Small Change In Project Focus is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

My big project I was working on a rakeback site with a twist to teach limit holdem. I have change focus a bit as I will not be teaching limit holdem and has removed the limit holdem content and publish the articles on my other websites. The small change is a step towards a better site.

Overall this project is all about building a solid brand. A brand that players would want to tell their friends, promote on their own blogs, and wear the brand clothes. While the name isn’t something one would think about branding the logo surely change that view.

So to speed up development I have decided to take on one or two financial partners. I don’t know how long it would take to find a partner. It’s not going to stop me from focusing on building my own funds to develop the site. Anyway, you want to invest or know someone else that would like to share in the profits without doing the work. Please visit this thread. Thanks

Back To Work is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I took a small break from working which was great. I watched seasons 1 through 5 of Weeds. Now that I am back getting things done. I also did some thinking about the goals of this month. While content is great, it’s not going to make money today. Content is more of a long term, return on investment.

I will be producing and buying content as always. However, I am going to turn my focus to branding my rakeback/limit holdem site. I set up 2 tournaments to run every weekend. I am also, going to run some freeroll tournaments to bring in more subscribers to my mailing list as well as drive sign ups to smaller online poker rooms.

Things Done Since I’m Back…
I set up a $25 freeroll tournament on Full Tilt Poker for my rakeback site. All of my players will be added in the tournament so all the password/freeroll whose looking to sign up to my mailing list just for the password will be out luck with that. However, I will try to convert them with the $25 freeroll tournament on playersonly as a cross promotion for my rakeback site and a poker forum I bought advertisement on. Depending on how well these tournaments do I will host more of them.

As for content, I have produce some articles for article marketing as well as news articles for my poker news site. I did a lot of editing stuff, moving stuff around to add more banner slots without over doing it. I think I did a good job of it. I also decided to start taking some direct ad orders on this site so we will see how that goes for boosting my direct ad sales.

Hopefully the sign ups from the tournament promotions and the traffic from the poker news site will boost the monthly affiliate marketing income. From the monthly income reports we all know my affiliate marketing income isn’t up to par with my direct ad sales. Also, I will begin my bankroll challenge on my poker blog soon so hopefully the readers I gain from it will join me at the tables by signing up through my rakeback site.

With all that being said, I guess I decided to change this month from being about content to producing more signups and affiliate marketing income. Let’s see what happens.

Half Way Through The Month is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

It’s a little over half way through the month. I am not liking how things are going but then again when things run slowly in the first half of the month I push harder to make the second half better. Today I want to go over a few things. May goals, a few things added to the “to do list” this week, and how the income is coming along this month. First let’s get into this month’s goals. I want to complete 10k words of new content, revamp one of my sites, rank on the first page for 5 keywords, and complete the follow ups for the newsletter using aweber for my new site.

So far I have done over 6k words of new content. So half way through the month I am over half way done with goal number one. I am really happy about this because I got into the mood of not writing my own poker content. Now that I am writing again, I really feel bad about selling the content. The articles are so good I want to place them on my site for my players to benefit from them. However, I need the money to fund my project. I will touch more on the income later. Some of the articles I do keep for myself if I feel it’s more beneficial to place the article on my site. I also use some of the articles for article marketing if I don’t like the way it came out or if it’s shorter than 400 words.

Now goal number two is a little more work than just writing. This site I plan on changing from a poker community into a online poker news site with a little twist. I have taken off the dead poker forum, change some of the sidebars with an awesome wordpress plugin, and since I took off the forum where the poker commercials was published. I am going to add a poker commercials section. I still have to pay for the reviews, a new design, and logo as well as hire a poker news writer. The only problem with this project is funding. I told myself this project will only be funded by its income. So far, it has been producing from 2 online poker rooms and direct ad sales. However, I played poker with some of the funds and lost. It was during my downswing. So this project will be fund by my poker winnings since things have turned around and any direct ads I sell on it for now on.

