It’s time again for me to do a little reflection on last year and some planning for my online business going forward for 2012.

First of all, I am very thankful that I have broken the old record again this 2011 Christmas season. After a frustrating start with Amazon (see my other post here), I was pleasantly surprised with the sales numbers. This year I have built a few sites that focus on higher ticket items (commissions are around $100 to $150 per sale). Those are not the items you would think of as Christmas “gifts” but their sales also increases just as toys, electronic gadgets, and other gift items. And that really contributed to my bottom line for 2011.

After a year of fighting Google updates and sandboxing, I am so glad that 2011 ended on an up note. There is no better feeling than knowing that your living expenses for the next 6 months are covered. It certainly takes the pressure off.

For 2012 and beyond, I will only focus on building PASSIVE income. I used to think that’s what I have been doing with my online business. Turns out I was dead wrong.

It sounds great that you can just build a few affiliate sites, get top ranking on Google to get “free” traffic, and just put everything on “auto-pilot.” After all, that’s what the gurus would have you believe.

What I have realized is that there is nothing passive about SEO. To qualify as “passive” it must be something that you work on once, then just need minimum effort to maintain it. In fact, SEO is by far the most labor intensive method to make money on the Internet.

And the traffic is NOT free, either. Despite all the gurus out there who claim they did not “pay a dime for all these traffic,” SEO is actually very expensive. To be able to maintain top ranking you must constantly adding content and links, which means paying money for content writing and backlinking. And you won’t even see the results until 3 to 6 months later, if ever.

Compare that to paid traffic methods. You can spend as little as $20 to $50 to test a campaign and within days you will know if it’s going to work. Then you can decide to scale up or move on.

With SEO, you are always one Google update away from losing your entire business. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content and serve your visitors better than anyone else. This is definitely not the way to build a long term, sustainable business.

In my previous post I mentioned publishing ebooks on Kindle. This fits my definition of “passive income” perfectly. For example, after everybody getting a Kindle as their Christmas gift, they start loading it up with ebooks. Right now I am seeing my ebook sales doubled. The books are selling and earning money while I have not touched them since they first published 5 months ago. They will continue to do so day after day, year after year.

So there you have it. My plan for 2012 – plain and simple. I will be focusing on Kindle publishing while maintaining the affiliate sites I still have until around October – that’s when my Christmas campaign will be kicking off again with another great ending for 2012.

For years I have had great experiences with Amazon’s Associates program but recently it’s been one problem after another. And it’s not just me. A quick look at Amazon Associates Discussion Board you will find many people are having the same issues.

First, my earnings for September 30th was at 4% rate even though I have reached 7% level for that month. According to other associates who have contacted Amazon, they stated they were aware the problem and working on a fix but it’s been 2 months and the payments have all been issued. So I don’t think they will do anything now.

Well, just one day and not much difference anyway. No biggie. So I thought.

Then, in November I started seeing disappeared earnings. Again the commission rates were calculated incorrectly on some of the days. It got corrected a few days later.

Then there were missing orders. When I checked my November earning reports from different reporting options, it showed inconsistent results. It appears that 10 ordered items has vanished from the summary report but they showed up in individual tracking ID reports.

Only 10 items. Still not a big deal, right.

Well, today it really hit me hard.

This morning when I logged into my associates account, on the home page it shows MTD (up to Dec 3rd) order # total: 1,104 items. But when I click on “View full report”, it shows the total ordered is 1,231. There is 127 items missing.

Then I checked the “Tracking ID Summary Report” which also shows 1,104 items; and discovered that that one particular tracking ID has no record – no clicks, no orders, and no earnings. This one happens to be my best earner so I knew right away something was up.

I then looked up the “Orders Report” only for this particular tracking ID for Dec 3rd (unchecked the “Combined reports” box) and it shows there are 127 items ordered.

I then looked up the “Earnings Report” for this tracking ID for Dec 3rd and there are 63 items shipped & with earnings but at the bottom the “Items Shipped”, Revenue, & “Advertising Fees” are all 0s. This is apparently wrong. See screen shot below.

The missing earnings for this particular tracking ID on Dec 3rd along is several hundred dollars. We still have 3 weeks to go for this year’s Christmas shopping season. If this goes on I could be losing several thousand dollars.

