).

Alternatively, you could get a friend, family member, or associate to look over your site… but unless this person is trained to do so or is part of the demographic segment that you’re trying to target, they could also easily overlook the glaring issues that you need to change to up your chances of keeping people around.

Fortunately, there’s a much better option – a set of 14 free (well, most of them) tools that will make your visitor retention rate skyrocket, increasing your profits, courtesy of the Conversion Rate Experts.

I won’t go into great detail about each of them here & steal this article’s thunder… but I will say that you now have no excuse for looking at your 93.1% visitor bounce rate and saying “Ah, wish I could get people to stick around & buy something!”

Check it out – and leave me a comment here on your experiences in raising your conversion rate – or your plans to do so!

Article: 14 (nearly-free) tools reveal why people abandon your website

As internet marketers, we’re generally in the business of making two key things happen: delivering value, and making money.

While there are a myriad of easy ways to increase the former, easy ways to increase the latter aren’t always as easy to come by.

Naturally, in order to make more money, you either need to reduce your expenditures, or increase your income.

But it can be difficult to do both at the same time – if you’re increasing your customer reach, you’re probably having to spend some amount of additional time or money to make it happen. If you’re intentionally reducing your expenditures (particularly on ads), you may be sacrificing potential income somewhere in your affiliate sales pipeline.

However, instead of sacrificing either, there’s a better alternative!

Increasing your conversion rate

While it’s probably not a new concept for you, (and this particular article isn’t particularly new, either) you may not be aware of all the tactics available to you to increase your conversion rates on your site – many of which are super easy to test!

I was reading Aaron Wall’s Interview with Conversion Rate Experts the other day and found this link to Ben & Karl’s site with 108 ways to get better conversions from your affiliate & sales sites… and if you haven’t, you may want to as well – I was really impressed not only by the width and depth of the advice they offered but moreover by their in-depth explanation of why a given element is important to split-test.

Their advice is not only essential to established marketers wanting to increase conversions but it also doubles as an excellent, excellent primer on how to construct a great affiliate/sales landing page. Best of all, the tips are clean & simple – no second guessing what they’re talking about or how to do it… so I’d highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet!

Karl Blanks & Ben Jesson’s 108 ways to improve your sales conversions

If you’ve been following internet marketing for more than a year or two, one thing you’ve probably observed is just the massive flood of new internet marketing tools, strategies, and resources that seem to crop up more and more frequently.

Undoubtedly a lot of them are decent, & worth checking out, but like most products, there’s some that are decidedly better than others.

However, the interesting thing is that, unlike you might expect, some of the better resources for certain things like PPC analysis, SEO optimization, Campaign creation are actually the ones that are free – not the high-end,  spendy ones.  And nothing is more frustrating than purchasing an expensive tool – and then finding a faster, better, free way to do it!

I got an email from CPA guru Gauher Chaudhry, and included was a link for his new, free 89-page CPA/PPC guide which details a complete strategy to take the best free & paid internet marketing utilities – and start really leveraging them to make some solid cash.

Unlike some other guides, he offers a pretty objective look at a fairly wide range of resources, making it easier to figure out which ones are most appropriate for your marketing efforts.

Additionally, I was glad to see that it’s all new material, not based on outdated tricks from a year or two ago – and very modern/relevant to people who are making a lot of money out there with PPC strategies leveraged against CPA offers.

As you’re probably aware, there’s a lot of money out there to be made with CPA… but knowing how to cater to the right crowd, do the proper research, and test/track your efforts isn’t always as straight-up intuitive as you might hope it would be… and that’s where I was really impressed with this particular guide.

Further.. if you haven’t done much with CPA, there’s a lot of helpful info here to get you started – basic terminology, strategy, and even some more subtle details of making CPA profitable for you.

Normally, I’d expect to see a guide like this packaged up as an ebook on Clickbank and sold for $39.99 or more.. but in this particular case, Gauher is really pushing the free line by putting this guide up for anyone to download.

So – check it out – and let me know what you think.

PDF: The Insider’s Guide To CPA Marketing Profits

So, I was thinking the other day…

My #1 goal for this site is to provide you, the readers, with the best, high quality, free marketing resources and tools for use with your online business.

