How Can I Help You?

December 20th, 2012 | 40 comments

answer internet marketing questionsAs Zig Ziglar once said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” So today I’d like to try something a little unorthodox and different.

You have questions and I have answers (maybe not to every question, but you get the point.) So lets hear them. I promise to answer every single question that is asked related to Internet Marketing… making money online in general up to 100 questions on this post.

You can ask either via the Facebook comment section below the post, or (below the facebook comments) through the normal blog commenting area below.

In case you haven’t been following the Ethical IM blog and newsletter for a while, here are a few of my stronger areas of expertise:

- Product creation and marketing (primarily ebooks, reports and software)
- Email Marketing
- SEO (on-page and off-page)
- General affiliate marketing
- Membership sites
- General webmastering (HTML, FTP, very basic PHP etc.)

A few things I am admittedly NOT strong in:

- PPC
- Aggressive sales funnels/systems

I’ll answer any IM question on your mind, right now. One per person and up to 100 questions. If I don’t know the answer for sure, I’ll tell you. I’m not a “know-it-all” type of person. So rest assured, if I know I’ll tell you. If I have no idea, I’ll tell you that. If I know a little, I’ll tell you the little I know.

So lets have it. What can I help you with? :)

Related Posts




40 comments

  1. Nicola Keegan (1 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 5:56 pm 

    Hi Josh!
    Great idea. Thanks for offering to share your experience!
    In your opinion – if I could focus on only one of these two things as “the next step” – which one would you say is the most important to work at: Focusing all my attention on increasing traffic, or start building an email list (even if traffic is not so high)?
    Thanks :-)

    (You might want to edit the above post to “So lets hear them” not “So lets here them” ;-) )

  2. Joy
    20th December, 2012 at 6:00 pm 

    Hi Josh,
    I have a very hard time picking a low competition but profitable niche…any tips on how to pick one would be appreciated :)

  3. Christopher
    20th December, 2012 at 6:15 pm 

    Thank you Josh,

    Your emails are one of the few (from hundreds of IM emails each week) that I look forward to reading.

    Your promise is generous.

    What would you build/do with a network of 150+ domain names/websites all with the same branding of a single topic word and then ‘forum” (e.g. baseball forum, business forum, cooking forum, parenting forum, finance forum, jewelry forum, jobs forum, pet forum, success forum, WordPress forum, etc)?

    To help people find answers to common topical problems, build a community, build a publishing world, monetize them (so they at least pay for themselves! or perhaps turn into a hubristic EMPIRE! :)

    I’m open to all white hat, membership, advertising, and useful IM possibilities–the key here is I want to follow what a wise person once said, “The man who will try to give more for a dollar than he gets its bound to succeed.”

    I have several of the sites in process and before I lay too many bricks I want to be sure I’m heading in a worthwhile direction.

    Warmest,

    Chris

  4. Mark V (2 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 6:15 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    Just wanted to let you know that yours are one of the few emails that I ALWAYS open. I am building a list and have purchased solo ads to go to the free offer on the squeeze page. Is that the most cost-effective way to build my list? Other than Adwords what is the best PPC site to use(eventhough I’m hesitant)?

    Thanks and Merry Christmas!!!

  5. jonathan (1 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 6:18 pm 

    Hi Joshua, I’ve been interested in SILOing for Onpage SEO for a while. I’m wondering your thoughts on using a SILO structure for onpage SEO and if you do it for your sites? Some people say doing this properly can reduce (not eliminate) the need for so much backlinking when ranking a site. Your thoughts? Thanks.

  6. Charles (1 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 6:36 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    I am similar to a lot of people commenting here and that is focus. Recently I got into list building and email marketing, so my question is how do you get more open rates and what is considered a decent size email list?
    Thnka in advance.

  7. Joe
    20th December, 2012 at 6:42 pm 

    Happy Holidays to you Josh. Thanks for your offer. Unfortunately I have more than one question and don’t even know where to start.

    I’m just tired of swirling around the inside of this vortex (rabbit hole).

  8. Amit
    20th December, 2012 at 6:46 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    Thanks for offering this service. I have a website doing good in India(with lots of visitors) but having hard time making money on it. Website is offering service where people can post free ads(like Craiglist but it’s not that huge). Currently, I am using Adsense on it but the CPC is really low there($0.05 to $0.10). Any ideas on different website monetization methods I can try on this site?

