NickLarson.com | Success online through internet marketing and web development!

My experience so far with NeverBlueAds

Got recommended to NeverBlueAds the other day from a friend and just wanted to share a little bit about my experience with them so far.

From the get-go everything seemed very prompt and well organized. It wasn’t but a couple hours after I first applied that I received a phone call from my already assigned Affiliate manager telling me -to make a long story short- that I got accepted. I was pretty excited about this and kind of caught off guar (which isn’t a bad thing), because I didn’t think I would be getting a call later in the day after business hours. I just like overall how fast of a response I received.

After first logging into the system I was very impressed. It has a very intuitive feel, and everything just seems to make sense. Which is contrary to Commission Junction, which I still do not fully understand to this day.

The whole system is similar to Azoogle Ads, but everything is organized just a little bit more, as well as the overall layout/design/colors are more pleasing to the eye.

I also like the types of offers here a lot better than previous companies I have used. There are plenty of PPL offers which is just the kind of stuff I am looking for!

Well that’s about it for now, just wanted to throw in a little update because of how impressed I am so far! I just thought I would share it with you.

-Nick

Part 1: Using Google Adwords to make some cash.

Like I said the other day, I was going to go into a little more in detail what exactly it is I do to make money. Promoting affiliate products through search engines like Google and Yahoo are one of the more popular ways to make some cash online. Most of the big “gurus” online like Shoemoney and Zac Johnson both use this strategy to promote offers such as ring tones and other things while gaining a commission when somebody makes a purchase.

This is one of the main ways I make money online aside from freelance web design/programming, and a few other things. One of the reasons I really like this form of marketing and making money online is because once you have a solid campaign set up, you can leave for a week and still make money doing nothing! Autopilot income! It’s also a great way to spread your business around so you are not concentrating on just one idea. That way if ever something goes wrong with one campaign, you still have other campaigns making you money to back you up.

Note: one thing I should mention before we get too far into this article is that I am assuming you already know what Google Adwords is and what it does.

They overall business model I use to go about setting up a campaign is pretty simple, but it can easily be complicated with little odds and ends along the way. I will share with you my basic outline, but the rest is up to you to experiment with. I wish I could tell you everything I know about making money with Adwords, but it would very quickly turn into a 1000 page novel! The best learning is done by just going out and trying it yourself. At the end of this article I will share with you a few resources I use to make things a little bit easier.

One of the main things people are afraid of with this kind of marketing is losing money. The process I will teach you is geared around minimizing costs, but at the same time maximizing profit. A lot of marketers who are making the big bucks will throw in thousands of fairly generic keywords and throw a ton of money into the process initially, because they are expecting to make all that money back. I’m not saying this is the wrong way to do it, in fact it really isn’t, but when a person is starting out they can’t always throw in that much money at the start.

Instead of using programs to generate huge lists of keywords, I hand pick the keywords myself and tightly monitor the progress of my campaigns. I do this to ensure that my cost is minimized and my profit is maximized. The big marketers will usually not worry so much about this, because they want to make sure they are getting the maximum impressions as possible. By doing it the way I do, I don’t get as many clicks and impressions, but I end up making a much larger relative profit. So the way I make a lot of money is just by making more and more small profitable campaigns vs. only a few huge risky campaigns.

I think I will wait until Part 2 to go into detail steps wise as to how I go about setting up a profitable campaign.

If you want to jump ahead you can visit AdwordsExcellence.com, a great site owned by my friend Stewart McKay detailing step by step on how to make money with Adwords. This is the main site that I give credit to for the Adwords knowledge I have now. There is a free membership and a paid membership with more in depth articles and videos. I honestly urge you to at least give the free membership a try, I promise you wont be disappointed and you have nothing to lose.

Good Luck,
Nick

P.S. I used my affiliate link to Adwords Excellence as a good way to show my appreciation if you wish, but if you would prefer not to use my affiliate link you may click here instead.

Major League Gaming: Halo 3 Top Ten Moments

Hope everyone had a great fun/relaxing weekend. I know I did. The temp around here finally got up to around the 20’s 30’s! That’s t-shirt weather for me!

Just thought I would offset all the seriousness with a little bit of entertainment. Not sure how many of you play Halo 3, but it’s an awesome game and if you have played it even once before you will definitely appreciate this video.

“Reflexes like that don’t exist in a normal human being”.

Wow, these people are ridiculous.

I’m looking on getting into a little more of the details on how exactly I make my money tomorrow, so stay tuned!

-Nick

New server!

Just got the site transfered over to the new server so sorry if there are some problems. I’ll fix those as soon as I can.

This hosting is much much much faster then the last stuff and I hope you can tell the difference. I got my new hosting through Media Temple and so far they rock!

Cross browser compatibility with Safari and others

I just got accepted to the new and upcoming “Rubicon Project“, a site dedicated to help optimize PPC advertising. Only after creating my account though, I noticed that users are required to use Firefox 2+ to access the member’s area!

What a bummer, it seems like a bunch of other sites these days are doing the same thing. Well I guess it’s probably getting better now days, but I think as other browsers like Safari start becoming more popular people need to make it a point to develop their websites so that they can properly handle every browser!

