Optimize Your Life
A quest for living a healthier, happier and better life.

I just read a very interesting article about the impact of the Google Quality Score on your PPC bid prices. Good to know that a 10 Score can save you 30%.

http://www.clickequations.com/blog/2009/03/the-economics-of-quality-score

One thing I am working on right now is to setup new campaigns using blog driven landing page. Quality scores have been pretty good so far. I’ll report on this blog once I have more data.

After a long break from blogging I decided to re-activate this blog with a great new theme from Unique Blog Designs.

I have been extremely busy with my affiliate marketing business since the last time I posted. I have learned a lot and I feel that it is time for me to share some of the things I have learned. One thing is for sure. Affiliate marketing is no get rich quick scheme. There is a lot of work invoved and all the successful marketers I have met had similar stories of many failures and a lot of work until they got successfull.

I feel i am on the right path and I am getting closer to my goals. It is a step by step process, but it is definitely worth it. To setup your campaign and see it finally making money is the greatest feeling in the world.

I promise to keep this blog updated more regularly from now on, so I can share my knowledge with the world and help other marketers who are in a similar situation!

I know I haven’t been writing on this blog for a while. It seems the busier I get with my online marketing the less time I spend posting on this blog. It should be way different, since I really have a lot to talk about. However, I spend any free minute working on my affiliate business right now and my blog is just second. I will definitly work on this, so I can update here more often. For now let me give a quick overview over my recent progress.

Last month I visited Ken McArthur’s JV Alert which was the best online marketing event I have been to so far. 3 days full off information and great networking opportunities. I meet some truly amazing marketers such as: Rick Butts, Paul Counts, Carrie Wilkerson, Dave Lakhani, Jonathan van Clute, Carl Zetterlund and many more. This event truly got me motivated to get more serious with my business. There are really no more excuses if you see what other people have been able to accomplish in far more difficult situations.

When I cam back from Vegas I signed up for PPC classroom, since I realized that PPC marketing is truly my strongpoint and it is also the area of online marketing that interests me the most. I have been following Amit Mehta and Anik Singal for a while and truly admire their work. Amit is one of the most real and honest online marketers I have ever seen.

As soon as I got the course I started to emerge myself into the material. The whole program is structured as an online class with lessons and tests at the end of each lesson. In combination with videos Amit does a truly great job explaining his PPC strategies. In the beginning I was worried this course would only be the same old PPC info I already found in other courses and ebooks. Oh how was I wrong. The information in this course is unique and really amazing. Amit’s techniques make PPC marketing so much more efficient and easier.

I have to admit I was so impressed by his info that I instantly started setting up campaigns. Every free minute of my day I am working on my campaigns and right now I have 4 full blown campaigns running and already made some sales. I am extremely exited for my business now, since I feel I really undestand PPC much better. I see things I never saw before and I have no doubt that I will be able to earn a full time income from PPC in the not to distant future. I am already working on my next campaign and plan to give regular updates on my progress on this blog. As Carl would say “It’s a hustle”. For me that just means “Hustle harder!”.

If you work a lot on the computer and the internet password management can be a major factor of frustration. If you don’t have a system to manage your online passwords sooner or later you face either one of 2 problems:

1. You use the same password on all your online accounts, which can be very dangerous in the long run

2. You constantly look for your passwords and waste precious time recovering your different passwords

I had the same problem and was in denial for a long time. Finally I started to write down all my password on paper next to my computer. Now I was able to find my passwords but this was definitely far from safe. After a while I noted my passwords on so many pieces of paper that I had a hard time to go through my stack of papers to find the right password.

This was the moment when I started to type my passwords into notepad and save it on my computer. This worked for some time and I successfully ignored the whole issue once again. However this was still not a long term strategy and especially not very safe. One instant that made me aware of this was when one of our computers was stolen at work. Luckily we did not have any passwords or sensitive information on this computer.

This was the moment when I started to look into a keyword software program I did quite a bit of research until I found a great free keyword manager called KeepPass. This software is easy to use and stores your passwords safely in an encrypted database file on your computer.I have been using this software now for over 3 years and I am very happy with it so far.

