The end results will be something like this. To link to an Amazon product, you would simply put

http://yourdomainname.com/amazon/[ASIN]

And this unique link of yours would forward to Amazon’s product and credit you for any sales. As you should’ve guessed, to link to a different product in Amazon’s catalog, you just change the ASIN number in the link above.

This should make it very convenient for you not only to link to Amazon, but also cloak your links effectively.

So, let me show you how to set this up…

First, you need to install the plugin Redirection. Through this plugin, you can setup automatic URL redirects.

Now, in your WordPress admin area, go to “Tools” and then “Redirection”.

You’ll see a section with the heading Add new redirection. Enter the following values in the form below it:

• In Source URL, enter /amazon/([^/]*)
• In Target URL, enter http://www.amazon.com/dp/$1/[Your Amazon Associate ID]
• Make sure that you check the box that says Regular Expression
• Click save, and you’re done!

Now, your blog will automatically direct visitors to Amazon products. All you have to do is supply the ASIN number like in the example above.

If you want more details or if you want to know how to do the same for your ClickBank links, check out my earlier article.

If you have any questions or if anything isn’t clear, feel free to ask in the comments.

I may create a WordPress plugin to make this even easier. Stay tuned for that.

Related posts:

1. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash
3. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

Today, I want to share another idea: a directory of technical help communities online. A place where a visitor can easily find links to the most active help communities of a specific topic, like HTML, math, physics, language, and so on…

But I’m not talking about a simple collection of forums, mailing lists, social networks and chat rooms. It’s more than that…

Essentially…

It’s a directory, like the 100,000 other directories on the web. But this one has a specific definition. It only lists community sites related to technical subjects.

Quality versus quantity

I realize that for each technical topic, there would be several communities scattered across the Web. The job of this directory is not to include them all, but only those most active. The level of activeness would be gauged using:

• the number of posts in forums
• number of messages per day in a mailing list
• number of users in a chat room

To reduce maintenance, these numbers should be pulled dynamically — using a Web spider of some sort…

Classification is gonna be a challenge

In projects like these, classification is always a challenge. Some help communities will overlap. For example, there could be a help community dedicated graphic design. And another one dedicated to Photoshop. But the topics discussed within each community are the same.

How are these going to be classified? This is something that should be looked into. But…

Before a criteria for classification can be determined, the raw data need to be collected. Having the complete set of data will provide better understanding of how the communities relate and how they should be organized.

Search engine optimization

A well SEO’d resource like this can bring lots of traffic. Here’s a table showing the number of monthly searches for each of the following keywords:

On-site optimization

The structure of the URLs in this directory is gonna be important. For example, if I were to create this directory as part of this website, here’s how I would structure the URLs

• http://msafi.com/online-help/php/
• http://msafi.com/online-help/photoshop/
• http://msafi.com/online-help/math/
• etc…

For each page, I would list all the relevant forums, chat rooms, and mailing lists. I would also write a little paragraph describing each one. These paragraphs would help in capturing long tail search engine keywords.

Other basic on-page SEO stuff apply here, of course.

Off-site optimization

A comprehensive, free, and helpful resource like the one described here is very easy to promote on social networks and to other webmasters. Getting link backs would require much less effort/money than getting link backs for a blatantly commercial site.

Provide supporting articles

It’s a good idea to provide supporting articles with this resource.

Research and write articles to help users ask good questions. Educate people on how to use forums. Tell them to search first if the question has been asked. In chat rooms tell them not to flood the channels with big copy/pastes. And for mailing lists…I don’t know…Tell them how to properly post a reply…

Actually, I might work on this project…

With this post I wanted to clear my head by getting the ideas out “on paper”. This is something I would like to work on; not the data gathering and classification parts (I’ll probably outsource those tasks), but the programming, development, and SEO part.

And if I do it, it’s indeed gonna be part of this website. Wanna contribute?

