Anyone interested in earning money from your blog, newsletter, web site, social networking sites, RSS Feeds or even your site communications like Thank You pages? Stupid question? Of course it is! Karen over at RevResponse contacted me about doing a review of their network and I have to say, I’m glad she did. It has led to a couple of interesting avenues I’m going to pursue to generate money.

Before I get into my thoughts on RevResponse, though, I have to mention something kind of interesting. I was actually turned down last year when I applied to their network. The site I listed on the application wasn’t a good fit for their offers (according toRevResponse). It kind of pissed me off at the time, but in hindsight, after looking through their offers, I can see their perspective.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is a welcome change to how many affiliate networks approach their application process. At least RevResponse is putting applicants through a screening process and not just blanket approving everyone. In fact, they should end up with a tighter, more focused network with higher quality offers. After all, advertisers want to put their dollars to the most effective use possible. A high quality network stands a better chance of offering that than one filled with junk or unrelated affiliate sites.

How About Some History
In 1994, the parent company, NetLine Corporation, began offering free business magazine subscriptions through its TradePub.com website. B2B magazine publishers gained a new channel for growing their circulation, qualified professionals gained a convenient way to subscribe to their favorite industry publications.

In 2008 NetLine revamped the TradePub partner program and created an easy-to-use portal and self-service program known as RevResponse in order to provide the tools and access to our content that partners had been asking for.

What Sets RevResponse Apart
I asked Karen what she felt was different about RevResponse from other networks. Here’s what she had to say:

1. We give you valuable business resources that you give away for FREE and then we pay you for giving them away. You provide value AND we pay you.
2. We offer the option to pay our partners by check or by PayPal. We use PayPal mass pay which allows us to incur the payment charge so that PayPal does not deduct any fees from your earnings.
3. We pride ourselves in transparency and customer service. The blog and forums are visible to all of our partners. If someone has a question, comments, rant, or rave, we want to hear it and response effectively. In the blog we provide updates, ideas, and fun contests and cool prizes. Every partner is assigned an account manager who can help them to generate earnings specific to their site and audience.
4. The ways to promote our offers are endless.

I can’t speak to #2 (however I like not paying PayPal fees to receive money!), but so far the other points are spot on from what I’ve seen. Here are my thoughts about RevResponse after spending some time in the system and considering how to make money with their unique offers.

RevResponse Backend
When I first logged in, I have to say, I was a little confused. The backend system is a little cluttered and requires some poking around to get the lay of the land. It’s not necessarily bad, just different. Be prepared to spend a little time getting to know the system and where things are at. There’s a lot of text and text links to wade through.

There are the usual features of an affiliate backend system. RevResponse, though, has a few I haven’t yet seen (or noticed at least!) in other affiliate systems. Here are the highlights:

• Ad Wizard - Just select your ad placement and the wizard will walk you through customizing a banner, text or link to fit that spot. Text, images and offers are all preselected based on the images and content type you select. Once you’re done with the wizard, cut and paste the code and you’re all set.
• Newsletter Wizard - This wizard walks you through creating a newsletter. The end result is a complete newsletter, with offers, that you can simply mail out to your audience. Very handy and a great way to take advantage of lists you have with very little work.
• Offer Wizard - Let’s you create custom ads by choosing the offers you want to fit a certain size space or letting the system choose the hottest offers that pertain to the niche criteria you select. You also can adjust colors and other features of the ad.

What I Like
#1 Free Content…Everyone is saying (and have been for a while) that offering something free in exchange for information like an email address is the best way to build a list or to generate a sale. One of the biggest benefits of RevResponse is the ability to offer free content, free trials, etc to your site visitors. Many of these offers are to publications that your users are likely already familiar with or reading. It increases the chances of you creating successful leads and removes barriers in an otherwise tough process.

#2 Co-Branded Site…Within a day of signing up for RevResponse, I received something I didn’t expect. A Blueverse.com co-branded site! What a welcome surprise. Not only did the site have all of the offers on the RevResponse network, it was branded with my blog look and feel AND the Blueverse.com navigation. That last one is a biggie because it keeps my site visitors within MY site, even though they’re taken to a RevResponse owned URL. That’s HUGE!

Even if you didn’t include any other offers from RevResponse in your site or blog, having the co-branded site and driving traffic to it is worth the time and effort to get signed on with RevResponse. This is a time saver and potential goldmine with relevant offers assembled in one place and updated automatically for you.