Just last week I realized that it is still a hassle for me if I need my passwords when I am not at my own computer. I did some more research and found another great free solution to safe passwords online. The site is called Passpack and it is very easy to set it up. You can actually use your Google (or even Twitter!) ID or multiple other online IDs to login. As added security you enter a security phrase to access your passwords. This is great, since you don’t have to setup another user account.

To sum this up, if you are looking for good free password management programs checkout these two options and depending on your needs you should be covered. I think it’s a good idea to store passwords in two places and a copy online can be a great help in case of disaster (fires or earthquakes here in California). This way you will always have access to your passwords and will never loose them again.

Often you hear people say PPC is not working anymore or Google makes it so hard these days to make money with PPC. As so often this is just a reality that people create for themselves. There is a lot of potential in PPC as long as you know how to use it right.

I started my first affiliate marketing PPC campaign in August for a couple of niche products. I have a lot of knowledge about PPC due to my job where I setup and manage PPC campaigns for our client. However, I was not using my knowledge to build my own business.

I finally decided to give it a try and setup a direct linking affiliate campaign (It helped that I got a 50 AdWords coupon from Google). In the beginning it didn’t look too good and it was quite frustrating to get clicks but no sales, but I stayed with it and kept tweaking my campaigns.

Eventually I made my first sale. This was a major relief for me since it showed me that I could make money with PPC. In August I also went on my honeymoon to Maui for two weeks, where I didn’t even check my emails. I came back and found out I made two sales while on vacation. I was more excited now. I still didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a start.

In September I grew my PPC business and made the most sales so far. While I was also working on other online marketing strategies, such as Squidoo and SEO, PPC still made the most profit for me.

I finally decide to go with PPC as my main affiliate marketing strategy for now. I feel PPC has many great advantages, especially when you get started in a niche and want to test it to see if it is worth the effort. My strategy now is the following:

1. Test niche markets and products with direct linking campaigns

2. If market is profitable expand PPC campaign

3. Build landing pages for the best phrases

4. Setup an autoresponder and squeeze pages for the niche and start building a list

This is my plan so far. Right now I am still in phase one. I consider this market research until I find a converting market/product. As soon as I have a good monthly income from one campaign I will continue with phase two.

Something I read last week gave me even more motivation to concentrate on PPC. Amit Mehta and Anik Singal released a great series of videos about successful PPC marketing for their new PPC Classroom 2.0 launch. Amit was able to grow his part time PPC business in a 2.4 Million Dollar a year income. This shows that PPC is not dead at all.

So if you are thinking about PPC give it a try and see if it is for you. I am convinced that I have finally found something that works for me and I will report about my progress on this blog.

Today was the last day of Brendon Burchard’s Life’s Golden Ticket in Long Beach. In this post I would like to give a short review of my experiences. Life’s Golden Ticket was a 3 day event (Fr-Su). I was only able to attend on Saturday and Sunday, so I won’t be able to report about the first day.

The location for the event was a circus tent at the Long Beach shoreline village. The location itself was already very different than most self-development seminars and the circus tent gave the event a very different atmosphere. I have to say I liked this ideas since it made the whole seminar more fun and entertaining. This approach of mixing entertainment with education is a great idea.

The two days I visited the seminar provided a lot of great information. Brendon talked about overcoming your fears and getting rid of the herd mentality that so many of us have. He also talked in depth about his secrets of getting Fortune 500 companies and large non-profit organizations to sponsor you and work with you on your project. This was some truly amazing information.

One of the great elements of this event was that the circus tent belonged to an actual circus and the members of the circus performed their shows in between the speakers. This was really cool. Hearing these inspirational people and seeing a great show. A truly unique experience.

Brandon invited a lot of great speakers to his seminar. One of them was Bill Harris from the movie “The Secret” who talked about the importance of dreams and monitoring your thoughts. Another speaker was John Gray the famous autor of the bestseller “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus“. His presentation was very educational and at the same time hilarious funny. He explained in great detail why men and women act in different ways and what the sexes need to do to reduce their stress and live a more full filling life together. His information was especially great for women since they learned how to loose weight the easy way without going on a diet.