  9. Robin (1 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 6:53 pm 

    Thanks Josh. Here is my question. Given that article directories get much less traffic now than they did six months ago, where would you concentrate your efforts? Would you go for web sharing sites like Scribd, free sites like Squidoo, curation sites like Scoop.it or Tumblr and many others? Basically where would you post all your content?

    Thanks and have a great Christmas!

    Robin

  10. Sandra
    20th December, 2012 at 7:12 pm 

    Hi Josh and thank you for your generosity…..In your honest opinion, can someone really make a full-time living monetizing Google Adsense? I know that it’s not advisable to make Adsense your only source of income. However, I wonder if it can actually be done and if people actually do it. Thank you.

  11. Kris
    20th December, 2012 at 7:40 pm 

    Josh, how would you revive a site that has lost most of it’s google traffic & rankings over the last 3 years (its a 10 yr old site) despite my efforts to keep it active?

    Thanks & happy holidays!

  12. Josh Spaulding
    20th December, 2012 at 9:35 pm 

    @ Nicola – Glad to help. Without any doubt whatsoever, building your list!! Think about it. You can work and work and work and work to increase your 5 or 10 or 20 or whatever daily visitors, or you can start getting 5 or 10 or 20 new opt-ins a day, who you can then get to COME BACK over and over and over… and also buy things from you. And oooops, thanks for catching that! :)

    @ Joy – The main problem I see people facing with that is they spend WAY too much time and effort trying to perfect it. The fact is some keywords are winners and some are losers. I user Keyword Canine to tell me whether any keyword is a winner or a loser. The competition analyzer. Of course I’m biased, because I’m part owner of that, but me and Jon wrote the algorithm so it just automated everything I used to do manually in finding a good niche. I can’t go through it all here… it would take a small report to do it, but the average pagerank of the top ten competitors is a big part of it. It’s not 100%, but keyword research isn’t 100%. It does give you a good idea of the strength of the niches competition. Then you just make sure it has at least SOME monthly searches and, of course, that it is in a niche where people spend money and isn’t extremely saturated (what I call the common sense factor.)

    @ Christopher – Thanks for the compliment and support. I really do appreciate that very much! hmmmmmm man, that’s a tough one. I have one major problem with it. Forums are VERRRRRY difficult to keep clean (spam free.) I mean VERY difficult. One forum, ok. Not extremely difficult. You can put some good measures in place to keep it clean, but I would venture to say that 150 live forums will be almost completely impossible to keep clean… I’m going to be completely honest with you. I’m not saying your idea WON’T work, but it would take some creativity … some kind of a really good idea… If you really want to do it go for it… never let someone dissuade you if you believe in something. You can make it work. But I honestly don’t have a simple answer. Spam will be a problem. So you’ll need to first figure out how you’re going to deal with that. If you can figure that one out, then I’d say you may have something there. I LOVE discussion forums. They are excellent sources of instant Q&A’s. If you can figure out the spam thing then get them all setup… and just do the grunt work to get them going and slowly they will pick up steam. The good thing is you have VOLUME, so some of them are SURE to take off.

    @ Mark V – Thanks for the compliment… greatly appreciated :) I’m not a PPC expert. I see the value in PPC, but I’m honestly just not a good PPC guy. So I’ve never done much with it, although I do outsource it for some, specific types of products. Never for affiliate offers or list building though. That’s NOT to say it’s not effective…just not my area. If we’re talking the most cost effective I guess it COULD be if you had a REALLY good campaign setup targeting the perfect niche with a good squeeze page. But my HUNCH tells me overall it’s not the most cost effective. I’ve had good luck building lists just with SEO… getting squeeze pages ranked (make sure you have lots of content on the site (not on the squeeze page, but on the site) so it has a chance.. Participating in forums etc. are also good ways. And if you sell products, be SURE to get all customers (or most) on a list… those are the BEST leads.

    @ Jonathan – I think people get way too obsessed with the whole silo structure thing. See the video “Internal Link Structure for SEO” I recently did at http://www.jlaffiliates.com/training.html

    @ Joe – http://www.CoachingWithJosh.com may be your best option then.