You can see the Blueverse.com co-branded site here: blueverse.tradepub.com

#3 Unique Monetization Methods…In reading through several of the RevResponse tutorials and looking through the site, I came upon several monetization methods I hadn’t previously thought of. One of my favorite ideas was to add a RevResponse offer link on the Thank You page for newsletter signups. Normally that’s a throw away courtesy page, but RevReponse offers a great option. Any revenue you can make from pages like that are pure gravy in my opinion.

Reporting
Reporting is good with a number of different ways to look at your referrals, earnings, traffic and sources. All of the reports are viewable online or available as a download in Excel. Nothing to write home about here, but nothing missing from what an average affiliate would want in my opinion.

My Final Thoughts
RevResponse is a great network that allows you to take advantage of offers you might not otherwise see. In the day of oversaturation in fitness products, teeth whitening, dating, etc., it’s nice to have a network that offers something different. Frankly, their offers are solid and will appeal to an audience the other run-of-the-mill stuff won’t. This will lend some credibility and legitimacy to your blog or web site. What’s more, you’ll be offering valuable products that your site visitors will be glad to have AND you’ll get paid for it.

I’ll throw this out there. Anyone who signs up using my link, I’ll be glad to help you by taking a look at your site or blog and suggesting what RevResponse offers would be potentially good fits for your content and site visitors. Just email me on the contact form once you’ve been approved.

Sign up for RevResponse here: Join RevResponse TODAY!

I love fast cars and just plain going fast. Course I’m not a street racer or crazy daredevil, but if there as an opportunity to open a car up safely, I’m happy to do it. You can imagine that for a guy like me there are few things more exciting than a jaunt on Germany’s Autobahn. My “first time” was about 17 years ago and was both a nerve racking and exhilarating experience. I had always liked going fast (”fast but safe” as I liked to call it), but in the States, you don’t have much opportunity for speed on public roads without fear of the smokies ruining your joy ride.

I happened on a couple of blog posts a few weeks ago that reminded me of driving on the Autobahn. It talked about the efficiency of the Autobahn and how that relates to efficiency with our time, the tasks we face and the responsibilities we carry, regardless of what we do.

I’ll let you read the blog posts in their entirety to get the whole picture and how the author fits each piece together, but here are some snippits to set the stage:

…why am I writing about the Autobahn when this is about efficiency? It’s because I’m using the Autobahn as an analogy and I want you take a look at your desk (and your computer!) and get the idea that this is your personal “Autobahn”:

It should be clutter free so your traffic can flow along freely and quickly.

The basic approach is this:

What does that mean?

It means that you have Porsches and Trucks on your desk and you need to know which ones are the Porsches and which ones are the Trucks.

You Porsches are the communications that usually are awaiting a quick answer, like which pricing formula do you want me to use for this proposal, etc. Someone is waiting for a response and is stopped in what they are doing, for example.

Your Trucks, on the other hand, are the projects that just move along (unless there is a very short timeframe involved).

Basically you need to prioritize tasks, and understand what place each has in your daily work day. If an emergency comes along that derails you, deal with it, then figure out how to avoid that type of emergency in the future. I don’t know that I buy into the whole organizational thought of the author, but I thought the entire thing was worth reading for the review process of emergencies in Part 2 alone.

I don’t know how many times a day I’m derailed because something “critical” comes up. Sure I have to stop what I’m doing and deal with it, but what am I doing to actively prevent or at least reduce the numbers of these things coming up?

Here are the 2 posts:

1. Efficiency - The Autobahn - Part 1
2. Efficiency - The Autobahn - Part 2

Take a read. They’re pretty quick. Tell me what you think.

I just finished reading through Week 1 of the Shoemoney Internet Marketing Course. It was fairly basic, but a great guide for people new to Internet Marketing or curious about IM.

I won’t blather on and on about Shoe, his site or his business. He hasn’t reached “god” status in my book, HOWEVER, the guy definitely is smart and is sure doing something right. He’s arguably one of the most successful guys in the IM/MMO space, at least from a guru standpoint.

So for him to take time to put together a 12 week course that he’s giving away for free?! That’s doing our space a solid. Sure he’s after something and has a grander plan to take over the world using nothing but his 12 weeks of great content (assuming all 12 weeks are great), but still, this is one of the few times in the last year I’ve been offered free content without immediately being pushed into an upsell.

One of the things I’ve liked so far about the course is I only get one a week, rather than having an entire course to go through at my pace. Seems less overwhelming and more manageable to me. Also, the action plan at the end of each week’s course is worth going through even if you don’t read that week’s materials. Built in success by breaking the big task into smaller bite size chunks.

My advice, regardless of where you’re at or what you know about Making Money Online or Internet Marketing, is to sign up for Shoemoney’s course and consume the content for free. If nothing else, it’s a great reminder of the basics and even if your end game is not affiliate marketing millions, it should help you determine some effective strategies for marketing to your audience, even if that’s just through ads on your blog.

