Support Your Downline
I have been reading several forum posts lately from people who are asking "How do I find out who my upline is?" Most of these are people that are new to online business and need help with updating their website, figuring out how to market or just aking a question about a comp plan.
So I ask myself, why would anyone ignore their downline? These are the folks that are going to help generate that residual income we are striving for. Without them we might as well pack up and go home.
Personally, I try to contact my downline once a week to see how things are going. I'm not trying to sell them anything, I just want to find out if they need any help. And I am fortunate that my
PIPS sponsor has done the same for me. I have seen greater success after getting some guidance than just experimenting on my own.
Don't get me wrong, experimenting is a great way to learn. I have been learning about HTML, building lead capture pages, managing my website, etc. But why not take advantage of the experience your upline has.
And if you are one of those who needs help and can't figure out who your upline is you are welcome to join
my team.
Restarted AdWords Campaign
I made some adjustments to my Traffic Swarm AdWords campaign and restarted it on April 21st . It has now been a week and I wanted to post some results.
First, I peeled out the keywords that were getting the best results and put them in a new campaign with a couple of text ads. I also did a keyword search and found some additional keywords that I plugged in.
The biggest change is that I reduced my maximum CPC (cost per click) to 20 cents. This also reduced the recommended daily budget. It appears that I am getting fewer daily impressions, from 4800 - 5000 in the prior campaign down to 1000 - 1500 in the current campaign.
However, the results are similar. I have a CTR (click through rate) of 1.5% and a CPC of 13.9 cents. Needless to say, this is easier on the advertising budget. In addition, I have signed up 10 new affiliates, four of which have activated so far. This translates into a 16.9% signup rate and a 6.8% activation rate.
I have spend a total of $8.22 for this effort so far. That comes to $2.05 per activated affiliate. With that activation comes 200 credits in my account plus 1 credit for every site they view. So at a minimum, an activated affiliate provides me 250 credits. Based on Traffic Swarm's current price for credits, 250 credits would cost me $5.00. So just on the initial activation I am $2.95 per activated member ahead of what purchasing the credits would cost. Or for this campaign so far, 4 new activated affiliates @ 250 credits each is 1,000 credits which would have cost me $20.00 to buy. I am $11.78 ahead!
And this does not include the continuing credits I receive each time an affiliate views a page. So far I have received 3,470 credits for this from my entire downline.
So once again, if you are running a home based business, or any buisness for that matter, I have to recommend Perry Marshall's book,
The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords. You can sign up for a free 5 day e-course
here.
Building a Downline
One of the most important, if not the most important, tasks in creating an income online is to build your downline. Besides being a source of sales your downline recruits others into the opportunity and they become a second level source of sales and they recruit others, and so on. The focus therefore should be on getting the first signups.
That is one reason I tried Jimbo's offer.
I was recently shown another downline building tool by Craig Frieson, one of the members of the PIPS and the Warrior Forum. It is the Home Income Team or
H-I-T. This program includes several business opportunities, such as
Empowerism, investment opportunities and paid to surf programs.
It also includes several manual surf and autosurf programs, list building tools, marketing/advertising tools and more. Along with these are step by step instruction on how to use these tools to generate traffic and a downline.
There is no cost to join
H-I-T. Whether you already belong to one of the programs promoted by HIT members, are looking for one to join, or hae your own opportunity you want to promote this is a great place start.
Stone Evans Comes Through
I have written about the guaranteed signups offer made by James "Jimbo" Patterson. His company, New Leaf Associates, is apparently a scam and unfortunately I was caught up. I paid $300 for 10 signups. If he had come through it would have paid for itself the first month and would be profit from there after. Live and learn.
Now I have read an offer by Stone Evans, the creator of the
Plug In Profit Site, to any of the Plug In Profit Site owners who has not received a refund from Jimbo. Stone is offering 1000 credits in
Traffic Swarm and a $25 RSPV lead package from
Empowerism which will eventually pay out $2000! No catch, no money. He is trying to help us recoup some of our loss. And with the
Empowerism RSVP package it will still be a profit.
So I am glad to report that there are still some folks online that have integrity. If you are looking for a home business I can still highly recommend the
Plug In Profit Site.
And Stone, thanks.
AdWords Campaign Update
My Google AdWords campaign has run for about a week. When I started I had 3 affiliates in my
Traffic Swarm downline, 2 of which had not activated (earned 50 credits) their account. I now have 52 members of my downline, 39 who have not activated. Or in other words, 13 who have.