How many of you have ran into problems like this with websites that you are trying to access? It’s really a day ruiner, especially when it’s on a site that you were really excited to be a part of! In some cases, I’m almost more willing to put off using the website if it means I have to open up another browser just to use it.

I’m not sure about you, but it sort of seems like a copout and/or a sign of being unprofessional to me if a website doesn’t function on every browser. I understand that there are some fancy features in css and javascript that only work on browsers like Firefox, but what about everyone using a different browser? Personally, I go without some of those fancy features just to support all of the other browsers.

One thing that especially bothers me is when websites restrict their users to only Internet Explorer. That leaves people like me and other Mac users out in the dust, as IE no longer is supported on a Mac. It not only is unfortunate for the users, but it really restricts the company’s reach to additional clients/users (i.e. less money).

This really makes me realize more and more the fact that we need to be making sure the websites we make are cross-compatible with every browser out on the market. With other browsers like Safari becoming more and more a part in the traffic surfing across the web, we need to start taking it more into consideration.

-Nick

Your and You’re, grammar and spelling in blogging.

Ok, so I’m posting this because over the course of my blog reading history I have been noticing that so many bloggers have terrible grammar!

When I first started heavily reading and participating on other people’s blogs I didn’t notice bad grammar so much, but now that I am an avid reader of a large amount of blogs I keep noticing it more and more! It’s not even the big complicated things that bother me, it’s the small, simple, and easy errors that get to me.

The one thing that I see most often as far as grammatical errors go is fellow bloggers using your instead of you’re. It annoys the hell out of me! I’ve seen famous bloggers like Shoemoney and Amit do it multiple times in their posts.

I remember a while back Shoemoney made a post about grammar entitled “Can you suck at grammar and have a successful blog” which linked to a post from Nick Sullivan’s blog pretty much stating the same thing. I guess more than just me are bugged by these famous blogger’s grammar. I’d also like you to know that I had already thought about making this post on my own before seeing the Shoemoney post!

I do like how Shoe took the initiative to make a post about it though, it really shows his personality. To be honest, if I was him I wouldn’t really care what others thought anyway!

• I’d be interested in hearing what others think about grammar in blogging. Do you think it is a big deal for bloggers to have good spelling and grammar, or is it not a big deal?

Oh and by the way, I’m not saying that I have perfect grammar. I’m sure someone can point out some mistakes in this very post as a matter of fact. It’s really just the elementary stuff that bothers me.

How to get started online.

I have a lot of friends that think it is really cool that I am able to make as much money as I do online. It’s really nice to not have to get a job during the Summer because of my internet stuff, and I always enjoy telling people how I do it or helping them out personally.

Let me set this straight to begin with, I don’t make that much money online. Well, I make enough to cover a part-time job, but compared to some of the other people on the internet I’m nothing. The possibilities are endless. The reason I don’t make as much money as some of those other people is because I don’t spend that much time on it. Doing well in this business takes time and hard work.

One thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that it isn’t easy to make money online. You always hear about all those people who seem to sit around on their computers and make millions of dollars. Well this usually just isn’t the case. If they are just sitting around making millions then chances are they have already worked their ass off to get there.

All it takes is an idea. Almost anything online is profitable, you just have to set your mind to it and keep working on it until you get there. This is hard for a lot of people because not everyone enjoys working online. If this is the case, I suggest you find something else to do. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just think that making money online is something you really have to have a passion for. You have to have fun doing it. Most people who hate working online will never get anywhere. On top of that, the overall statistic is something like only 1 out of 10 people actually will be successful online.

Don’t let this discourage you though. I believe that if you are motivated enough and you enjoy it, you will definitely be successful online. For some people it takes longer than others, but I believe that if you have those traits, there is no way you can’t be successful.

On that note, just get started! All it takes is an idea… it doesn’t matter what it is. I urge people to choose something that they are very passionate about. Once you find something you love, in my case Mac and web development take that and work with it! Get a blog set up, make a forum, or sell a product. There are endless things you can do and all of them will make you money some time or another as long as you stick with it and never give up.

I have the problem of moving on from one thing to the next without finishing the first thing. It’s hard to stay away from, but try not to do that as much as you can. Just because you don’t see success right away, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to work. Sometimes some of the biggest success makers take the longest time before they start showing returns.

So there you have it, all you have to do is be passionate, work hard, and don’t forget to do your research! If you do those things, you are bound for success both on and offline.

I urge you to get out there and get started immediately!

-Nick

Leopard 10.5.2 released along with many fixes… the other day.

A comment left by Mark enlightened me to the fact that Leopard 10.5.2 came out the other day! I’m very excited as the list of fixes seems like it pretty much sums up all the small problems I have been having. I’m excited to see if Leopard can get any better than it already is.

One thing I didn’t see on the list is a fix for Safari. I had been hearing a lot about people having problems with Safari crashing a lot, and I was one of them. I’m hoping that somehow this update will have something in it to fix Safari anyway, as that was one of my biggest issues.

Sounds like the main fix after reading some other articles, is the fix to stacks. Well not exactly a fix, but they added list view which most definitely should have been there all along.

All in all, i’m looking forward to this big update and i’ll get back to you with how everything goes.

Has anybody else upgraded yet??