You can sign up for the course here: Shoemoney Internet Marketing Course

Timothy Ferris had an interesting post about the effects of multi-tasking on your brain and ultimately your productivity. Here’s a snippet from the post:

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than thestoners by an average of 6 points. [Source: FourHourWorkWeek.com]

I’ll admit I’m a big multi-tasker. I’m easily distracted and have a tough time focusing on just one thing. In fact, my problem is so bad that I can easily get halfway or even all the way through a day and realize I haven’t accomplished anything of real value (mainly defined for me as taking steps towards accomplishing short and long term goals).

Today is a great example of how bad things have gotten. At one point on my primary work system, I had between 35 and 40 windows open (about 2/3 of them being browser windows in 3 different browsers) and 12 applications. Windows layered upon windows with a bunch parked down on my dock (I’m using a Mac). I needed to do a quick DNS update for a web site, so I logged in to my primary DNS server and jumped over to an Excel spreadsheet to confirm the IP address I was changing to.

I don’t know what happened, but somewhere on the the way back to the Remote Desktop session to make the DNS change, I got sidetracked and ended up checking email, answering some of those email messages, looking at my To Do list a few times, checking my Gmail account, looking at a few web sites, reading an article on one of them and doing who knows how many more things. It was at least 20 minutes before I realized what the task at hand was and that I was freakin IN THE MIDDLE OF IT when I got sidetracked! I had to go back to the Excel spreadsheet to look up the IP again, then go back to the Remote Desktop session, log back into the server and finally make the change.

When I realized how badly I lost focus, it kind of hit me in the face. I have GOT to get control of my multi-tasking, haphazard approach to my task list. I think it’s not only affecting my efficiency, but my brain power as well. I fancy myself a reasonably smart guy. Not a brainiac or genius by any stretch, but relatively smart and able to figure things out. I’ve also had a darn good memory most of my life. Lately, though, my memory and ability to apply my brain to things has been failing me pretty badly. I think it’s because I’m trying to simultaneously manage too many moving parts.

Unfortunately the remedy is not an instant fix. Nor is it something you can just pick up from someone else and apply. So I’m going to try a few little 1 or 2 day Life Experiments and see if I can hit on the right combo that works for my personality, schedule, preferred working method, etc.

Tomorrow I’m going to do 2 things:

1. Consciously limit myself to 1 thing at a time. This sounds trivial, but this will be a heck of a task in and of itself.
2. Only check my mail 3 times during the day at 8:30am, 1:00pm and 4:00pm. I’ve long realized that my inbox is the biggest instigator of multi-tasking in my life. Honestly, though, I love email and I love keeping my inbox clean, so I’ve resisted the urgings of gurus (like Timothy Ferris) to only check email once or twice a day at specific times. I figure I can resist and check mail 3 times during the day.

I’m sure I’ll end up posting my thoughts and any results I have here. If anyone has ideas for me, feel free to share away. I’d love to hear them.

Let me start by saying I get WAY too many magazines. Somehow in the last 8 months, I’ve managed to subscribe to what feels like 50 different magazine and trade publications of all sorts. Some of them were intentional for blogs or niche sites I’m running, but many times I walk away from the mailbox with a fistfull of magazines wondering how I signed up for all of these.

One of my mental deficiencies is my sense of duty to read every magazine from cover to cover. I simply can’t bring myself to just read just one article and forget about the rest. I know, I’m broken. When I come across a magazine I actually want to tell others about, it’s a rarity. I don’t want to put others through the psychological hell I endure with my larger than life magazine pile.

Website Magaine is just such a mag. I picked up the last issue which had a focus on blogs and specifically profiting from them and I was pleasantly surprised. Typically in the Internet Marketing space, you have lots of fluff articles with barely anything worthwhile. Website Magazine had several substantive articles about how others are making money online.

To give you some examples, here are several articles I found helpful and thought provoking:

• Blogging for Profit - Discusses how to increase brand awareness, better cover your blog or business services and how you can increase revenue.
• Article Marketing Exposed - How to increase branding and exposure through article marketing as well as enjoy some serious traffic generation benefits.
• Top 50 Affiliate Networks - This was simply a listing of the top 50 affiliate networks, but I found a number on the list I didn’t even realize existed. Some great places to look for new offers to promote and/or look for increased payouts on existing offers.

There were actually quite a few good articles this month. Here’s the best part, if you don’t want to sign up for the Mac Daddy Internet Professional subscription, there is a complimentary quarterly subscription you can try out. You have to qualify, but most should be able to make the list.