Goal number three, this goal is bothering me a bit. I 301 redirected my test site which had a nice amount of backlinks and 301 redirect 3 mini sites to the new site. At first it seem google was taking forever and day to update the search results with the new site. Then it updated, I was happy until I notice some rankings dropped and others complete disappeared! So I began working on getting some of my rankings back by building backlinks for them but the more backlinks I built the more they dropped so I stop building backlinks for awhile. The rankings are coming back.  Then I read on PAL a lot of people are having all types of problems with google search results. So I guess I will have to ride the wave until things claim down. Until then, I am 1 out of 5. Rank for my own domain name. Not something I am happy about since that is pretty damn easy to do.

My final goal of the month, finish the follow up emails for the newsletter. I did this in the first week of the month. It took a lot of thinking and writing but I got it done. I should count the writing in the new word count for goal number one but I am not going to do that. I did 14 follow up emails including the welcome email. If the newsletter can not convert a player into a real money player producing rake each month I don’t know what will. Also I have some follow up emails that promote some poker tools that such bring in some nice sells as well. Once I get some training videos on the site I will be adding those to the follow up emails as well. By the time I am done with this newsletter it will have a ton of follow up emails. I will never have to send out a promotional email. We all know I will anyway.

Things I added to this months to do list. Create a facebook fan page for the new site, create a twitter page for the new site, and this one can wait until later maybe next month but it’s on the to do list. Hire someone to answer questions on Yahoo Answers. Personally, I think outsourcing this is best. It will give me time to complete other things.

The break down of income and what needs to be done. This month I said, I was not going to focus on direct ad selling. So far this month, I must say I only made a few comments this month in my sales threads. A few people contacted me but no deals. I have been focus on selling articles though. I stocked myself this one though. When it comes to something hard to make money. I normally run back to what I know best if I don’t see results fast enough. However, that’s not the case this month. I am really replacing my direct ad sells income with article writing. I have a few problems with this though.

1. Coming up with things to write about.
2. Getting over the feeling of keeping the article.
3. Knowing I will have to produce 50 articles to make $1,000

Now there is an up side to writing articles over selling direct ads. At first I didn’t even think of this but after talking with a friend. He help me realize a couple of benefits to writing articles than selling direct ads.

1. I only have to write 20 articles to replace my $400 a month income from selling direct ads
2. I will have less outbound links from my site. Which is always a good thing. I rather do internal linking.

As you can see there are good and bad things about selling articles than selling direct ads. I don’t know if I can write 50 articles a month plus content for my own sites. However, I have no problem producing 20 articles a month for $400+.

What will I do with the income? Here’s a break down of what will go where. All direct ads sold on my soon to be poker news site as well as some of my poker winnings will be reinvested there via producing content and hiring a poker news writer. All direct ads sold on my poker blog will be used for producing content and SEO for my new site. All articles sold will go towards producing content, design work, and SEO for my new site.

Summary
In my opinion, I done very little work in the first 2 weeks of this month and need to really pump out new content this second half. I only wrote 9 articles to sell this month so far. 11 more needed to completely replace my direct ad sells income for this month. Who knows if I will complete it. I been having writers block a lot lately. I think I am still having troubles getting back into the writing groove. Although, I always seem to crank out 1 or 2 articles around a long poker session. The twitter and facebook pages will be completed this week. However, I will have to find out the cost of a custom design for the facebook fan page landing page. If that make sense to you. I will wait on getting though. There are far more important things need to be done on the new site.

Here’s a little self promotion for my articles sales thread. Support my project and add new content to your site by buying an article or two maybe all of them. Until next time, work hard and work smart.

May Goals is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I told you guys and gals I was going to be blogging here more and I know I talked about some of May Goals in the April income report. I want expand on that. What I have done and what will be done this month. Everything is just trying to come together from months of planning. I had these ideas I wanted to do but needed a niche to do so. I have found the niche and putting things together.