Also present at the event was Marianne Williamson who was also featured in “The Secret” movie. She gave some great information about the importance of spirit and meditation and opened my eyes in these aspects.

Next to the great shows and information at this seminar I also met some truly great people, such as Ken McArthur the author of the book “Impact: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions, and Make a Difference in a Noisy World” and the amazing Jeff Wellman from layoffyourboss.com.

Ken has started a truly inspirational project to raise awareness for the problem of teen suicide and help to save thousands of lives! His Impact Action Team did a great job speaking up for this cause at the Life’s Golden Ticket event.

All in all this was a truly great event. An amazing combination of eductaion, entertainment, networking and raising awareness for a good cause. Bendon is a great inspirational teacher and I am sure I will be back at one of his future events.

Today I want to talk about a cool new free software that I have been testing for the last 2 weeks . It is called Traffic Travis and it is very useful for keyword and competitive research.

One thing I really love about this software and that stands out from all the other free keyword tools is the option to find competitors PPC ads. Since I do quite a bit of PPC this helps me a lot to analyze the competition and fine tune my ads.

Another great functionality is the backlink analysis, so you can see who links to your website or the competitors website. You can even see the anchor tags that other websites use to link to you or your competitor.

Additional to all the keyword, traffic and competitor analysis Traffic Travis also includes a ranking checker, so you can see where you rank in the search engines for your keywords. Altogether this free software has a nice set of functions that can be very helpful. I have to admit the logo is a little bit cheesy, but this might be a hint for all the online marketers and seo experts to loosen up a little and take things with humor.

If you are marketing online keyword research is a vital part of your business, so any tool that helps to make this easier is great. Check out Traffic Travis for yourself.

I just got an email last week with a link to Eben Pagan’s new project. Eben Pagan is a very successful and respected online marketer and his new program, is about time management.

I was always aware that time management is a crucial factor for success. However I also always struggled with this aspect of my business and life. If you don’t know how to manage your time it can be a very stressful and frustrating experience. Especially with the many distractions that the Internet has for us it can be hard to focus on the things that are really important.

Eben’s time management strategies are on point and I learned quite a bit from this video. To view it click here.

The main points I took away from this video are:

1. Be persistent in what you do

2. Take at least 2 hours to focus exclusively on one thing

3. Remove distractions (email, phone, interruptions etc.)

4. Develop routines

5. Take time to recharge

I am already working on implementing some of these strategies. I am checking my email less often and allow myself to focus only on one thing. I also started with a morning routine. This is difficlut for me since i am not a morning person, but I will go step by step. For now I started working out for 30 minutes every morning.

Another thing that Eben didn’t mention is to make a list every day with all the things you want to do and work on it by importance. Another thing is to track your time, to see what you spend the most time on. I wrote about a great tool for this in another post.

I am very interested in time management and increasing my productivity and I am looking forward to the next video from Eben to see what other strategies he recommends.

On Friday was the grand opening of Sprouts, a new health food store, here in Seal Beach. Of course I had to check it out, to see what they would offer and if it would be comparable to other stores. I was especially hoping that they would carry raw milk, which is hard to find here in Orange County.

The first impression of the store was good. A lot of space, very clean, and a lot of fresh produce. The look of the store is comparable to a whole foods store. However the prices are a little bit lower. The best thing however was that the carry raw milk. I was very happy to find this out since I was driving all the way down to Huntington Beach to Mothers Market to get my milk. This will save me a lot of gas and make shopping for milk way more convenient.

The store also has a great selection of fresh fruit and vegetables. I was also looking at the meat and fish and both looked very good and fresh. They have organic and all natural chicken and meat. The only thing I don’t like is the big candy selection in the middle of the store. I guess they do this because candy sells good to kids and is a money maker. However I would prefer less candy in a health food store. But then again I don’t have to buy it.

My wife and I had a great time shopping at Spouts and it looks like this will be our new regular store. We will probably no longer drive to Whole Foods or Mothers Market, since we get all the products we need here. We are still going to Trader Joe’s and the farmers market though. Produce and prices there are just too good.