Related posts:

1. Create a Chat Website (Or Add Chat Rooms to Existing Website)

Having affiliates promoting your product or service is a great thing. A decent network of affiliates can  send you large volumes of targeted visitors. But you maybe overlooking something else very valuable that you could get from your affiliates — namely, an SEO boost.

Here’s how you can increase your search engine ranking by using links from your affiliates…

Conventional affiliate links

Traditional affiliate links carry very little SEO benefit because they go through several redirections. And some times these redirections lose all SEO power that would otherwise be transferred using a clean link.

What do conventional affiliate links look like? They’re usually long and messy looking. Like this: http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348. If I were to use this affiliate link to promote 7UP, I would write a link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348">Great drink!</a>

When search engines see the snippet of markup above, they know that this page, http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348, is about a great drink. And that influences where the page is ranked in search engines.

In fact, linking with anchor text like above is the most influential SEO factor. That’s why when you type “follow me” in Google, the first website that shows up is Twitter. Many people link to Twitter using Follow Me.

But there is a big problem with the highlighted link above. When the search engine follows it and sees that it points to a page which then redirects the user and attempts to drop a cookie, the search engine realizes this is an affiliate link. It could be biased, therefore it doesn’t transfer SEO power.

But using technology and a link building strategy, you can let some of your affiliates link to you and bring all the link juice with them…

SEO affiliate links

A much more useful link for 7UP would be a direct link like:

<a href="http://www.7up.com/">Great drink!</a>

If enough people link to 7UP like that, pretty soon www.7up.com would be the #1 website in Google’s results pages for the keyword great drink.  Most keywords only need a handful of trusted links to start influencing search engines.

If you notice, compared to the traditional affiliate link, this SEO link is much shorter. Traditional affiliate links are long because each affiliate requires a unique link. The link usually points to a script that registers the visitor, drops a cookie, and redirects to the product’s page.

The easiest way to do all of that is to have a long link. But one affiliate software company got the idea that tracking where users came from and crediting the right affiliate is still possible using a direct, clean SEO link.

Here’s how it’s done.

If you have a Web analytics software for your website, you must have seen the section in the report that points out the Top Referring Sites. Or you may have landed on a website through Google or Twitter and were greeted by Welcome, Googler! or Welcome, Twitter user! How do these sites know where you’re coming from? They use what’s called HTTP referer [sic]. It’s part of the HTTP protocol and it allows the target website to know where it’s being linked from.

Utilizing this technology, 7UP can group and track all visitors that land on 7up.com through msafi.com without me, as the affiliate, having to use a special link.

How to get started with this new affiliate linking method

From my technical background, I realized the potential of this method and I set out to look if someone has built a system that exploits this technology. Sure enough, I found Post Affiliate Pro. It’s the only affiliate software that is capable of this as far as I know.

Here’s what they say on their website about this linking method:

Search Engine Friendly Links

With Post Affiliate Pro, your affiliate links can be SEO friendly. Customize the link format exactly the way you like it; choose from different linking types:

Standard (redirect)

http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate/scripts/t.php?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (URL parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/?a_aid=1&a_bid=2

New style (Anchor links)

http://www.yoursite.com/#a_aid=1&a_bid=2

SEO links (with mod rewrite)

http://www.yoursite.com/1/2.html

DirectLink (no parameters)

http://www.yoursite.com/

Post Affiliate Pro‘s extraordinary DirectLink technology offers the best possible linking method – your affiliates link to your site without any additional parameters in the URL.

A few things to consider

In very unusual cases, the HTTP referer will not be reported correctly, and this decreases the reliability of this linking method. Also, without a unique link to send visitors to, affiliates couldn’t promote your product or service to their email list or on forums. But that’s not a big problem because, as I just showed above, Post Affiliate Pro allows multiple methods of linking. So, you can ask your affiliates to use the DirectLink from their websites and the other links for emails and whatever else…

Obviously, Post Affiliate Pro is a self hosted affiliate software, which means it doesn’t come ready with an army of affiliates compared to using an affiliate network such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or Commission Junction. It also requires more in-house work such as paying the affiliates, managing refunds and whatnot.