What I have done this month
Last month I wanted to finally get my ideas into action. I started playing limit holdem to stop from losing at poker. It almost helps me think about my business while im playing. So this idea popped in my head, why not run a limit holdem poker school/rakeback site. It will be easy for me to get players and they all will become big rakers so it’s a perfect fit. So this month I got the logo and design done for my limit holdem site. I am still working on the content but running low of funds so any articles I write over 400 words I will be selling to rebuild my paypal account. The rest of the articles will go towards article marketing for the site.

I 301 redirected the whole test site to the new site since it has backlinks and traffic going to it. I didn’t want it go to waste as I know I wasn’t going to work on it anymore. It took me about an hour to completely redirect a 50+ page site. (Only reason it took so long, I was eating breakfast at the same time) I changed any backlinks that I could from pointing to the test site to the new site. So I should see the new site in the search engines within a week or so for many keywords.

In other news, I still have 3 mini sites for sale. Selling all 3 for $800 even though I could just add 10 to 20 more articles to the biggest one and sell that one alone for $1k. But I really don’t have time for that. I am not sure what to do with them if they don’t sell. I mean I could 301 redirect them to the new site as well but that would be a waste of 3 mini sites. I know if I built backlinks for them they could rank well and make money or sell ads on and make money that way once the google PR update came again. However, the backlinks I build for them I could be building for my big project. I guess I am kind of stuck playing the waiting game to see if they sell.

May Goals
This month is all about writing. jdwanchalk from PAL forum started a challenge to write 300,000 words of new content in 3 months. The bet was $2k. We all know I don’t have that to lose so I didn’t enter the challenge. However, it kind of got me out of the content buying mode I been in over the months and into the writing tons of content mode. Which is why I am writing this post right now. I just feel like writing again. I don’t know if I could pump out 300k words but I have already pumped out over 2k or 3k words of new content over the pass few days. Where am I going with this? Well my goal is to write at least 10,000 words of new content this month. Which is 20 articles of 500 words each. Doesn’t matter which site I place it on as long as I am pumping out new content. I will NOT be counting the content I already did this month. I will start counting the content I do after this post is published!

My next goal kind of ties into the goal above. I am going to completely revamp my poker community. This is going to sound pretty dumb but I am going to take off the poker forum and complete the rest of the website before I focus on building an active forum. This means completing all the poker, casino, sportsbook, bingo, and rummy reviews. Adding all the logo images and icons for each site listed. Customize the sidebar on each page of the site. Once all of that is completed. I will see if I have the budget to finally hire a writer to keep the poker news section updated daily Monday through Friday.

My next goal is to have the new site rank on the first page of google for a few keywords. I will not say the keywords but if I out rank any of you for your keywords well then you know. I always seem to hop on the first page of google for keywords I want very easily. So I will make a goal to hop on the first page of google for 5 money making keywords and see how much money it brings in.

Also for the new site, I will be writing a ton of follow up emails for the newsletter. In each email, I will make sure to have at least one or 2 links pointing back to the site. Always having the subscriber coming back to the site to convert them weather its to sign up to a poker room, buy a poker tool, or buy a book. I will keep my brand in their head. Hopefully they will tell their friends. We all know the best marketing is word of mouth.

Let’s do a recap of May goals before I do my final statement.

• Write 10k words of new content.
• Completely revamp the poker community
• Get the new site to rank on the first page of google for 5 keywords
• Complete follow up emails for the newsletter

To some of you this may seem like a ton of work and others it may seem like very little. I personally don’t view it either way. I just view it as things that must be done. Hopefully I can complete all of this work even though completely revamping the poker community is a shit load of work. lol I suck at writing reviews so all of that will be outsourced. I just have to get my budget up again. I will keep you all updated on how things are coming along.