    @ Amit – I’m afraid your problem is in your niche. There is no money in any niche where the audience is looking for “Free” anything. People looking for “free” want “free” things :) You could possibly use it to build a list… that is what I would possibly look into depending on the site. The leads won’t be extremely valuable either, but that may be your best option.

    @ Robin – That depends on the goal. Are you talking about traffic generation or link building? For traffic generation I’m leaning more and more towards social media including video sites like YouTube… but I still like that free SEO traffic. For link building I don’t concentrate nearly as much on content sites, but I still do it. For link building now more than ever I just get slow, gradual, diverse links from as many sources as possible.

    @ Sandra – I don’t think, I know. There are many people who not only make a living with Adsense, some make 7 figures a year with Adsense. It’s not advisable to RELY on it though, because from one second to another, for any number of weird, little reasons, they can and DO suspend adsnese accounts and you can’t just replace it with a friends account, they deny ads to run on the URL(s) you had it on. So yes, definitely possible and good as ONE source of income. BUT, if you’re not making much online or not, if you have something good that’s making you money… it would be dumb to ignore it…

    @ Kris – I wish I knew that answer :) I’ve been trying to get EverythingAboutGermany.com back for a few months now. I know it will come back though. It’s just a matter of cleaning it up… it all depends on the site in question, but just give it a once, or twice or thrice over. Make sure the pages aren’t full of repeated keywords… not selling links without nofollow… if you have a bunch of backlinks with a very high percentage of the same anchor text, start building links slowly with obscure anchor text… things like this…

  13. John Delgado
    20th December, 2012 at 9:44 pm 

    Hi Josh, John here.
    I have just lately started looking into building a sales funnel to start growing a list and i am greatly interested in Email marketing. Could you tell me your recommendation as how to receive the best training on sales funnels and list building. Thank you for your time.

    John

  14. Donal (1 comments.)
    20th December, 2012 at 11:06 pm 

    Hi Josh, Thanks for your generous offer to help.

    My question is:

    Do Fiverr gigs for social network marketing have much value?

  15. Clint
    20th December, 2012 at 11:14 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    Always a pleasure to get an email from you – and what a perk.

    I seem to have stretched myself thin and need clarity on which direction to go. I’ve built and sold some websites, I’ve got some Adsense sites out there (that seem to work now and than), I’ve been doing the YouTube thing and have started making some $$ there. I have probably bought a tad too many products lately.

    I guess I am not sure what best to focus on. Do you have a suggestions for ‘clarity’? I have been trying to do IM for a number of years now – along with 2 other jobs – and seem to be spinning my wheels on where to go to make this work full time.

    Any advice would be warmly appreciated.

    Clint

  16. Annette
    21st December, 2012 at 2:17 am 

    Josh
    I am interested in doing CPA marketing. What is the first thing that I would do to start? Build a worpress site, blog or what? What is my first start. I am interested in forex market offers. What’s my 1st step to make money with this? Do I need to do keyword research?

  17. Ray (5 comments.)
    21st December, 2012 at 3:33 pm 

    Hi Josh,
    Just a quick question….I have been thinking about moving my blog to wordpress but I am worried about the traffic interruption that will occur due to switching domain names. Is there a way to minimize this issue?
    Thanks

  18. Philippe (1 comments.)
    21st December, 2012 at 5:55 pm 

    *** NICHE SITES ***

    Hey Josh, Good idea to answer 100 questions, it will not only help the ones asking the questions but also everybody else reading this post.

    My question is simple and to the point.

    Can you give me 5-10 Niche that are not IM related where you KNOW from experience that money can be made if things are done right of course.

    You know how we often hear that there is money to be made in the weight loss industry, beauty, health etc.

    But what I am asking is 5-10 actual niches that you have experienced where there is a good potential to make money if you do things right.

    example fo niches: Get your ex back or panic attack, hair loss etc.

    thanks bud.

