Nerdy Affiliate Adventures In Affiliate Marketing Land

Stretch for the Red Ball

Posted by JasperP on August 25th, 2008

This was a nice little article that sent to me via email which was written by Kim Kiyosaki, author of the “Rich Woman” books (richwoman.com).

Anyway, this article is basically about persistence and being able to stay determined in reaching for your goals.

You’ve heard the saying, “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.”

I see that sentiment everywhere: in business, in investing and in people’s personal lives. Ask someone, “Do you want to be rich?” and they say, “Of course!” But ask them, “Are you willing to do what it takes?” and all too often, you’ll get a blank stare. To me, the difference between someone who achieves her goals and realizes her dreams and someone who does not is that one is willing to do what it takes to get there, and the other is not.

In an earlier article I wrote about the four types of people in the world: Those who must be right, those who must be comfortable, those who must win and those who must be liked. I’m a “must win” kind of girl. And in order to win, sometimes you have to do things that are uncomfortable, difficult and even scary. The most revealing test of a winner (or loser) is how she responds to adversity. What does she do under pressure? Does she back down? Does she quit? Does she roll up her sleeves and get to work? Bottom line: Does she keep moving forward? How you respond when things get difficult is the difference between being a rich woman or a poor woman.

If you set goals at the start of this year, how are you faring? Are you doing what you need to do to achieve them? Are you or is someone you trust holding you accountable to make your goals?

Sometimes You Need a Coach

That is the beauty of having a coach. I have coaches in many areas of my life: business, investing, presentations, fitness and personal development. I even have a television coach. My coaches hold me accountable when my natural tendency is to take it easy. My weakness (one of many) is that I’m essentially lazy. So I do my best to surround myself with coaches, mentors and friends who push me harder than I push myself at times.

For example, I was working out at the gym with my trainer, JR, when he said, “Kim, pick up the red ball for your next set of exercises.” I walked across the gym and leaned over to pick up the ball, expecting it to be pretty light. In fact, I realized, it was a lot heavier than the blue and yellow balls I was used to. I hesitantly walked back to JR, red ball in hand. “OK,” he said, “I want you to do 40 lunges with the ball over your head. Next, do 20 sit-ups on the incline holding the red ball. And last, 20 squats with the ball.” I gave him a questioning look and set off to do my lunges, sit-ups and squats. Afterward, I came back to JR huffing and puffing, but proud of my accomplishment and ready to move onto the next—and easier—exercise. Instead JR said, “Good job. Now give me two more sets.”

“Two more sets?” I protested. “This red ball is heavy!”

JR smiled and said, “Do you want me to take it easy on you? Are you paying me to hold your hand or are you paying me for results? It’s up to you.”

I quietly walked away with my red ball and began my next set of lunges.

That’s when I realized that to get results in anything, you’ve got to reach for the red ball. So often, we go for the lighter challenges or goals—the yellow or blue balls—because it’s easier and more comfortable. But in order to get the result that we want, we’ve got to do some heavy lifting and stretch for the red ball.

So the “Red Ball” question to ask yourself is this:

What is the one thing in my life, today, that if I did, I know would dramatically improve my life?

Once you know the answer to that question, ask yourself: Am I willing to do what it takes to do that one thing?

That may be your red ball and the one you reach for next.

Investor, entrepreneur and author of Rich Woman, Kim Kiyosaki educates women about money and investing through books, speaking engagements, a PBS TV show and  RichWoman.com. Kim and her husband Robert created the CASHFLOW® board games and own The Rich Dad Company.

This article originally appeared in WomenEntrepreneur.com. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Tutorial: Keyword Grouping With KeywordPad (Freeware)

Posted by JasperP on August 20th, 2008

I’ve been using this excellent free keyword tool called KeywordPad.  You can basically do alot of cleaning, grouping, and modifying with this tool.  The best part is that it’s ABSOLUTELY FREE! You can download it here:

http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/keywordpad/

What I’m going to demonstrate is how I do keyword grouping with this tool.  The first thing I did was get a broad range of keywords from Wordze.  I basically just typed in the word ‘debt’ and it returned a list of 3,334 keywords. You can check out that list here:

WZ_debt.txt

Anyway, the first thing I do is “IMPORT” this list into KeywordPad.

Then I “Delete …Duplicates” and “Clean… Unwanted Characters” and Clean… Trailing/Leading Chars”

At this point, I need to know what keywords to group it by.  So first I “Modify… Sort…Ascending” to view the list.

The next step is to start creating a “Base Keyword” list that I want to group my keywords by.  Since I’m using YSM to test my campaign, I can afford to have larger ad groups.  If I was using Google Adwords, I would limit my keyword groups to 100-200 keywords for each ad group.