Let your desire drive your motivation and everything will workout.
- Quote by Deneil Merritt 2009

SEO and Review Posts is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

This post is really focused on bloggers. We review a product or service do some social media marketing, email marketing, but fall short of doing a lot of SEO for that one review post. Think about how much money we are leaving on the table by not getting that review post to rank #1 in the search engines for their keyword like “product name review”

What made me think about this, being in the poker niche. Online poker room reviews are very important and money makers. Then I thought about this blog and I just let my oiopublisher review blog post just sit there with no backlinks. I don’t know how much money I left on the table by not having that rank number 1 in the search engines.

On average most bloggers (or niche bloggers) have at least 5 reviews on their blog of products and services they use. Why not build backlinks for those reviews? Think about it, we are so focus on getting our homepage ranking for our given keywords. Often times we forgot about SEO for our blog posts.

Try doing some article marketing for at least one of your review blog posts and get it number 1 in the search engines. You will surely see a jump in your monthly income. There are 3 ways I know to do successful article marketing to build solid backlinks to rank well in the search engines.

1. Submit articles to article directories. Remember, only submit the same article to the top 5 article directories. The search engines will not index anything beyond that. Which why a lot of people highly recommend spinning (rewriting) your articles to submit to more article directories.
2. Guest post on other blogs. Contact as many bloggers as you know to write something unique for them with a backlink to your review post with author text. (This is a lot of work)
3. Submit your article to blog networks like free traffic system where you can submit an article with 2 backlinks for each article. You can submit an article up to 30 blogs at once.

Most product and service review blog posts are really easy to rank for with a small amount of backlinks because few people build backlinks for their review posts. I recommend doing some keyword research to see which review will rank number one the fastest and the keyword has traffic. Also, keep in eye on your rank in the search engines once you reach number one. If you fall from number one throughout the month. That mean you need more backlinks because someone is trying to outrank you for that keyword.

Always remember, do not write a review for a product or service you do not use yourself. Nobody will buy the product or service through your link. People know when you are full of shit. So keep those reviews honest and never say something good about a bad product or service. Either tell the truth or don’t write the review at all.

Cheers, let your desire drive your motivation and everything will workout.

Every Product Needs An Affiliate Army is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

I talked about why my ebook never sold a single copy. One thing I left out of that article, I want to talk about today. Thanks to a commentator, I remember this one mistake I did with my ebook. One thing you focus on before and after you have launched a product is getting affiliates. This is one thing I spent about a few minutes doing. This is one of the worst mistakes you can do. Affiliates are one of their most important parts of your product success. Doesn’t matter if its an ebook, membership site, or whatever.

Lets say its just you promoting your product. How many sales do you think you can get? For this example, I am going to say you got enough skills to get 1 sale a day for a $20 product. 30 days in that month. $20×30 results in $600 for that month. Not bad right? You only one person, picture that with a lot more force behind it.

Still product and for this example, its you and 10 affiliates with the same skills as you. You pay affiliates 50% on every sale. You each make 1 sale a day for 30 days. $20×30 which resulted in $600 from you promoting. 10 affiliates does the same as you but they get 50%. So 10 affiliates x $300 each result in $3,000 in your bank account or paypal account from your affiliates. You total for the month is $3,600.

Do you see the power in having affiliates promoting your product? Having an army of affiliates will result in big sales and even better. If you build a mailing list just for your affiliates to sign up too. You will have great success for every product launch you do because you built an army of affiliates ready to product all your products.

I am sure you got my point by now. Don’t count out affiliates! They are your bread and butter so treat them well and everyday recruit more to promote your products. You should at least put away 30 minutes of your time everyday just to recruit more affiliates. Sure you will get a lot of affiliates that will drive un-targeted traffic to your sales page and result in no sales. They are getting more eyes on your brand and getting your name out there if you have your name on the sales page. Whenever they email you, help them as best you can. You never know if that person turn into a super affiliate from promoting your product. While this is happening, I am sure some big name bloggers or super affiliates will come across your product and start promoting it.

Side note: Sign Up to Deneil Merritt dot Com Affiliate Program

Start building your affiliate army and have the power to make all your future products a success the day of the launch.