Getting the best of both worlds

It is possible to have an in-house as well as an outsourced affiliate program. For example, you can have your product listed on ClickBank and at the same time allow some affiliates to link to you using a direct link.

But, why would anyone use your in-house program instead of your network-managed program?

You can convince some of your affiliates to use the SEO links of the in-house program by giving them a higher commission than the ClickBank affiliates.

Additionally, this technology can also work as a performance reward for link partners. Webmasters will be more willing to link to your website when they know they’ll get paid for converting traffic. This can provide a great boost your link building efforts.

What else can you do to get SEO juice from your affiliates?

If you’re not going to use an affiliate software that allows for SEO links, there is something else you could try to get more SEO power from your affiliates.

Basically, give your affiliates JavaScript powered link codes.

Going back to 7UP. If 7UP is like most online merchants, their website would have a section or a page dedicated to affiliates — welcoming them, giving them instructions, ideas, linking tools, and so on. In that section, they can provide HTML code to their affiliates like this:

<a href="http://www.7up.com" onclick="location.href='http://www.7up.com/xyz.php?af=1059348'; return false;">
Great drink!</a>

In Google’s eyes, this is a direct link to 7up.com. However, when a real human user clicks on this link, the JavaScript-powered browser would actually take the user to the affiliate link that is specified in onclick.

For example, see this link: Google. When you hover over this link, your status bar at the bottom tells you that if you click on this link, you’re going to go to http://www.google.com. But try clicking on it, it’ll actually take you to the homepage of msafi.com.

This is cool and all, but there are a few things to consider. First, supposedly, search engines have become smarter at detecting JavaScript like this. Second, for people who don’t have a JavaScript powered browser (a fractional minority), the affiliate commission will be lost as those users will be taken to the direct link and not the affiliate link.

Dominating the SERPs

None of what’s written here is considered unacceptable black hat practice. Whether you decide to use the Post Affiliate Pro SEO link method or simply provide a JavaScript powered HTML code to your affiliates, you’ll sure see positive results in your ranking.

Alternatively, you can use Post Affiliate Pro direct link as a reward for link partners. It could make it much easier for you to convince and acquire new link partners and affiliates. And therefore, dominate the SERPs.

Related posts:

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
3. Turn Keywords into Links with Word 2 Cash

In that post I talked about how I spent several weeks intensively redesigning and revamping DET only to realize that I was actually killing the business with my new ideas.

Today, I’ll share with you what I did to revive DET, get it to generate $1,000/month in sales, increase its potential, and what I plan to do to realize that potential and multiply the revenue…

Professional vs Personal

Part of the plan of revamping DET was to make it look more professional. My assumption was that: more professional = better conversions. As I explained in my earlier post, I was wrong. Filling my website with corporate imagery and speak killed conversion. I decided that it was time to look into creating serious, visitor-converting sales copy.

So, I picked up the best copywriting book I could find, Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. I studied the book for a few weeks and finally produced the new sales copy.

The new sales copy is very personal. I talk to the visitor in a one-on-one tone. I also changed all the plural pronouns to singular ones, i.e. we, our, and us changed to I, my, and me.

Luckily, this did the trick. Sales volume was restored to a level that was even higher than the previous $700/month average.

Suicidal Thoughts Despite This Moderate Success

Improving the sales copy and changing the tone of the website back to a personal one helped the business a little. But DET isn’t exactly a “set it and forget it” type of business. I have a constant stream of comments and customer service issues that need attending to. And I don’t want to dedicate myself to that. I have other more interesting concerns.

I also felt that I don’t deserve this website. It gets loads of traffic but I’m not intrinsically interested in this niche. I felt that someone else could get a lot more mileage out of it.

So, I decided to sell it. The amount is $7,000 x 10, i.e. the annual revenue for last year multiplied by ten. It’s a straightforward and fair way to valuate a business. I bet if someone bought it at this price and then paid the proper attention to it, they’d recoup their investment in 5 years or less. What a better deal you want, right?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find interested buyers. So, I’m stuck with DET. What next?

