Make Cash Online

This sums up my week of work on my product (which still isn’t ready for launch yet). I made the huge mistake of doing research on copywriting and seeing if there was anything I could pick up on. I found too much. So I’m in the state of editing and digging through my words of my sales letter to correct their orientation and effectiveness.

For the longest time I had a very simple philosophy on sales letters, landing pages and any other persuasive types of words. I would try to pick apart what I thought was a good example and learn from it. There is nothing wrong with this type of method because it has made me money for a long time. But there is a huge flaw with it too and it is viewing things from an outside position.

What I mean by that statement is that you’re like an alien watching a hockey game. After a while you’ll understand some basic things like trying to get the puck in the net, but beyond that you think people are acting like irrational fuckin’ idiots.

I’ll pick up on the obvious stuff. I’ll see the statement that says we’re only selling this to the first 100 customers and recognize that it is a concept of scarcity to create urgency in a potential customer. I can pick up on those things. With the average length of a sales letter at 2500 words (not including testimonials, guarantees, and any other boxes) I am missing out on a lot that is buried right in front of my nose.

Active Verbs

Through my research this time I started to pick up on was active verbs. This is a concept that took me some time to figure out because I wasn’t the type of kid that paid attention during English class. It is a subtle difference in the way you use verbs in your sentences. You can either write active verbs or passive verbs. I think I fall under the category of using passive, when active is the more persuasive way to write your copy.

Let me show you subtle this can be:

Mr. Smith is considering my resume. – Active

My resume is being considered by Mr. Smith. – Passive

Do you see how immaterial this is? From an English language standpoint you should be thinking who the fuck cares and that is what I was thinking too. But there is the aspect of selling and making an impact that you must consider when writing. This is one of these points.

Active verbs allow you to make a much larger impact on your reader, but it also gets the point across is less words. From the example I gave the active one has 5 words and the passive has 7. Its two words shorter and you’re thinking big whoop. Well, considering a sales letter is 2500 words you can get more information in. Plus you run the problem of your reader leaving. At least this way you’re getting as much information into their head before they leave.

Stephen King’s ‘-ly’ Adverbs

Yes, I’m taking advice from freakin’ Stephen King. He wrote a book “On Writing” where he talked about these “-ly” adverbs. What was his lesson? They are a plague to your writing. They infest your text like an invasion of ants at a picnic.

After playing around with this idea for a few days I couldn’t believe how often I was using these adverbs. They were in everything I wrote. I’m sure if you dug through all my posts on this site you could pick them out. I like to use the words obviously, probably, basically, easily, etc.

Let’s see a few examples:

Basically all you have to do to make cash online is work hard.

All you have to do to make cash online is work hard.

When you work hard you’ll probably experience more rewards.

When you work hard you’ll experience more rewards.

Do you see, yet again, how immaterial the changes can be? But they all play a huge role in what you’re doing. The points get made in a concrete manner and you do it with less text. You should pick up on those examples as being the ‘-ly’ words that are pure fillers and not needed. Now that I think of it, is basically an adverb?

Let’s see a few adverb examples and replacing them:

The old lady slowly walked down the street.

The old lady inched down the street.

I spoke softly to my girlfriend when she was sick.

I soothed my girlfriend when she was sick.

Do you see the differences here? The impact and image of this should be much more apparent. When I said the old lady slowly walked, you just internalize words and their meanings. When I say the old lady inched down the street you actually see that lady inching her way down the street.

The same is true with the second example. You’re going to internalize the meanings of the word softly, but there will no image with it. When I soothed my girlfriend you have to picture it.

I know what you’re thinking now: Holy shit! I thought this site was going to show me how to make cash online, not some fuckin’ grammar lesson. Yeah, I’m just as surprised as you are.

But there is a point to all of this…

Show Them, Don’t Tell Them

This is one of those frustrating statements you’ll see mentioned when an expert reviews a sales letter. Go to any internet marketing forum that has a copywriting section and look. Anyone looking for a review will be told that.