The integrity of Amazon’s tracking system has deteriorated. This is quite disappointing. These are just the errors I see. Who knows what else is going on that I don’t see?

I really hope Amazon will get their acts together and soon. If I can’t trust Amazon to track my sales then I really can’t invest my time & money building up Amazon traffic.

UPDATE 12-06-2012: After 2 emails to Amazon’s support they finally corrected my account. I’m still seeing some discrepancies but not severe enough to let me lose sleep at night! BTW, it looks like we will have another strong Christmas season. I am really excited!

WOW! It’s hard to believe it’s been over 7 months since my last post – my last public post, actually. I have written quite a few private posts mainly on what I have learned in the world of SEO since Google’s Panda update but decided to keep them private for a couple of reasons.

First, I have seen at least 2 marketers got their web sites de-indexed shortly after they published their tips & tricks. They were not even anything close to gray-hat but I guess the big G just don’t like people teaching this stuff.

Second, there were lots of misinformation and confusion after the Panda update. Many marketers were trying to capitalize the chaos by selling “how to Panda-proof your sites” courses. Some of them were good. Most were just garbage. I documented my experiments and findings along the way but felt there was no reason to put it out there unless I know for sure it would work.

Unfortunately, as SEO has always been, nothing is really for certain; not even if you have the best quality content, best designed web sites, and best quality backlinks. Nothing can prevent you from the “Slaps.” Just check out Google’s webmaster forum and you will see how many people with “high quality” sites are caught in each “update” the big G rolls out.

Panda 2.0 Got One of My Sites

Here is an example of one of my Halloween sites.

This site does have good quality content and lots of pages. It is definitely not a “thin” affiliate sites. It was not affected by the February Panda update and have maintained a steady flow of traffic since last Halloween.

But it was hit by the Panda 2 update on October 13th. It went from over 800 visitors on October 13th to 150 visitors on October 14th and the earnings got cut in half overnight.

I wish Google had waited one more week to roll out the update so I could finish the Halloween season but on the other hand, I am VERY thankful that it did not occur before October – at least I got a good 2 weeks out of it.

Be G-Proof

So what should you do to make yourself “Google proof?”

I believe the ONLY way to be G-proof is not to rely on Google as a traffic source.

What?! No “post Panda” content, backlinking, or social media exposure strategies? Yes. That’s my answer. Plain and simple.

I have been working on diversifying my income and traffic sources for the past few months and will continue to do so. Here is one example.

Kindle Publishing

Since early July I have been publishing ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. It all started in June when I bought a WSO about making money with Kindle. This WSO is about spamming Kindle with PLR and public domain work. It shows you how to get 100,000 PLR junks from eBay for $10. Then just upload them to Kindle. Sell them at $0.99 to $2.99 a piece. Each book just needs one or two sales per month and you will be making thousands of dollars a month. Simple. Right?

Well, after some research I found Amazon was already onto this. Can you imagine what would happen when thousands of affiliates start to dump the same PLRs on Amazon? Of course Amazon would not let the quality of their Kindle store goes down like that. It’s too important for them. Amazon is even willing to sell Kindle at a loss in order to make backend profit on the content. What happened next was that they banned PLRs and many publishers lost their accounts.

The person who sold the WSO apparently made quite a few bucks using this spammy strategy but saw the handwriting on the wall. So he just put the whole method on WSO so he could squeeze a few more dollars out of it.

Needless to say I got a refund but I saw the potential with Kindle publishing. If you think about it, it’s quite amazing. All you have to do is put the ebook on there. Amazon does all the work. There is nothing else you need to do. Amazon drives all the traffic, handles the sales, and cuts you a royalty check at the end of the month.

Compare this to building a web site. You don’t need to constantly adding content. No need to endlessly spend money building backlinks. No G slaps. No sandbox. No de-index.

The only thing you need to do is to write a good quality book.

Now, I am not a writer so I outsource the writing on Elance. My job is to research a good interesting topic and find the ghost writer. I may also edit the ebook I got from my writer if necessary.