Why Your Blog Readers Don't Buy is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Many bloggers wonder why people don’t buy products and services through their affiliate links. The answer is very easy to explain. It’s all in the way you present the products or services.

There’s 3 ways to present a product or service. Only 1 produces sales through your affiliate link. If you asking what is it then that means you not making money from your blog posts with your affiliate links. No problem though, lets change that right now with this post.

1) Have NOT bought, use, nor interview/ask someone about the product or service.
Most bloggers do a review of a product or service this way. This is the worst way to present a product or service to your readers. Sadly, I am guilty of this when I promoted Become A Blogger and Blog Masters Club. I only did this because I was and still is readers of both bloggers that created these products and I believe in these products and once I can afford them I will buy them. Nonetheless, this will not get you any affiliate sales.

2) Bought the product or service but haven’t used all the features or long enough.
This is a little better. Most bloggers that bought the product or service say this in the review. People know you bought the product or service and you say its good. This is not good enough, people want the ends and outs of the product or service.

3) Bought the product or service, used it, and all it offers.
Bloggers making money from their blogs have learned this secret. When you write the review of a product or service. You give the reviews all the details; what the product or service is, all the features it offers, and most importantly how it can help their readers. Remember to add your personality in your blog post. Tell your readers what you do and don’t like about the product or service.

To get extra affiliate sales from your review. Offer a bonus for a limited time. Make sure its a bonus people really want or present in a way that make people want it. I learned that lesson the hard way by just saying you get this bonus and nobody cared about the bonus. So it resulted in no affiliate sales.

After reading how to do reviews the right way, I got a few last words for you. Recommend the product or service in your review, don’t sale the product or service in your review. That is the product or service creators’ job.

I hope this information help you improve your reviews. Remember, its never too late to edit your reviews and add a link to your review in a newer blog post.

Deneil Merritt Dot Com Affiliate Program is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

You read the title, now you can make money online selling Deneil Merritt Dot Com ad slots. You will get 50% commission on all ad slot sales, paid posts, and paid reviews. Just like my friend at Benjamin Cip. Until like most bloggers Benjamin and I is sharing the money made from selling ad slots on our blogs with readers using the wordpress plugin oio publisher. You can always find the discount code for oio publisher in my discount coupon posts.

I took in count a few things to make everybody happy from the branding of advertisers, money given to affiliates, and enough money I can be happy with. Since this blog is always growing from blog commenting, search engine traffic (Thanks to the thesis theme), and my ever growing mailing list using aweber. It won’t be hard to sell my ad slots to advertisers using your affiliate link.

Tip 1 – My blog is about blogging, making money online, making residual income online, web entrepreneurship. To get advertisers to buy ad slots on my blog. Go to webmaster forums like digitalpoint, websterly, bear marketing system, and more. Find their buy, sell, trade section. Sometimes they have a forum just for buying, selling, and trading advertisements. This is where you going to make your money. Make a thread with the title something like this “WTS: Advertisement On PR 3 Blog” If you been a reader of mine for awhile you know I can careless about pagerank but others do care about it a little too much. This is how you going to get them to buy. State a few facts about the blog but don’t provide a link in the thread. They will pm you for the link. This is where you place a “click here” within the reply back to their pm with your affiliate link in the words “click here”

Tip 2 – Selling my ad slots to companies. You want to act as a rep for Deneil Merritt dot com sales team. Since you an affiliate selling my ad slots, in other words you are a sales rep for my blog. Contact trusted companies that are related to my blog and send them a nice email something like this.

Hello,

My name is “add your name here”. I want to help you spread the word about your brand. I represent an ever growing blog for web entrepreneurs and its my job to fill in the ad slots for this blog. I am sure the readers of the blog will be interested in your “product/service”.

For more information, contact me.

Best Regards;
“Your name”

This gets you in the door, the second email you send them once they contact you is all up to you. I am sure this method will make some of you a lot of money. Not just promoting my ad slots but also selling your blog ad slots.