    Philippe

  19. Josh Spaulding
    21st December, 2012 at 6:19 pm 

    @ John – As for list building IN a sales funnel, I either use my autoresponse (GetResponse) API to automatically add all clients to the list (after they confirm) or I simple display an opt-in form that is optional, where they can opt in to get free updates. But other than that I’m not much of an expert on sales funnels. I personally do not like aggressive sales funnels. Regarding list building… oh man. That’s a book in itself :) I hate to defer you like this, but you might just want to look through the blog here… I’ve wrote many times on email marketing.

    @ Donal – That’s not something I’ve done, but no. I can’t imagine them having much value. They will grow your following I guess, which is a good thing. Social proof (although it’s really not proof, is it?) but as for converting those people who follow your social profiles converting into money in your pocket, I can’t see any value there.

    @ Clint – There are many different paths to success with Internet Marketing. So without choosing a path for you, which is not the answer, I can’t give you specific advice there. What I can tell you is to think less about making money and more about solving problems, answering questions and truly helping your audience. If you help something, they won’t forget it.

    @ Ray – Yep. 301 redirect. You can redirect the entire site. Google “change domains with 301″ or something similar. The thing to concentrate on is ensuring that EACH page is redirected to EACH new page. The easiest way to do that is to setup the URL structure of the new site to be exactly the same as the URL structure of the old structure. Then you just redirect the root.

    @ Philippe – Every niche on earth has profit potential. I appreciate your question, but the real answer is every niche. It’s not about the niche you choose, it’s about how you go after it. I could tell you the niches I’ve profited from, but it will not help you without knowing exactly how I did it. And that goes for every niche that every person has had success with. Don’t look for the perfect niche, look for a technique that works.

  20. TOM VERGEYLE
    21st December, 2012 at 11:06 pm 

    Josh, I have been trying to get going for a long time in IM, I have paid for several different step by step programs and every time I start to set up a web site, changes happen that stop me. Things like all the changes at Google, which stop me in my tracks and I do not know which direction to take. I will get emails from different IM experts saying do this, don’t do this. I am 60 yrs old and in good health I wanted to do this as a way to pay down debt and supplement retirement. I do not have a lot of extra money to spend. Any advise on the best direction to take would be helpful. Thanks in advance!

  21. Bart Murray (1 comments.)
    22nd December, 2012 at 3:22 pm 

    Josh,
    I have been busy doing local seo and have recently wanted to get back to my 1st love, online marketing. Can you suggest a specific strategy that will work now? I really started 5 yrs ago wanting a residual income online, struggled to find a consistent method and got lured into local seo money as I thought it might b e easier, it is, but I am tired of running a business and want to get into online marketing. I’ve tried blogging, youtube marketing, and even ebay and adsense, but over time they stopped working whenever google changed the rules. Can you help direct me back into a correct path? thanks!!!

  22. Josh Spaulding
    23rd December, 2012 at 5:30 pm 

    @ Tom – There are many paths to success. The best path is the one that adapts your non-IM skills and/or knowledge, but that’s not the only path. Pick one and this time don’t let anything or anyone stop you in your tracks. Failure is almost always a prerequisite for success.

    @ Bart – Everyone in this world seeks advice on something and they don’t care where the info comes from, they just want answers. There are top 10 results for any phrase you can come up with to type into google. There are products being sold in every category of ebay. There are videos ranking in the top 10 of youtube for any phrase you can come up with to type into youtube. Adsense is monetization, not a method, so I don’t have one for that ;) See what I’m saying here? There are no magic bullets, but there are opportunities everywhere! Stop finding brick walls and start finding secret doors.

  23. Chris Deals (2 comments.)
    24th December, 2012 at 2:41 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    A while back you mention you were starting a company that sells online services to offline business. If I recall specifically it was offering text message marketing services to business.

    My question is: Can you give me an outline on how you went about marketing your offline business, what services you offered, and pricing structure.

    I see there is a lot of potential in text marketing for offline business.

    Thanks for your help, and happy holidays to you and your family.

    Chris

  24. Wendy
    25th December, 2012 at 8:03 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    I have a fitness blog I have just started and have been working with market samurai to find my keywords.

    With blogs having multiple pages and also tons of articles/posts, how many keyword phrases should I be working with? Should each page have its own primary and secondary keywords? Or should you only have a handful and then build your site around just a few?

    I am finding many good ones that i can easily rank for.