While I could take some guesses and post up a bunch of stuff like SEO tools & PPC articles & marketing perspectives, and it *might* be useful….  but probably not as much as just asking what you’d like most to see.

So! If you’re up for it, I want you to tell me what kind of marketing resources I can post up here (for free, of course)! It could be anything – from an advanced Adwords tutorial… to effective copywriting tips… even a profitable campaign walkthrough & setup from start to finish.

Just leave me a comment on this post with what resources you’d like to see here, and I’ll do my best to put ‘em up! Thanks!

Do you use Adwords or other PPC services?

If so… are you split-testing your ads for better conversion rates?

In case you’re unfamiliar, split-testing is the process of continually trying new headlines, ad text, copy text, images, etc etc…. anything you use in your marketing to see if it converts better.  If you have successful ad headline A,  you might try new headline B to see if you get a better clickthrough rate, more overall conversions, longer visitor time on site, etc etc.

Since the difference between two different ads can mean the difference between a profitable campaign and one that just gradually turns into a money-sucking vortex of doom (or just plain is unprofitable!)… it’s definitely something you want to be doing on a weekly, even daily basis.

eBook: Adwords Copywriting Tips

But how do you split test – when you’re not sure what you can do differently, or better… and you don’t want to waste a lot of time or money trying things that you have no idea about?

Well, to a large extent – it comes down to testing – seeing what works & what doesn’t – in your own niche.

For instance, is your headline solid, but your call to action week?

Or maybe you’re using all the right buzzwords for your niche on your landing page, but your ad CTR is poor because your display URL is more like “MyGenericReviewSite.com” than something highly targed for your audience.

At any rate, chances are, no matter how good your PPC conversion rate, you might be still leaving money on the table that you could be putting in your pockets with 5 minutes of tweaking your ad.

Anyways, I recently found a mini-eBook with a whole bunch of stellar Ad copywriting tips and split testing stats to back their suggestions up… and figured I’d post it up here for anyone whose interested in fine-tuning their ads just a bit further.

Download the free report below & leave me a comment with your thoughts – is there anything in it that you can use to help fine-tune YOUR campaign?

eBook: Adwords Copywriting Tips

Just in case you were wondering when a new PPC training course might come along on DVD for free, today(well, yesterday, technically) ‘s your lucky day!

Anik Singal & Amit Mehta have formed up a pretty cool deal over at the acclaimed PPC Classroom… they’re giving away PPC Classroom 2.0 for free on DVD (well, plus a small shipping charge).

These guys are definitely some of the most well-respected in the affiliate/PPC community (Anik was listed as #2 of Business Week’s top entrepreneurs under 25), so this offer’s one I’m looking forward to for sure… even moreso since it’s free!

This offer is one I’d normally expect to see go for $97 or even $197 or $297, so at $0, it’s worth checking out.

Of course, there are a fair number of upsells after you enter your info to receive the free DVD, but as far as I can tell right now, they’re all totally optional (but may be just the ticket for you, if that’s what your IM career needs at the moment).

Going to claim your free copy? Heres the Link:

Link: PPC Classroom 2.0 for free

I was browsing Jennifer (PotPieGirl’s) blog recently and found a link to a pretty nice free SEO package she put up from WebCEO.com.

After downloading it, I was pleasantly surprised by the options it offers, considering its price.

Structured into 4 main categories (Find your Niche, Promote your Site, Analyze your Site, and Maintain your Site), it goes beyond traditional free bare-bones SEO programs by offering a more comprehensive suite of tools.  Not only can you find keywords & optimize your pages; you can upload files via FTP and monitor site uptime.

As far as its core SEO features, WebCEO delivers all the basics: Checking Search Engine Rankings, Search Engine submission, Finding similar sites for link exchanges, Managing PPC campaigns, Checking backlinks, Analytics & optimization strategies with their “HitLens” service. Additionally, their “Auditor” tool helps check your site for errors and warnings, helping seal up any leaks due to broken links or misstyped URL.