To get advertisers to buy even faster you can offer a discount by cutting some of your commission, the advertiser will get a discount. You can do this within your affiliate account.

Sign Up To Deneil Merritt Dot Com Affiliate Program And Start Making Money!

What Is Internet Marketing Giveaway Events? is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Since I have been building my mailing list in many ways. I want to talk about one way I have been building my mailing list as well as getting free ebooks to learn more about internet marketing. This method will be in the jump start mailing list membership site once it is complete. First let me explain what an internet marketing giveaway event is.

What is internet marketing giveaway events?
internet marketing giveaway events are pretty simple to understand. A lot of internet marketers sign up to the event to give away their free gift. Most likely an ebook. Once the event has launched, members sign up to get free ebooks before the event is over. Most of the time an event will run from 5 to 14 days.

If you think like I think, you want to grow your mailing list as well as get some of those free ebooks to better your knowledge about internet marketing. Well let me explain how you can do both build your mailing list and get free ebooks by just signing up once.

You will need to sign up to the event as an contributor before it begins. Where can I find internet marketing giveaway events before they begin? I got you covered on that one. Go to the page on my blog called Giveaway Events. You will need the following to add your ebook to the giveaway event; Title, Description, eBook cover image, Squeeze page for your ebook, and Download page for your ebook.

You got 2 ways you can go about growing your mailing list and getting those free ebooks.

1) Pay to have your account upgraded which will put your ebook at the top of the list with the other internet marketers that upgraded their account and promote the event to push your ebook even higher on the list. Also you get to download all the ebooks you want without signing up to their mailing list. You are taking directly to their download page.

2) You don’t pay for the upgraded and you just promote the hell of out the event to get your ebook higher and higher on the giveaway list. If you don’t promote the event, your gift is removed from the list. You will have to sign up to people mailing list just to get their ebook.

Now with me being on a tight budget again. I went with option 2, I took the free way. My mailing list grew a little bit and I got some free ebooks. Now if I had gotten the upgrade, I am sure I would at least got 4 times the amount of signups to my mailing list than I did from my first giveaway event. I am sure you had seen the banner on the top right corner.

If you don’t have an ebook to giveaway, wait until the event start and grab the ebooks that will help you with your business. Seriously, who doesn’t like to grow their business from free information?

See you at the next giveaway event.

GDI Journey To Success: The Beginning is a post from: Deneil Merritt - Journey through life

Talking with my friend Wade over the past week and half. I have joined GDI and the Bear Marketing System. Wade and his partner Brain made the bear marketing system to help others make a full time passive income online from part time work at home. I know some people would be asking themselves why would they do that. The answer is very simple. The more they help you make money online, the more money they make online.

For example, Wade makes around $4,000 a month and Brain makes around $12,000 a month. With incomes like that, I can see why they are so willing to help others build their incomes. The bear marketing system was built around the GDI program. I will show you why right now.

GDI owns .ws and is a hosting company. They are best known for their affiliate program. The best program I have ever seen. Personally I wish I joined it when I first seen it last year. The affiliate program runs with 2 payouts; commissions and bonuses.

Commissions: You earn $1 a month for each person in your downline 5 levels deep.
Bonuses: You earn $100 for every 5 people you bring in one week.

I don’t know about you but the commissions made me think “That’s how people are making so much money every month from GDI” Then the bonuses made me think “Why I am not in GDI yet?” You know the end result from that. I joined GDI and started promoting asap. I only been in GDI since Monday so we will see how it goes this month.

Final thought: What’s the catch?
lol, there is no catch, you do what everybody else does. Signup to GDI for a .ws with the 7 day trail and then pay $10 a month. Pretty damn cheap for such high payouts. 10 referrals and the program pays for itself. 5 referrals in one week more than pay for itself.

With all the resources for success in bear marketing system. There is no way to fail, well of course if you do not promote GDI at all.

Cheers to all our success.