I contemplated letting DET die a slow death. I decided that I won’t moderate comments and I will only provide customer service support to paid members. No pre-sale support whatsoever. That’s actually what I’m doing right now. But I can’t stomache it. I always feel that it’s a shame to let this successful website die. So, I always go back and look into ways to streamline the business.

You might think that I should just hire a virtual assistant. But for an arrangement with a virtual assistant to be profitable, I’d need a really good virtual assistant and at a cheap rate. The challenge is, where would I find an assistant that knows about this “dubai employment” niche? I’d have to train them a lot.

Increased Traffic and Renewed Interest

DET used to get about 7,000 unique visitors per month. Lately, the traffic has been steadily increasing. Last month DET got 11,000 unique visitors. I don’t know what exactly caused the traffic increase, but it excited me. Additionally, I’ve recently discovered using blog reviews to get backlinks, drive traffic, and increase SEO ranking even further. The thought of applying this new technique to DET also reignited my interest in it.

Realizing DET’s Potential

I honestly think DET could make $10,000 a month. It just needs the right kind of attention. So, here is my new theory. DET’s future success depends on the following pillars:

• Continue to generate content
• Publish user’s comments and interact with them
• Provide proper pre-sale customer support
• Follow up with users that register but not pay
• Continue to work on SEO ranking
• Improve the sales page further

Building each of these pillars in an efficient and desirable way is a challenge, but I plan on solving these challenges. Doing this right will finally get DET to reach the success that it deserves.

I will try to keep this blog updated as I continue on with this…Stay tuned!

Related posts:

1. Find a Great Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant (VA)
2. A Website Struggle in Internet Marketing
3. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress

If you currently have or plan to have plenty of affiliate links on your WordPress based website, you should have a way to easily track and manage these affiliate links. You want to know how many clicks each link received and you want to be able to edit and change the affiliate link without having to revisit and change old content.

And to keep your website clean and organized in the eyes of search engines, there are a few things that will need tweaking.

Here’s how I create, manage and cloak my affiliate links.

Using Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that is made by John Godley, who works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Redirection helps you manage your blog URLs. Using Redirection, you could create a link like http://msafi.com/gotogoogle/ and set that link to forward to http://google.com. Similarly, you could put all your affiliate forwarders in a virtual directory like:

• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product1/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product2/
• http://msafi.com/affiliate/product3/
• and so on…

Most people don’t use affiliate for the directory name, though. They use goto or visit. Or like on this website, I simply use a.

Redirection also allows you to group related URL redirections together. So, you could create a group, name it Affiliate Links and put all your affiliate links there.

Create an affiliate link in Redirection

Once you have Redirection installed

1. Click on Groups in the top left corner
2. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see Add Group. Enter Affiliate Links in the textbox, and click Add.
3. Click on your newly added group, Affiliate Links
4. In the source URL, put something like /visit/product-xyz/ (don’t include your domain name, http://ursite.com)
5. For Match, select URL only
6. For Action, select Redirect to URL
7. Leave Regular expression unchecked
8. In Target URL, put your affiliate link

That’s it. You’ve added your first affiliate link to Redirection.

Now whenever you want to link to Product XYZ, use http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/. It’s even easier to remember.

Redirection also gives you the number of hits each link received. So, if you’re putting your links in relevant places and getting huge volumes of clicks but maybe no sales, you’ll know something is going on…

Cool tip: get Redirection to automatically create ClickBank affiliate links for you!

If you promote products for ClickBank, here’s a cool tip that you’ll find very useful.