Since July I have been working on this as a side project. To date the income from it has grown to about $1,000 a month with just a few books. I have heard one person making over $20K a month with Kindle (no, he is not publishing 100,000 books…) so I am just barely scratching the surface and still have a lot to learn. I will continue to grow this income stream and will probably write another post on how to publish on Kindle – the correct way.

For now, here is the link to Kindle Direct Publishing if you are interested in opening an account.

It’s That Time of The Year Again

Christmas shopping season has just begun again. If you have read my previous posts you know how much I love this time of the year. It will be another exciting 3 weeks and I can’t wait to get up each morning to check my Amazon stats. I hope this year will be as good as last year but I won’t be posting my exact earnings because it’s now against Amazon’s TOS.

That’s it for today. I got a few more topics to discuss and since I will be taking my Christmas break shortly, I will have more time to write. So be sure to check back soon!

I am sure by now you have heard of Google’s “farmer update” a couple months ago that aims at eliminating duplicate content and scraper sites. Every time Google updates its algorithm, it attempts to improve its search results and gives searchers better & more relevant information.

We Internet marketers are also content publishers. The question we should ask ourselves often is, are we publishing content that’s really going to help the visitors? Or are we just trying to make a buck and as a result clogging up the web?

I outsource most of my content creation. I do this for several reasons. First, I am not a native English speaker and I can’t write very well. Second, delegating is the only way you can multiple yourself and grow your business. However, I’ve found it’s extremely difficult to find someone who would actually write quality content to my satisfaction (at a reasonable cost, of course).

Here is an example. I recently got an article back from the writing service I am using. And here is the first paragraph (I omitted the niche for obvious reasons):

When it comes to the purchase of a xxx, it is incredibly important to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to make sure that you are getting the best product for the best price. Even though it may not seem to be the way it is, once you start looking around, you will quickly notice that not all xxx are created equal. This is why you must be prepared with the knowledge of what to look for.

This text does nothing other than fulfilling the word count requirement. It serves the reader no real useful information. It’s nothing but “fluff.” Reading this paragraph reminds me of listening to those politicians’ response when asked a tough question. It’s seemingly correct and covers all basis, but upon careful inspection it provides no real solution to the problem and no substance at all. It’s completely useless.

What’s worse is that lots of web sites just put out plainly wrong information. Every since I got into Internet marketing, I have been taking everything I found on the web with a grain of salt. I now know lots of the stuff out there are being pumped out by marketers wanting to make money. It’s hard to find actual unbiased information.

Six or seven years ago my older son had a severe coughing problem. He coughed day and night. It not only affected him, but was very stressful for my wife and I. Every doctor we went to told us it’s allergy but we tried prescription after prescription, tried air purifiers, and other things. Nothing worked. This lasted almost 2 years.

I searched the Internet to see if there is any home remedy and found several sites selling some sort of silver oil (colloidal silver). They claimed it’s a miracle drug for coughing with all kinds of testimonials from people who got healed by it. Now, this was before I became an Internet marketer. I didn’t know better. I was so desperate that I almost bought it.

Thank God I didn’t. Upon further research, I found that this silver oil thing was nothing new. Apparently it was once popular 50 years ago. If not manufactured properly it can turns people’s skin gray and it’s irreversible (the medical term for that is argyria) – I even saw pictures of people who had taken it when they were little and they looked like ghosts! Imagine the guilt their parents had. I would never be able to forgive myself if I made my son look like that.

As affiliates we may have tendency to write product reviews for the sole purpose of making an affiliate commission; or pump out junkie articles just to get backlinks. Remember what you put out there – someone may actually read it and it may change their life – either good or bad.

P.S. In case you were curious, in a trip back to China my wife took my son to a locally renown pediatrician and the cough was gone after 2 months of taking the Chinese herb medicine the doctor prescribed.

I made $14,362.35 in March, 2011 just from Adsense!

Really?! No, not really. :)

I guess with a title like that, you probably expected I have a big number to report, didn’t you?

After all, isn’t that what the gurus are doing these days? “Look, I made $432,578 in 30 days. Buy my $37 course and you can do the same! Oh, if you try to leave this page I will even give you a $10 discount…”

All jokes aside, here is my real Adsense earnings for March.

Yes, only $96.46. Ouch!