A lot of the points above fit into that category, in particular replacing the ‘-ly’ adverbs with a much better verb. These are all methods designed to help you show your readers, rather than tell them. Or another way of looking at it, don’t tell them what to think, make them think it (or feel it).

I guess this is enough on copywriting because I have a lot more to learn. While digging around online Wednesday night I found myself spending $80 picking up a few books on copywriting that are considered the bibles of the business.

Here is what I picked up:

• “Tested Advertising Methods” – John Caples ($17.48 CDN)
• “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters” – Joseph Sugarman ($17.51 CDN)
• “The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells” – Robert W Bly ($15.20 CDN)
• “Cash Copy: How to Offer Your Products and Services So Your Prospects Buy Them” – Jeffrey Lant ($19.99 CDN used)

It’ll take me months to dissect, absorb and interpret all the information in these books, but it will give me something to talk about on this site when it comes to things you can purchase. I mentioned somewhere on my earlier blog that I refuse to review products I haven’t gone out and bought (that means I won’t talk about review copies either). Up to this point in my affiliate marketing career I have bought “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” and a membership into the War Room at the Warrior Forum. I guess I now have a list that is 4 points longer.

I feel this is a pretty good investment because selling with your words is very important. Having traffic to read the words is important, but I’ve got that down.

Okay, enough of this.

An Article Experiment

This is something that I haven’t done in a while. My philosophy for online marketing has concluded long ago that bum marketing is a death trap (a future post on this, I promise). I’m saying this with experience too with over 2700 unique articles sitting at EzineArticles and countless others at different directories.

The point of this particular experiment is to determine SEO value of a lot of directories. I think all my readers should recognize that you can only get so much link juice from a site. The first link is worth the most, but as you get more and more, the juice gets weaker and weaker. I’ll go a step further and say the juice gets toxic and hurts your site, but that’s for the future post I’ll talk about.

The objective is to submit one unique article to each of the article directories out there. I think we know that there are thousands of article directories out there aside from the few big ones. I want to see what happens if I get a link back from a few hundred of them. I want to know if article directories are enough for power in the search engines, as long as you anchor your links, use a unique article at each directory and vary the page you’re linking too.

That’s all I’m looking to test out. My breakdown of link backs is going to be split. 33% will go to the domain front page and 66% will go onto inner pages of the site. I will also be varying the anchor text at about the same percentage breakdowns. I’ll get Google slapped if I kept linking with the same anchor text.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this. This week I started into this. I’m 40 directory submissions in. I thought that the hardest part of this would be writing all the unique articles, but it isn’t. The hardest part is digging through and investigating the current directory you’re about to submit too. There’s no point in uploading a unique article to a directory that has their most recent submission listed as June 8 2006. There’s no point in submitting to a site that has popups and other shit. I even submitted to a directory where the admin removed my link from the author box. There are some shady fuckers out there.

I put everything into a spreadsheet, so I could go back and review how things are progressing. There’s nothing to report after 5 days of testing, but I did find one interesting site. I never hear anyone discuss it on forums or anywhere, but my articles get a decent amount of views. It even was pushing some top 10 positions on Google.

I guess if this experiment turns out to be a total failure, I might find some good article directories to submit my articles to.

Sniper Sites

I guess I can give you guys an update on the sniper site experiment. Things this week have been pretty interesting. I had a record setting day this week, which isn’t saying much because it was like $6. But this is the first time I invested labor into Adsense. The impressions from week to week are about the same, which is fine.

I was looking at some of the sites in the first wave and was doing an analysis on their performance. This left me with a small list of a few sites that I’m going to change from Adsense to Amazon. The reason is that the click values they’re getting are pitiful or the CTR isn’t good enough. You’d be surprised how many unrelated sites that show up in Adsense that aren’t even related. What’s annoying is getting 5-10 cent clicks for products that are selling on Amazon for $150.

The odd thing is that I have another site where you can buy the product at Walmart for $15 earning $3 clicks. It makes no fucking sense to me.

Done to the numbers:

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Earned: $99.80 US ( $33.69 US last week )

We have to remember that this is an 8 day period, but still above the weekly averages.