All of ClickBank’s links have the following structure

http://YourClickBankID.VendorClickBankID.hop.clickbank.net

You can tell Redirection to automatically fill in the VendorClickBankID field for you based on a value that you provide in your URL. Like:

http://ursite.com/cb/vendorx311/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.vendorx311.hop.clickbank.net

and

http://ursite.com/cb/sumvendor2/

automatically redirects to

http://yourClickBankID.sumvendor2.hop.clickbank.net

…and so on…

Here’s how you do this in Redirection:

1. In the Source URL, enter /cb/([^/]*)
2. In Target URL, enter http://yourClickBankID.$1.hop.clickbank.net
3. Make sure Regular expression is checked
4. Match should be set to URL only
5. Action should be set to Redirect URL

I have done this on my website here at msafi.com. So, now I can simply give out a link like http://msafi.com/cb/4idiots/. This will redirect to http://mksafi.4idiots.clickbank.net, which is the landing sales page for the product sold by 4idiots ClickBank vendor. You can replace 4idiots with any ClickBank vendor ID and it will still work.

Pretty cool isn’t it?

Perhaps a similar trick can be done to automate link cloaking and management for Amazon and Commission Junction, but I’ll have to look into that.

For now, let’s look into optimizing your affiliate links so that Google will not have trouble with them…

Helping Google not trip over your affiliate links

Now that you have a convenient and easy way to create and organize affiliate links, I’m gonna show you how to make sure that Google will not discriminate against your blog as a result of affiliate links.

First, whenever you add an affiliate link as anchor text make sure that you include a rel=”nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag. That is

Bad: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/”>Product XYZ</a>

Good: <a href=”http://ursite.com/visit/product-xyz/” rel=”nofollow”>Product XYZ</a>

If you want to automate the creation of anchor text links in WordPress, check out the plugin I created: Word 2 Cash.

Second, use robots.txt to disallow Google (and other search engines) from accessing your virtual affiliate links URL directories. Your affiliate link directories are /visit/, /cb/ and whatever else you may have created.

In your robots.txt file add lines like:

Disallow: /visit/*
Disallow: /cb/*

Do the same for any other affiliate link directory you have.

This will help Google index your website in a clean way and hopefully minimize discrimination against your outbound links.

That’s all there is to it. You now have a great way to create and manage your affiliate links. Just one last thing before you go.

Reducing Redirection database size

Redirection keeps a record of every redirect it makes. It stores these records in your database. If you’re gonna be using the plugin the way I described in this post, your records can build up and take a lot of space pretty quickly. What you want to do is set the records to expire after some time, say 30 days. To do that:

1. go to Redirection’s admin page
2. Click on Options
3. In the Expire Logs field, enter 30 and click Save.

Aaaaaaand you’re done!

Related posts:

1. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates
3. Great Networks for Software Affiliates and Vendors

Word 2 Cash is a free WordPress plugin. Its purpose is to turn specified keywords on your blog into links.

For example, suppose you want every instance of the word WordPress in your posts to be an anchor text pointing to http://wordpress.org. This plugin can do that for you automatically.

Just go to the administration page of the plugin and enter:

wordpress, http://wordpress.org

Now, WordPress becomes WordPress.

The original purpose of the plugin was to turn keywords into affiliate links. Hence, the name – Word 2 Cash.

This plugin can be used as a good alternative to commercial plugins such as Ninja Affiliate.

Limitation

To me, the issues below are not limitations because I implemented the plugin this way. It’s the way that suits me. This maybe the way that suits you best, too.

Okay…first…

The attributes rel=”nofollow” and target=”_blank” are automatically added to the HTML of every link. The plugin doesn’t give you a choice with this.

In case you don’t know, rel=”nofollow” tells Google not to increase the target website’s ranking as a result of this link. And target=”_blank” opens the link in a new window/tab.

Second. Some people may prefer to limit the number of instances that should be turned into anchor texts. You can’t do that with this plugin. Every instance will be turned into anchor text. However, if links on your posts are NOT styled to be big bright blue color with underline, turning all instances into anchor text won’t make your content look cluttered or spammy or anything…

Support

I provide voluntary support for this plugin. I don’t promise that I’ll fix your issues (if you have any), but feel free to post in the comments below and you may get an answer.

Download and Installation

Download the plugin from here…

To install, simply place the plugin in the WordPress plugins folder and activate it from the administration panel.

Credits

The core function for this plugin was taken from SEO Smart Links and it was modified by me.