In fact, I’ve hit a 18-month low in my Adsense earnings. What’s happened? Well, ever since I decided to stop making micro Adsense sites a year ago, I have not touched those sites at all. No added content, no backlink building. The traffic began to dry out. And in the past 2 months most of my micro sites have come up for their yearly domain renewal and I just let them expire.

So here I am. From over $600 a year ago to $96.46 last month. For the first time in 18 months I will not get my Adsense check this month. I was $3.54 short – I will have to wait 60 days because of $3.54.

Am I going to write off Adsense completely? Probably not yet. I am planning on building 2 large content sites this year and I may use Adsense as one of my monetization methods. I will report back at the end of the year if I decide to go that route; and hopefully I will have better numbers to report. :)

In my last post “Are You As Productive As You Can Be?” I mentioned a cool time management tool called Action Enforcer. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now. It works great except that I found when its window is open, regardless if it has the focus or not, it takes up 20-30% of CPU time.

It is really not acceptable that it would take so much CPU time especially when it is not in focus and all it’s doing is updating the timer. I am guessing there is a busy loop somewhere in the program – not a good programming practice.

Most people probably won’t notice the problem. However, my laptop runs pretty hot. When something is hogging the CPU, it causes the fan to run at higher speed which is quite noisy.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The CPU hogging doesn’t occur if Action Enforcer is minimized. When it’s minimized, it is hidden in the system tray. To make it appear on the taskbar all the time, I clicked the “Show hidden icons” arrow,

then clicked “Customize…”

Then I set Action Enforcer to “Show icon and notifications.”

This will force Action Enforcer icon to appear on the taskbar all the time.

This way if I need to bring up Action Enforcer, it will only takes me one click – same number of click if I leave the window open and having to bring it to the front – but now I can free up 20-30% of the CPU time.

Working from home is fantastic. I choose my own working hours. No wasting time sitting in traffic. My commute is only 30 seconds from my bedroom to my home office.

But…it is also very easy to slack off when you are the boss. And there are a lot of distractions at home as well. My younger son is not in school yet and I need to constantly remind him not to interrupt while daddy is working. The wife walks in every now and then wanting me to do something around the house…

Then, there are constant distractions even when I sit in front of my computer. There are emails, instant messages, and the biggest one is checking stats – I know this is a huge time waster but I just can’t help it.

I used to hit “refresh” button every couple of minutes to check my Adsense account, 5 or 6 accounts form CPA networks, and Clickbank accounts. I even loved to refresh my Tracking 202 stats just to watch traffic coming in.

So, I have been looking into time management and how to increase productivity and made a few changes. First, I got rid of instant messaging. I no longer see those pop-ups telling me who is online.

Then, I implemented time boxing, or time blocking. The concept is simple. You dedicate a certain time period, say 1 hour, for a particular task. Then you work on that task and nothing else for the entire hour. No checking emails, no surfing the web. Just focus on that one task.

With time boxing I can actually get the important tasks done and not worry about missing emails or having my campaigns gone bad just because I didn’t check the stats – because I can arrange time blocks for those as well.

To keep the time you can use something like a kitchen timer, then just reset the timer for the next task. I actually found a cool tool called Action Enforcer. It lets you set up to 12 timers at once. So in the morning I decide on all the tasks I want to do for the day and set the timers for all of them.

Action Enforcer shows me the total time of all the tasks combined. As I activate the timer, it also tells me how much time I have left.

The first time I used it, I set up all the tasks I wanted to do for the day, but when I entered the estimated time into Action Enforcer, I was surprised to find out that there were only 6 hours worth of work. So I added more tasks to fill the extra 2 hours. Had I not used Action Enforcer, I would have taken 8 hours to do 6 hours worth of work – just by slacking off. I would have wasted 2 hours for nothing.

Action Enforcer (non-affiliate link) is $27 and it’s well worth it.

Another tool I use is EfficientPIM (non-affiliate link). It’s a contact management software with a calendar where you can schedule events and tasks. It helps me keep long term perspective of where my business is going while Action Enforcer helps me with day-to-day tasks.

I used to use AgentOffice – I had it back in the days when I was a real estate agent. It works great but now since I am no longer a real estate agent, I only use 20% of its features. Besides, the software is getting old and I am not going to spend $250 just to upgrade it.