    Thanks alot.

  25. Bernard Kaplan
    26th December, 2012 at 9:16 pm 

    After I originally left a comment I seem to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on whenever a comment is added I recieve 4 emails with the same comment. There has to be a way you can remove me from that service? Thanks a lot!

  26. Josh Spaulding
    26th December, 2012 at 9:24 pm 

    @ Chris – I did, but I’ve since gotten out of that company to focus on development and learning code. The SMS service never did really take off, but we did sell quite a few websites and some other services. We had our best luck with direct mail (mailing out professionally designed flyers offering cheap web design) and then word of mouth. Wish I could be more helpful with the text message marketing. We got a short code and had $1,000/m. overhead before we had enough capital in that business to cover it, which is what really hurt us. None of us wanted to cover the costs out of pocket until the model proved itself and it never did. Text Message Marketing has alot of potential, we just didn’t choose the right model. Thanks and Merry Christmas to you too.

  27. Josh Spaulding
    26th December, 2012 at 9:26 pm 

    @ Wendy – Ideally every page targets it’s own keyword. But the more pages you have the harder it’s going to be to promote them all. Your homepage should target the most competitive phrase that has the most traffic potential, then each internal page should ideally be more long-tail. That way even if you can’t promote each page, it still has a chance to rank.

  28. Pieter
    30th December, 2012 at 1:53 pm 

    Hi Josh been thinking and I was wondering if you had to start all over again with a budged of $100 per month were it is that you would start to reach success.

  29. Josh Spaulding
    31st December, 2012 at 5:19 pm 

    @ Pieter – I would invest in a cheap web host (about $10/m.) an autoresponder account (Aweber or Getresponse about $15/m. at first) and use the rest to register a few domains that will be used to build my list (in one way or another) and also to outsource content and/or development depending on what I do with the sites.

  30. Josh Spaulding
    31st December, 2012 at 5:21 pm 

    @ Bernard – In the email you receive there should be a link at the bottom where you can remove yourself from the updates. Sorry for the trouble.

  31. Jo (2 comments.)
    1st January, 2013 at 6:09 am 

    Hey Josh, I hope I’m not too late for this! I know that the internet is changing all the time and google is changing too! Is there anything I need to know about keyword research and optimising my websites that will be relevant for 2013? What is most important right now in terms of SEO and optimising SEO on my websites? Thanks!

  32. Josh Spaulding
    1st January, 2013 at 12:00 pm 

    @ Jo – It’s always changing, but the most important thing right now is to diversity. Don’t rely on just one or two backlinks sources and also throw in several different variations of anchor text in those links, including a few obscure keywords.

  33. Christopher
    1st January, 2013 at 12:14 pm 

    Thank you for this Josh,

    In your heart of hearts, in your gut–do you think it is possible for “micro-niche” “authority” content based sites (20 to 100 pages of 400 to 1100 word, topical articles), with AdSense, Clickbank and Amazon, to generate income online now and in the future?

    OR Is it only possible to make money by selling products to people who are hoping to make money online?

    OR is there something else?

    It seems the market and the internet is saturated with pure junk now. Amazon is chock full of fiverr/plr rehashed ebook pulp–so you cannot even chose a book to learn from–or even consider writing something original which could stand out in the ebook trash heap and get a sale or two (at $ 1.97 each). Everybody and their outsourced source is selling a theme and a plugin with OTOs, and 372 hours of free video training which nobody has time to watch.

    It now feels like to make $ 93 a month I’ll need to work nine hours a day, every day, writing original posts, reviews and email campaigns (which will all be stolen and re-purposed by many people) on a single topic focused, long-long-tail, micro-niche “membership” site with a miraculous email opt-in list which only 1% of readers will read and click on…. just to get a few dollars.

  34. Jo (2 comments.)
    1st January, 2013 at 8:49 pm 

    thanks so much Josh – very much appreciated! :)

  35. Josh Spaulding
    4th January, 2013 at 8:27 pm 

    @ Christopher – I’ve never heard of a “micro-niche authority” site. It’s either micro niche or authority. But yes, sites (no matter what you call them) that have 20-100 pages of good content that are monetized have, do and will generate income online.