Related posts:

1. Best Way to Organize and Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
2. Automatically Create and Cloak Amazon Affiliate Links in WordPress
3. Squeezing the SEO Juice Out of Your Affiliates

The domain name of DET contains the phrase “dubai employment”. I wanted to create a website that is search engine optimized for this key phrase. I learned the importance of this from The Thirty Day Challenge, which is a free course that got me to stop fumbling and truly get started in IM. They hold the 30-day challenge every year with renewed and improved material. I’m thinking of taking the new course soon.

The plan for DET was to first build a sustainable stream of traffic. I imagined that I could then throw any product in front of this stream and have it picked up. It was an accurate imagination, but it wouldn’t be that simple.

I created DET. I put some search-engine-optimized content on it. And I started getting traffic. It was time to start selling.

The First Product I Tried to Sell

What do my visitors want? Easy. To find employment in Dubai. So – obviously – my product needs to assist with that not-so-simple task. As someone who has experience in jobhunting in Dubai, I found the most valuable method to be networking with other professionals, hiring managers, and recruiters. So, I compiled a small list of contacts and wrote a guide to show how I compiled this list. I put this product up for $47. I knew nothing about sales letters back then. So, the product must’ve had a very bad sales page. I left it there for – maybe – a week. It received a bit of traffic, but I sold ZERO. I tried changing the sales page a little, but still no luck.

How can I position the product differently?

The nature of my product, which was simply a list of contacts and a guide, conveyed to the buyer that they still had to do a lot of work to get results. I needed a product that would make finding employment seem effortless. So I made a new offer:

The Second Product I Tried to Sell

Here’s what I proposed to my customers: upload your resume to my web server and I will instantly distribute it my list of “100s” of hiring managers and recruiters in Dubai.

I hired a freelance web developer to create the system to store uploaded files on my web server. And I had planned to distribute the resumes using iContact.

It has turned into a resume distribution service. The price? US$14.99! On 30th of November 2008 and only 20-minutes of this offer going live, I received the first order. And in the next two days, I received 3 more orders. Despite the low price, I was ecstatic. Aside from the one or two affiliate sales I had coincidentally made, these were my first ever sales in IM.

Time to Deliver the Product

As I said, I promised that I would distribute these resumes myself. I had a small list of personal contact information of professionals in Dubai and in the span of 2 days, I spammed them with 4 untargeted emails from a service that they didn’t subscribe to. Surprisingly, the majority of the recipients were happy! They replied thanking me and asking me questions about the service. But one of them complained – rightfully so. Here’s what he said:

Please STOP sending these – I have marked them as SPAM.
Kind Regards,

Obviously, the service couldn’t be scaled up. What if I receive three orders per day? It won’t work.

Transforming the Product

This experience has taught me something valuable. People liked believing that, to find a job, all they had to do was upload their resume and pay a small fee. I should keep this perception in whatever I’d be selling. But my model wasn’t scalable. What I needed to do now was keep the same offer, but modify the product a little bit. I ended up with:

1. A membership section where visitors can login and find contacts relevant to their industry in Dubai.
2. Resume distribution service where we send the subscriber’s resume to a list of corporate and business emails. (Note: I always gave owners of the emails the option to opt-out. More on that later)

The emails were divided by industries. They looked like info@corporate.com or a variation of that. It didn’t feel as bad spamming these emails as it did spamming the personal emails. And subscribers could still find personal contacts when they logged in to DET. The new price was $24.99.

The New Product is Kind of Scalable. But a Big Headache!

I guess now I could accept up to 3 orders a day. The list of emails we had was broken up by industry. That allowed us to send relevant resumes to relevant companies. It was valuable for job seekers, too. They saw the results and thanked us for having made their resume distribution convenient. But there was a big problem. The delivery of the product was done completely manually. We used iContact to send the emails to our list of companies. Every time we received an order we had to manually setup the email for dispatch. Once the email was dispatched, we had to manually setup the user account on our website. Then we would manually email the user a notification and a completion report.