Every article isn’t a slam dunk, but there are always ideas to be gleaned from different articles. And heck, you only need to get one halfway decent idea to more than pay for your yearly subscription. By the way, the magazine is geared towards Internet professionals of all types. Not just bloggers or Internet marketers. If you’re involved with the Internet in just about any capacity, you should be able to find something useful.

Give Website Magazine a try by clicking on the following link: Website Magaine

Shoemoney had a post on his blog a couple of days ago that talked about the path to success that some of the current “gurus” in the make money online space have taken. Or more specifically, some of the signs along the road to their current successful state. It got me to thinking about the possibility of building a site that could achieve the same success and whether or not it’s possible.

To muddy the waters even more, today I was reading an article in Website Magazine discussing monetization strategies for blogs. The author mentioned that private paid advertising was considered “the holy grail” of monetization methods, but isn’t always necessarily the case. It kind of sparked a bit of concern in my mind with some of my primary methods of earning money online. I started to doubt, just for a second, about the strategies I’ve been investing in (and earning money from).

That led me to wonder two things: a. If building a “big time” blog was even worthwhile in today’s market; and b. If it was even possible to replicate the success, using the same principles as some of the most successful bloggers in our industry (just as an example). Everyone dreams of the 4 Hour Work Week, JohnChow.com, Shoemoney.com, Problogger.net success, but sometimes I wonder if that type of success is still out there to be had or if it will need to be substantially different in order to see that kind of monetary level.

This also raises other underlying questions such as:

• How many people are actually making money online? (as in percentage)
• What methods are they primarily (or most successfully) using?
• How long did it take them to get there?

The last one isn’t as important as the first 2, but still weighs in on how you evaluate and make a decision as to which path you’re going to follow in your make money online venture. I think part of the problem is those of us still developing our make money online methodologies and strategies (really that should be EVERYONE if you agree with the theory that you should never stop learning) can get easily distracted or misdirected by some of the latest spin on what’s working for some. This can lead to being counter-productive rather than helpful.

So, where am I going with all this? I’m not 100% sure. I’m kind of wondering if anyone else has the same feelings and what conclusions you’ve come to. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

3 things I’m confident in:

1. It definitely IS still possible to build a big time blog or web site that you can monetize.
   I think there’s always room in existing niches to do a better job or take a different approach to the topic. The dream of earning a decent income (let’s use $100,000/yr as an example) still exists while not killing yourself. It might even be possible, if you’re smart in how you architect it, to do this while working part time.
2. The big payoffs come with hard work and persistence.
   The usual principles apply. You need to work hard at what you’re doing, be diligent and work at it with persistence. I want a get rich quick method as much as anyone else, but that just doesn’t happen that often. In fact, most of the get rich quick stories from the gurus that I’ve read happened after they had tried a number of different things that were mediocre or failed completely over the course of months or even years, then happened on something that made them a load of money nearly overnight.
3. Stay focused on what you’ve identified as YOUR method for making money online.
   What I mean by that is first figure out what you are going to do (blog, affiliate stuff, some kind of Internet service, web site focused on a niche, web app, etc), determine your strategies (link building stuff, SEO tactics, old fashioned networking, etc.), then buckle down, focus and stick with it until it succeeds or completely tanks. You’ll learn more than enough along the way to help you expand or fine tune your strategy and likely end up being a guru of sorts yourself. Don’t get distracted by the latest and greatest method for making money online or getting traffic. Most of the tried and true traffic strategies that worked 3 Internet years ago (my feeling is, like dog years, it’s a 7 to 1 ratio) still work today.

I darn near had to slap my hundred bucks down on the table and report “I’m out!” No sooner had I finished the post about taking a break from guru’s for 30 days (Take a Guru Break) than I received a couple of tempting emails. I sorta broke my rule, by accident, by opening and reading one of them. In my defense, it’s someone I follow regularly and it was actually a blog post.

I read the post and was darn tempted to buy…but I held strong!

In the last 2 days, I bet I’ve saved at least 3 hours of wasted time looking at offers, reading long sales letters, and generally dreaming about untold riches deploying some of these methods. Instead I’ve been using the time to launch some new PPC campaigns to hone my skills.

I know not everyone agrees with me, but I have to say, this is pretty freeing giving myself permission to just get rid of all of those email offers. This experiment might last longer than 30 days. Course there are some decent things that come through. I’m hoping in the end, that I’ll be able to better select a smaller number of “gurus” to follow and save myself some much needed time.

So, am I the only one undertaking the challenge? No compadres joining me?