Until I found EfficientPIM, I’ve tried 4 or 5 different free personal management software but they either don’t have everything I wanted or their user interface is not clean or attractive.

In addition to contact management, calendar, events, and to-do lists, EfficientPIM also has a diary that lets me record things I’ve learned during the day. It also has a sticky note feature. I use it to jog down reminders and it works much better than the sticky notes that came with Windows 7 because you can make it stay on top of the screen so it doesn’t get lost or buried under all the open windows.

Another thing I really like about EfficientPIM is the recurring task feature. You can set a task to repeat every x number of days, weeks, months, years, etc. But what I like to do is to have the task automatically re-generated once it’s completed. Let’s say you need to make a car payment on the 5th of every month. You can set up a task, say on March 5th, and have EfficientPIM automatically generate the task every month. So when you have made the car payment on March 5th, mark this task as “complete” and a new “make car payment” task will show up automatically on your calendar on April 5th.

There is a paid version and a free version of EfficientPIM. I actually tried the paid version (you get 30-day free trial of full functioning software) but never had the need to use the additional features. So I just stick with the free version.

Both Action Enforcer and EfficientPIM have become indispensable to me. If you are not as productive as you want to be, I highly recommend you give them a try.

Over the past 12 months I have done intensive testing on almost every backlinking strategies taught by the gurus. The results? Most of these schemes just plain don’t work. Only a few that really helps with site rankings. None of them works like gang busters as the gurus selling them would have you believe.

My conclusion is that backlinking is really a long term work that requires slow & consistent effort. Any expectation of quick & fast results is just unrealistic.

The conventional wisdom is that SEO is 10% on page (content) and 90% off page (backlinks). Some even goes as far as saying with enough backlinks, you can get any crappy content to rank #1 on Google. While this may be true a few years ago, Google has caught on and it is certainly not true at all from my own test results on over 100 web sites.

Why most backlinking schemes don’t work? Well, what Google really want to see is that backlinks occur naturally, not forced by webmasters. It’s really not that hard for Google to detect if you are participating in any backlinking scheme – profile links, blog commenting, mass article submissions, blog networks, link wheel, link tree, web 2.0 spam, etc. They know all about these.

In theory, Google could very easily de-index anyone that’s using these tactics. But in realty, what usually happens when Google find out? Nothing. That’s right. We all heard about someone got all of his/her web sites mass deindexed overnight. I believe these are the results of human reviews and they don’t occur that often. In most cases, Google don’t like to de-index web sites unless they have concrete proof. So what they would normally do is to disregard the links you build.

Let’s say you have a site that sits on the 5th page. You decided to buy those profile link packages from vendors in the Warrior Forum. You paid someone in the Philippines to build those links for you. You were even smart enough to have them built slowly to “stay under the radar.”

After a few weeks you started to see your site climbing up its ranks. It even got up to the 1st page. Then, all of the sudden, it went right back down to the 5th page – exactly where it was before. Most people would think they got “sandboxed” because they were building the links “too fast.” Actually, Google has devalued your backinks. And what happened to your ranking overall – absolutely nothing – you got back to the same place where Google thought you should belong.

I am now a firm believer that SEO is 90% on page and 10% off page. An example is one of my best performing Christmas theme sites. During last October & November I worked over time putting lots of content on the site to get it ready for the Christmas buying frenzy. I’ve talked about it in my other posts Are You Ready for Christmas? and Results From The First 11 Days of Christmas Marketing.

Most of the content were hand-written by me. Some were re-writen PLR content. A very small percentage were quick copy & paste content with original text added to them. Overall I would say all the pages on the site provide shoppers with valuable information and help them make their Christmas shopping decisions.

I threw up a couple of backlinks in mid October then got busy building the content. My intention was to finish the content first, then work on backlinking. By the time I got done with the content, to my surprise, this site was ranked #1 for its main keyword. At that point, I decided not to “rock the boat,” and did not add any backlinks. The #1 ranking actually held all throughout Christmas season and still at #1 right now.

Here are the best ways I found so far to build backlinks that actually work.