It’s a bit of a different workspace compared to SEOElite (more of a full-featured desktop application than a widget), but it’s definitely not a bad thing. If I were to mention anything I’d like to see in a future version, at least from a surface level, it would be making the app a little faster & crash a little less overall (trying to access some of the functionality seemed to cause it to soft-lock on me).

Otherwise, if you’re looking for a little extra help in the SEO department, it’s worth a look.

Link: WebCEO SEO Software

Well, I might be a bit late to the party on this one, but today I ran across the new Search-Based Keyword Tool (SKT)that Google implemented back in November. (If you’ve already discovered & used it, please feel free to leave a comment telling me any fabulous tricks you’ve come across with it!)

So…My first thought was, “Neat, but how does it differ from the existing Adwords Keyword Tool (AKT)?” Considering you can use both to find real search phrases based on your site… I was curious to find some differences.

Well, according to Google,

“The main difference between the Search-based Keyword Tool and the Keyword Tool currently in AdWords is that the former generates keyword ideas based on your website, and identifies those currently not being used in your AdWords account. Additionally, the Search-based Keyword Tool provides more detailed data for each keyword, such as category information, suggested bid that may place the ad in the top three spots of a search results page, and ad/search share.”

Ultimately, what they’ve done here is to give Adwords/CPC advertisers an easy way to grab some more relevant keywords for campaigns, landing pages, etc and easily stick them into Adwords campaigns. Of course, this is a nice financial win for Google (more keywords = more ads displayed = more money) but if the keywords it recommends bring in more conversions for marketers’ campaigns, it’s a win for them too.

Back to Google’s description of the differences between the two tools…. as you’re likely aware already, the Adwords Keyword tool can also pretty easily generate keyword ideas based on your website by using the “website content” button instead of the “Descriptive words or Phrases button”.

However, the SKT presents it more efficiently and distinctively than the AKT… instead of a hodgepodge of keywords assorted by keyword relevance, the SKT nicely displays not only the general category for the keywords but also the specific page on your site that it forumulated the keywords from.

Not that you couldn’t do it on a page-by-page basis with the AKT… but that would take far too long to be of much use.

Instead, the SKT makes it much faster & easier, even allowing you to group the keywords it generates based on the page they were generated from, allowing you to find out just what Google thinks every single page in your site is about…. very helpful for SEO, relevance & PPC testing, and so much more.

Additionally… the SKT seems to have more refined estimates as far as the Cost Per Click (CPC) prices go.

One of the main columns presents the predicted cost to get you into the top 1-3 ad positions on a page. In the AKT however, all you get is the “estimated average CPC”, which from my experience can vary widely.

This is not to say that your real-world CPC is always going to match the SKT prediction, but chances are it will be a lot closer… especially if you have a good Quality Score (QS), meaning your Ad headling, Ad text, Ad grouping, and landing page (among other factors) are all highly relevant to each other.

Finally, the SKT adds some fantastic filtering options for marketers really looking for certain kinds of keywords to add.

For instance, looking for more keywords for your “Improve your Golf Game” niche that have at least 12,000 searches a month, low-medium competition, with a suggested top-3 bid of $0.40-$0.70 where the URL contains “Golf Game”? Well, now you can find those keywords – and add them to your Adwords account and begin seeing results quickly.

So, while the SKT may not redefine the Keyword Research process, it does allow you to “see your site” through Google’s relevancy eyes, looking for extra profitable keywords that you may have missed – and extra places to tighten up your overall relevancy. And sometimes, that’s really all there is between a wildly successful campaign, and one that just ends up costing you money.

Link (tool): Google Search-Based Keyword Tool

While we as affiliates often spend a lot of time reading up on the right way to do things, we sometimes overlook the opposite perspective – what NOT to do.

In the case of PPC, it’s easy to make a lot of mistakes, and the reality is that without knowing what went wrong, it’s hard to correct mistakes & really be successful.

Anik & Amit over at PPC Classroom recently came out with a report aimed at helping to overcome some of the major issues newer folks have with PPC, and after reading it, I figured it was worth putting it up, since it’s free.

Let me know what you think – do you see yourself making any of these ‘big 5′ mistakes in your PPC campaigns?

5 PPC Mistakes You’re Probably Making.