    It’s not about the number of pages or the monetization in place, it’s about exposure and quality and the niche and many other things. If you’re providing value, you can make money.

    You’re seeing all of the negatives and none of the positives. There has always been and always will be junk out there. The more junk there is the easier it is to stand out, right?

    Stop worrying about the junk and look at it as an opportunity.

    Concentrate on building some kind of a “following” in any niche you target. Ideally that “following” is in the form of an email list (by the way, the average link click through rate for an email to an average email list is about 5%-10% and the open rate is MUCH higher than that) but it could be in the form of establishing a popular blog or a facebook page or something else.

    You need to concentrate on an audience. Once you have an audience that trusts you THEN you can concentrate on getting good content tot hem.

    If you’re concentrating on good content without having an audience to send that good content, then your content will continue to swim around with garbage content without it ever being noticed.

  36. Fabio (1 comments.)
    10th January, 2013 at 3:15 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    Thanks for your offer.

    My question is:

    I came up with an idea of a site where people would submit certain type of photos, all of them about the same topic. So, most if not all the content on the site will be pictures. Which would the best way to get traffic to the site? If there’s no content there are no keywords… what would you do? Thanks again

  37. way priaz (1 comments.)
    24th January, 2013 at 3:26 am 

    you can help me about tips indexs google in my blog?

    i am from indonesian sory bad english

  38. Josh Spaulding
    24th January, 2013 at 12:38 pm 

    @ Fabio – I own a site that my wife created many years ago and it gets a great deal of traffic from google images and bing images. It actualyl gets quite a bit of Adsense clicks too. I would say that’s your best bet. Be sure to add related keywords to the alt tags of each image.

    @ Way – Getting pages indexed in google isn’t really an issue anymore. They find and index most pages very quickly anymore. If your pages aren’t getting indexed I would say you may have a penalty or something very wrong with the site/page that goes against Google’s guidelines.

  39. V K Rajagopalan
    7th May, 2013 at 12:48 am 

    Hi Josh,

    I don’t know if I can put in this query in this post but I will still go ahead and do it.

    This refers to your ebook “Rapid Niche Profits”.

    I downloaded it on Saturday, I have read it completely and I am ready to start implementing it.

    To be honest, this is the first time I have found an ebook which is short but crystal clear and exactly discusses the methodology step-by-step. Thanks for bringing out this gem of a book.

    In fact, I have already researched (using KC) and found 5 long tails which are good candidates for promotions as RNP sites (Out of which, unfortunately, 4 are physical products using the Product Sniffer functionality in KC. But, they have good potential to earn big commissions due to the price of some of them).

    Before I start with my promotions, I have a few doubts with regard to what is mentioned in your ebook.

    a)
    Page 9 – Advertiser Competition Percentage (ACP):

    You have mentioned that ACP should be at least 65% where you wish to promote adsense.

    But, when I want to promote affiliate offers, you have not mentioned what should be the percentage to aim for? Should it be as low as possible or as high as possible?

    b)
    If all other parameters are favorable for a keyword phrase to be promoted but only the title is saturated, can I still go ahead and create the site and promote it. Or, I should not attempt it due to title saturation?

    c)
    Page 10 – Analyze Competition

    Using KC, in my niche analysis, I have considered keyword phrases that have upto a “Moderate” difficulty level. I am not considering “Hard” and “Fierce”.

    Do you think, I should concentrate on KW phrases with difficulty level “Very Easy” and “Easy” only for the RNP sites and not even consider “Moderate” level of difficulty?

    I would really appreciate it if you would kindly clarify on the above points. This will really help me to start full steam on my promotions using your RNP system.

    Thanks
    Raj

  40. Josh Spaulding
    7th May, 2013 at 5:45 pm 

    Hi Raj,

    a) If the ACP is low that means there aren’t many people buying ads in the niche and if there is money to be made in that niche, chances are, people will be buying ads in the niche.

    b) Yes, I wouldn’t let that hold me back.

    c) Moderate is typically obtainable.

Leave a reply

This video shows how you can get a nearly unlimited supply of unique content in 80+ niches with the click of your mouse!
Watch Video

© 2013 Dot Com Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Syndication is not authorized without consent.

Disclosure Statement | Privacy & Disclaimer