1. Improve the content of your site – It may seem strange that the #1 way to build backlinks is not about getting backlinks, but it’s absolutely the truth. When you have the best quality content, you will find backlinks are coming in automatically. This is what happened to the Christmas site I mentioned above. And trust me, it is much easier to improve the quality of your site than to build backlinks forcefully. You have better control, and it takes much less time and effort. Most importantly, you are giving Google exactly what they want.

2. Article directory submission – This one still works but don’t mass submit articles to thousands of directories. Submit good quality articles to only 2 or 3 best article directories such as Ezine Articles or Article Dashboard. You can disregard low quality article directories all together. Also, remember diversification is the key. Submitting 1000 articles for the same site to Ezine Articles will not be effective because all 1000 links would all be coming from the same place. Just a couple of articles for each site would be sufficient.

3. Guest articles – Most webmasters are hunger for good quality content. You can provide such content to them for free, in exchange of placing 2 or 3 links in the article pointed back to you site. This type of backlinks are great. It takes a lot of time and effort to do but it’s well worth it.

The backlinking tactics that don’t work, in my experience, include social bookmarking, profile links, blog commenting spam, web 2.0 sites spam, mass article directory submissions, rss submissions, and private blog networks. You are better off saving your time and money and using them on the above 3 methods.

Again, SEO is a SLOW process. Don’t expect any overnight results.

In this post I would like to share a technique I have been using on my landing pages to promote CPA offers with great results.

The concept is pretty simple. If your landing page calls out to the visitors directly with their geographic information, you will get their attention and increase the chance of them clicking through to the offer.

Let’s say you are promoting a car insurance offer. If someone comes to your landing page and it has a big headline saying “Special Discount Rate for Drivers in Springfield, IL Area!” Do you think he/she from Springfield would be interested?

So the question is, how can you know where the visitor is located and how do you get it to display on the landing page?

Here is the code that would get the visitor’s city and state based on his/her IP address.

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script>

Place the above code between the <head> and </head> of your page. Then, use

<script language="JavaScript">document.write(geoip_city());</script>

to display visitor’s city name and

<script language="JavaScript">document.write(geoip_region());</script>

for the state abbreviation. For example,

<p>Special Discount Rate For Drivers in <script language="JavaScript">document.write(geoip_city());</script>, <script language="JavaScript">document.write(geoip_region());</script> Area!</p>

It really is that simple.

Here is another example of how geo info is displayed on a landing page (not mine).

For a very long time I have been using Google Analytics to track the stats of my web sites. It has a nice looking interface, presents data in an easy-to-read format, and provides a central location to view data from all of my sites. More importantly, it is free.

However, after hearing so many people got banned on their Google Adwords account, and mass-deindexed of all their sites, I have a growing concern that with all my sites listed in a single Google Analytics account, it’s just too easy for Google to de-index all of them if they see something they don’t like on one of the sites.

So I started to look for an alternative to Google Analytics. The statistic tools like Awstats that come with my web hosting is just not good enough. Plus, it’s not practical to having to log into each site individually every time I want to look at the stats.

Other free tools like StatCounter has a really ugly user interface and I don’t think I want to go with paid tools like Clicky.

After some searching I finally found Piwik that I really like. It’s open source which means it’s free and you won’t have to worry about ongoing updates and bug fixes.

It has a clean and nice-looking interface just like Google Analytics and provides pretty much the same functionality. It is self-hosted so you don’t have to worry about your data going through a third-party company.

Installing Piwik is easy. Just upload the files to your server and follow the on screen instruction.

One thing I found that wasn’t clear (or maybe I miss-read the instruction) is Piwik does not create a database for you automatically (it would need to know the username and password of your hosting account to do that) so you need to create a database before installing Piwik. Then just enter the database info during the installation process.

Once installed, you can then add web sites you want to analyze from Piwik’s Dashboard.

The last thing you need to do is copy the tracking script that Piwik gives you and paste it to the pages of your site. If you are using a Content Management System like WordPress, there are plugins available which makes adding Piwik tracking super easy. If you don’t want to use plugins, your theme usually has an option to paste in the tracking script. If not, then modify footer.php and place the script just before the </body> tag.

So check out Piwik. I am sure you will like it.