This entire process took 25 minutes of intense focus to make sure that there were no typos in our emails and forms. We also had to come up with the cover letter that went into the email dispatch when the user didn’t specify one. We had to review the employment history of every user.

Every order delivery was a headache! After awhile, I felt that I’ve had enough. It got to a point when I’d flinch upon seeing the payment notification email from PayPal. So, in this sense, this model too wasn’t scalable.

Just when I made the final decision to pull the plug on this model, I received a complaint from a company that was on our list.

For your entertainment, here is the email exchanges we had:

Subject: Remove from your database – Dubai Employment XXXXXX

Please immediately remove any email addresses with @XXXXXXXX.com from your database. We are not interested in getting flooded with CVs and job applications.

Best regards,

John Smith

I replied

Hi,

Alternatively, you could’ve just clicked on the “remove” link at the bottom of any of the emails we send your way, which would have effectively removed you from any emailing list we have. And just FYI, all legitimate bulk email senders are required per law to provide that kind of removal link.

Best,

Mohammed al-Safi

He answered

I don’t bother about your removal link, I have never subscribed to your services.

Best regards,

John Smith

I replied

I’m just trying to tell you how a smart person that can read would go about this matter. You, however, choose to waste your time going to my website, finding my email and writing a message. With the education that I just gave you, you will now be able to just click “remove” and be done with it.

Mohammed al-Safi

You can see from my tone that I didn’t give a shit.

I thought that was the end of that. I already canceled the PayPal virtual credit card that I used for iContact. I didn’t want them to charge me since I wasn’t going to use their service anymore. But before they had a chance to find out that I canceled my credit card, they emailed me this:

Hello,

Sending for your account has been disabled due to a recent manual complaint we had received. These are weighted more heavily due to the lengths in which the contact goes to file the complaint. That being said we wanted to review your opt-in practices to make sure they are following the industries best practices. Can you please respond to the information below? Thank you for your cooperation and we look forward to your response.

* How were these addresses accumulated? What are the specific addresses of the sign-up forms?
Example: Online sign up form/paper forms.

* Where is the permission statement the subscribers agree to when signing up?
Please provide all tangible means of lead generation for us to view.

If applicable please provide the direct URL addresses or attach a copy of a paper form for us to view.

I told them

Hi there,

Sorry to have caused this to your service.

My contacts indicate their desire to receive my emails. However, they always have the option to simply opt-out of my emails per the mandatory removal link that you provide. I think the person who went through the trouble of filing a manual complaint had a personal issue with me, not because I spammed them.

At any rate, on the 23rd I stopped all my business activities that require email broadcasts and will not be using iContact again.

Thanks for the great service all along.

Best,

Automation is Obviously the Solution

Anyway, after this was over, I had to go back and think about the real problem. Orders were a headache to handle. If I could only automate the delivery of my product…

Actually, unlike how it’s presented in this post, I realized that I needed to automate the product early on.

Partnering with a Web Developer

As mentioned, to develop my website early on, I solicited the help of a freelance Web developer from Elance. He created the system that allowed users to upload their resumes to my website. In retrospect, I can see that he didn’t do much. But at that time, I was very impressed with his work. He created a WordPress Plugin…just for my site. Cool!!

Back then, I didn’t know about WordPress Plugin development, PHP, or JavaScript as much as I do now. But because I knew I needed to have access to these types of skills to achieve automation, I asked Alex, the developer, to partner up with me. He asked for 30%, I gave it to him – on the 12th of January 2009.

It was a stupid agreement because we didn’t know how much each one of us was going to contribute to this project. If I were to do that I again, I would follow this advice.

The advice says, to determine equity or share in a business between you and a partner, talk about it in this way:

Today, right now, your contribution is worth 5% of the company and my creation of the company is worth 5%. The other 90% is based on what each of us does over the next 18 months. Here’s a list of what has to get done, and what we agree it’s worth…

Brilliant.