Here are the keyword groupings that I chose for this list:

debt consolidation
debt collection
credit card debt
debt relief
credit card
debt management
debt free
debt reduction
out of debt
bad debt

In order to group, I use the “Highlight…Entries That Contain… Words Anywhere” function

Then I either “Export… Highlighted Words To Another List…” Or “Export… Highlighted Words To A Text File…”

I also have to “Delete… Only Highlighted Entries” to make sure the duplicate keywords don’t end up in other ad groups.

What I end up with is these keyword groups:

debt_consolidation.txt
debt_collection.txt
credit_card_debt.txt
debt_relief.txt
credit_card.txt
debt_management.txt
debt_free.txt
debt_reduction.txt
out_of_debt.txt
bad_debt.txt

RESOURCES

If you want to learn more about keyword research and keyword grouping, I recommend the following links:

Keyword Research : Go Deep or Going Wide First?

Keyword Research Secrets to Explode Your Affiliate Business

Uber Keyword Research

Think Outside the Box : Actually Don’t Think At All

Generating Pay Per Click Keywords

So that’s it! I’ve found KeywordPad to help a lot especially when working with huge keyword lists over 10k.  It’s a tool that’s great for newbies especially, since you don’t have to spend a dime on some complicated and expensive keyword tool.

Anyway, If you enjoyed this tutorial, go ahead and bookmark it or send me a comment with your thoughts!

“I Can Accomplish Anything!”

Posted by JasperP on August 19th, 2008

I had an interesting conversation with a friend over lunch today and it kind of made me realize a few things about having the proper mindset.  I was talking to her about my business and how I promoted products and services.  She said she wished she could start a business too, but she said she’s not business minded.  I was telling her reasons why she could do it and I think she understood my point.

Now I know business is not for everyone, but I really believe if you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything.  I knew that my friend played high school sports before and I knew how strenuous that can be.  Competing in sports is a great example of accomplishing a difficult task.  In sports, you have to tell yourself to physically compete with other players who also want to win.  You have to mentally drive yourself to exhaustion to endure the physical pain to accomplishing your goal of winning.

This relates to having a positive mindset. If you think you CAN do it, you’re right.  If you think you CAN’T do it, you’re also right.

My proposition is this: Start telling yourself you can accomplish anything.  Be a problem solver.  Ask yourself, “How do I do ______?”  Stop thinking, “I can’t do it” or “This is too hard” or “I quit”.  Once you start believing that you can accomplish anything, you can apply it to all sorts of things that don’t involve business.

• Want to learn to play a musical instrument?
• Want to play a sport?
• Want to learn how to build something?
• Want to make money online?
• Want to start a business?

Believe in what you’re doing, push through the obstacles and you’ll eventually reach your goal.  Failure is not a point at which you stop, it’s a lesson in changing your approach.

I’d love to hear stories of business or non-business accomplishments you’ve had.

What have you accomplished lately?

Niche Research: Brainstorming and Mindmapping

Posted by JasperP on August 15th, 2008

I had a consultation with Derek at ClickConsultants and he advised that I create a mind map in order to brainstorm all the possible phrases and keywords used in the debt relief niche I’ve been working on.  Since my campaign hasn’t been performing as I liked, I started from scratch in order to get a good idea of my niche.

So I went through Google looking for phrases to discover more about my niche.  As I was doing that I put them in a mind mapping software called Freemind.  This software is free and you can get it at:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Anyway, here is the mind map that I came up with for the debt relief campaign

Now, I didn’t just combine words and just throw them in a list.  I basically used these to create a base keyword list and started plugging it into keyword tools like Wordtracker, Wordze, and the Adwords Keyword Tool.

I ended up with around ~50k, but after grouping them by 1,2,3-kw phrases, I ended up with a list of ~27k keywords.  I just re-imported them back into Yahoo and YSM declined about 6-7k, which left me with 19k in my campaign.

To sum it up, it really helps to discover the terminology and wording used in your niche.  Use it as a guideline and start plugging them into the keyword tools.  Use your brain, use the search engines and then use the keyword tools.

Top Blog Posts This Week From My Google Reader

Posted by JasperP on August 14th, 2008

Just thought I’d publish some interesting blog posts from my Google Reader that I’ve read in the past week.

Top Five Motivational Sales Speeches [NSFW]
http://www.afftoolbox.com/2008/08/10/top-five-motivational-sales-speeches/

5 Mistakes I’ve Learned from in PPC Affiliate Marketing
http://www.tylercruz.com/5-mistakes-ive-learned-from-in-ppc-affiliate-marketing/

Formula of a winning PPC ad
http://www.cdfnetworks.com/formula-of-a-winning-ppc-ad/

Ten Thousand Dollars
http://www.afftoolbox.com/2008/08/07/ten-thousand-dollars/

How I got started…
http://www.ppcfool.com/beginners/how-i-got-started/

Twitter Sets 2000 Follower Limitation
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/08/12/twitter-sets-2000-follower-limitation/

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