This means my downline increased by 49 members, 12 who have activated their accounts. I feel that these are fairly good results. The click through rate (CTR) was 1.5%, not astounding but not bad. The average cost per click was $0.68. The sign up rate was 17.5%, meaning that 17.5% of all people that clicked on my ad signed up for
Traffic Swarm. The activation rate was 4.3%. This means that 4.3% of all the people that clicked on my ad signed up for
Traffic Swarm and activated their account. All in all I would say this was a fairly successful campaign.
So what else did I learn.
That you need to mix your cost per click (CPC) and daily budget. If the CPC is $1.00 but the daily budget is $10.00 you are not going to get your ad shown very often. If your CPC is $0.50 and your daily budget is $40.00 you will get plenty of exposure.
It also appears that more people have campaigns running on the weekend which results I needing a higher CPC in order to get placement on the first search results page.
And as Perry says in his book,
Definitive Guide To Google Adwords, a slight change can make a major difference in your results. For example, do you get better results if your ad says "Website" or "Web Site"?
So if you are looking to improve your site performance, sign up more people or sell more product, I would recommend that you get
Perry's book and try your own AdWords campaign.
Work At Home: Owner Beware
The old addage is "caveat emptor" which loosley translated from Latin is "Buyer Beware". This also applies to running a home business.
I wrote previously about co-ops and questioned wether they worked. I stated that I had ordered 10 "guaranteed" signups from another affiliate of the
Plug In Profit Site. This was offered by James Patterson, or "Jimbo" as he calls himself. I made my order for 10 signups at a cost of $300. As I said before, I had read positive posts about his follow through and felt it was worth a try. The
Plug In Profit Site is a great turnkey business but like others can have its reputation tarnished by unscrupulous people.
My order was placed on Februay 2, 2005 and as of today I have not recieved any signups. In fact, reading the posts on the Warrior forum, no one has received any signups. Many people have requested refunds and some have even received them. But I have not seen mine yet. In fact, one member of the Internet Warriors is collecting names of people who have been burned by Jimbo to determine if some sort of legal action can be taken.
And today I learned that the company Jimbo used for pament processing, New Leaf Associates, apparently has a history of taken money in advance and then fading away. Check out
this blog.
So for a second time (in my recent online experience) it appears that co-ops are questionable. There may be some that actually deliver, but this one didn't. Put James "Jimbo" Patterson on your do not do business with list. There have been other offers for co-ops, and not all of them offer "guaranteed" signups. Some are true advertising co-ops where everyone shares the costs and the leads. But very little is "guaranteed" in life and signups are just another example.
Using Google AdWords
I purchased Perry Marshal's ebook on
Google . This is very powerful stuff!
I have started experimenting with the concepts that Perry teaches. Create an ad, run split testing, select the one that gets the best result, revise the ad, improve the keywords, etc. The results have been limited so far but I am starting to see an increase in signups in the program I am promoting.
This takes some time and you have to watch your campaign because things can happen quickly. Including the bill you rack up with Google. But if you pay attention to the results and take action based on your split tests, you can achieve great results.
If you are curious you can sign up for Perry's free 5 day e-course
here
NoBSZone is All BS
Mike Glaspie came out late last year with his latest offering, something he calls NoBSZone. You remember Mike, the creator of BannersGoMLM. NoBSZone is supposedly a membership site where the members will be notified about the latest and greatest online business opportunities. He bills this as the "Ultra Mega Commission Club". One of my upline in another program promoted this to his list and I signed up as a free member.
In order to become an upgraded member of NoBSZone there is a monthy fee of $11.95. And since the only options for paying are credit card and Storm Pay most people appear to have used a CC. Here is where the problems start.
Mike enlisted an offshore credit card processor to handle the payments. A large number of people have reported unauthorized charges on their CC statements. These charges are to a porn site! Once the charges are discovered the victims have a very difficult time getting refunds. And the customer service is nearly non-existent from BSZone.
Fortunately for me, I did not upgrade and did not give my CC info to this crook. And I would suggest that you stay away from this one.
Mike has not been heard from for a few months. It may be that he is laying low hoping that this will blow over. But beware if he ever returns to make another offering. I know that I will never be a part of anything he is associated with in the future. And if any of you have a testimonial from Mike on your web site you had better remove it because it will taint you as a scam artist too.
If you want to read other posts regarding this scam
read this.