My job was to handle everything there is to handle. Alex’s job was to automate order delivery. His job required good knowledge of how WordPress works, but, like many other developers, Alex was more comfortable working from scratch. I guess he didn’t like having to cater to WordPress. Three months passed and we weren’t even 30% done with automation.

Alex has a day job and a family to support. I’m completely devoted to DET. I’m married, too, but I don’t support no body.

The point is, our partnership didn’t work. Against Alex’s preference, we had to dissolve our engagement on the 23rd of March 2009.

Breaking the Shackles

I’ve always felt that I was unfairly held back by inability to materialize the concepts and ideas that I had.

Ah, that’s a very broad statement. Of course, our imagination can fly while our tangible abilities are restrained by the limits of realities.

But when it came to Web development, I felt I could break some of my restraints. Due to my education and past experience with computers and programming, I was comfortable with programming concepts. All I needed was to apply those concepts and theories to my real-world problems…

So, I dug up my old programming toolbox from the attic of my brain. I pirated books on PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and Photoshop. And I started making Web.

Learning this stuff took me about 3-months. During this period, I shut-down the paid services on DET.

I’m broke and I can’t find a partner to compliment my skills. The only solution is to make my own Web. Besides, it’s something I’ve always wished I could do. So, for the first time in a long time, I was determined. I put everything on hold and focused on this one thing.

On the 15th of June 2009, the paid services of DET went back live.

Complete Automation

Now my system is completely automated. Users upload their information, their accounts are automatically created, they receive automated emails with their username and password, and they get exclusive access to the premium section. All we had to do to complete the fulfillment was approve the uploaded information. Once approve is clicked, the system distributed the resumes automatically. The order fulfillment process went from 25-grueling-minutes to easy, less than 5-minute review and approval process.

During this phase, DET was making $700+/month. My target income was and still is $3,000/month.

Better Conversion Vs. More Traffic

Now, I have a much more scalable model. I can market the product and not worry about being flooded with orders. I had a decision to make: should I work on turning more visitors into customers or should I work on bringing in more visitors. I decided that I will work on the former – increasing conversion rate.

Improving conversion rate is something we can do without having to talk to anybody. Getting more traffic, on the other hand, required that we went out and talked to Website owners or we had to spend more money.

Redesigning DET to Increase Conversion and Profits

During the months I was working on DET, I was frequently being told that I should redesign the website – make it look more professional. I agreed with those comments. During that time, DET used a WordPress theme by Brian Gardner. The theme was Revolution I. I thought that if I redesigned the Website, I could increase conversion rate. So, I embarked on a new project. I called it DET 2.0. It was a complete overhaul of not only the design, but also the content and presentation of every page on DET.

From July 4, 2009 to August 7, 2009, I was intensively working on DET 2.0. The new DET used an excellent WordPress theme called Education. According to some people who were shown the new DET prior to its launch: it looks “credible.”

Great! That’s just what I want.

On the 8th of August 2009, a different DET was fully deployed. It definitely looked more professional, but it was more salesy and included lots of corporate speak. The old DET looked like a personal blog.

I thought the new professional design – and the other improvements we made – justified a higher price for the product. The price was bumped up to $67. Less than 12-hours later, the first new sale was made.

There’s a peculiar pattern in the way sales occurred on DET. Whenever I launched new sales copy or made a major modification to the product, I would make several sales in a very short period. Then, sales would dwindle…or worse yet…almost completely vanish. And that’s just what happened with DET 2.0.

I worked my head off for more than one month just so I could kill the income that DET steadily provided.

I dropped the price to $47 to see if that would make a difference. It did help, but still…the conversion rate has actually worsened. It was ironic. Just as I was expecting sales to increase, they shrunk severely.

At the time of this writing, I’m getting an average of one sale every 4 days. A dismal situation.

Should I now go get more traffic?

Obviously not. The website has become a complete failure. I should fix this mess that I worked hard to create. I should now really focus on fixing the conversion rate. And that’s what I’m currently doing. I’m working on new sales copy and making some modifications to the website. I will write about that later. Stay tuned.

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