The At Home Couple

Mobile Media Marketing in 3 Easy Steps

Get ready bloggerhood, because what I’m about to share with you is pretty mind blowing. And for those of you reading this who are business minded – there is one particular avenue of internet marketing you need to grasp immediately: Mobile Media Marketing. The triple M!

I’ve been reading about marketing to mobile devices for the last few months, and recently there have been some killer products released (Mobile Monopoly by Adam Horowitz is an absolute must have course) that can take you step by step through the process of making stupid amounts of money marketing to mobile device owners.

For those of you who already know the gist of CPA and PPC – what I’m about to tell you will give you a jump start. For those of you who haven’t had any luck with CPA stuff, going mobile will save you time and money during the “get your feet wet” phase.

In the tradition of keeping shit simple, here is how to make money with mobile media marketing in 3 easy steps:

STEP ONE – DRIVE TARGETED MOBILE TRAFFIC

Head over to AdMob.com and create an account. Think of AdMob as pay per click marketing strictly for mobile phone users. It is the Google Adwords of the future! Imagine being able to target your traffic by age group, demographic (right down to the major city) and mobile operating system/device type – well AdMob allows you to do just that! Clicks will cost you as low as 1 cent compared to traditional PPC that can go as high as $1 per click.

TIP: Be sure to show them your best shit on the application. Use your best website or blog and really talk the talk in the application details field. Tell them how long you’ve been doing what you do and how you plan to promote. This will make getting accepted into the network a breeze!

STEP TWO – SEND YOUR TRAFFIC TO A KILLER OFFER

When it comes to putting links and banners up on mobile websites, you need to find mobile specific offers. CPA (cost per action) networks are great for this because they payout for every action a user takes – whether that be a download of a ring tone or and email address submission. Sponsormob.com is the premier mobile specific CPA network available online with a great selection of advertisers to choose from.

Alternatively, most major non-mobile specific CPA networks do offer mobile-friendly advertisers, such as Neverblue Ads – who has almost 300 mobile offers to choose from.

STEP THREE – USE YOUR INTERNET MARKETING SKILLS

Just because you’re marketing to iPhones and Android users, it doesn’t mean that the game changes – it’s just a different medium! If you’re gonna market a free ring tone offer, type in “download free ring tones” into Google and see what the PPC advertisers are using for headlines etc… Take notes and test different headlines/banners until you find the golden nuggets.

Remember – mobile media marketing is NEW and virtually untapped. Now is the time to master the craft and get a jump start on the hoards of traffic available because the fact of the matter is more people in the world have a cell phone than are on the internet.

Hopefully this will give you guys a little taste of what mobile marketing holds in store for you and your business. If you’re really serious and want to make upwards of $1000 per day in a short period of time, definitely stop by the Mobile Monopoly sales page and grab it before it’s off the market for good.

Cheers,

Elijah

PIP Module 2 – Building Your Niche Affiliate Site

Passive Income Project - Niche Website It seems no matter how hard I try – Posting on my own blog and building passive income, among other things, always seems to take the back seat. Let’s not forget to mention that I currently have no means of recording audio (no microphone/mixer is out of commission due to a fried preamp). So, rather than be a complete douche bag and use this as an excuse for not continuing my Passive Income Project series, I’m going to write out this next module with hopes of recording a video later.

In the first video, I talked about various ways I do my gold digging to uncover profitable keywords, products and domain names. Once you have everything in place they next step is to build your website, and even if you suck, I’m going to give you some tools and tips to make a killer site regardless.

Remember – I AM NOT A GRAPHIC/WEB DESIGNER! But I do know enough to make things look and perform well. How did I learn? I did the same thing anyone does when they want to develop a new skill… I scoured the Internet until I realized that I could just harass the living daylights out of my bud Jay aka Suite J to teach me every ninja photoshop, CSS, HTML trick in the book. This was so much easier than reading about code and it was also free!

So TIP NUMBER 1 is if you suck at building sites like Justin Bieber sucks at growing chest hair, find someone to take you under their wing and absorb absolutely everything from them until you vomit on your keyboard. Watch tons of photoshop tutorials on YouTube and TRY everything. Don’t be afraid to mess something up or get crappy feedback on your sites – because the more you do, the better you get.

Here are some killer places to start:

http://www.pstuts.com/

http://www.problogdesign.com/

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/css/

TIP NUMBER 2 – If you don’t want to do it yourself, find someone good to do it – for really cheap! When it comes to outsourcing your niche websites, the name of the game is FOREIGN EXCHANGE. How much is your dollar worth around the world? Find a great market and take advantage of the conversion, for example, $10 USD could get you a great looking website if you outsourced it to the Philippines – where the US dollar is of great value on the market.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

TIP NUMBER 3 – You’ve decided on how the site is going to be built, and which niche market/keywords you’ll be targeting, it’s time to find a killer advertiser to promote. Now to make this really work, you want to have one primary keyword, with the domain for that keyword, and promote one single advertiser. You’re not necessarily trying to build a micro niche website, because you might have a keyword/domain that is in a larger market, but you are trying to keep the website as targeted as possible and rank on the first page/first spot for your primary keyword.

I use LinkShare because they have every niche, great resources and make most other networks look like the bottom of Lindsay Lohan’s purse on a Monday morning. Click here for more on LinkShare.

TIP NUMBER 4 – For my passive income project website, I chose to promote LampsPlus.com, which is a reputable lighting and home decor franchise. When it comes to designing your website, you want to make sure that it shares a similar look and feel to that of the advertiser you’re promotiong. Why? Because when people find your site online and click on the ads or links, they won’t realize they’ve been sent to the advertisers website.

Is it okay to copy your advertisers website? No. Is it okay to mock their colors and styling to increase conversions? Absolutely. Just take a look at my website, MissionTiffanyLamp.com and click any of the ads referring to LampsPlus – doesn’t it feel like you’re on the same website? This is the whole point.

TIP NUMBER 5 – Keep your website as frequently updated as possible. If you can only write one post per week, great. One post per month is fine, as long as you’re compensating with an increased amount of social bookmarking per new post published. Every article you write or have written for the website will essentially be a short summary post, reviewing a product in particular – using your affiliate link for the image as well as throughout the content.

This is very important****IF YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR NICHE WEBSITE, OR DON’T CARE HOW IT LOOKS AND PERFORMS, YOU WON’T MAKE ANY MONEY. So the opposite of that would be to actually care, work hard, and if you don’t know how to do something – learn or hire someone for dirt cheap to rid you of the burden.

In the next module I’ll actually take you guys through how I set up the WordPress niche site in the back end so you have on board stats, click tracking, link cloaking, etc.. I’ll show you how to make your website run like a champ (Rocky to be exact). Not sure when I’ll get around to doing the video – but I will!

Cheers,

Elijah

ftp://gi-kimono.com

Followers, Fans, Bloggerhood, Lend Me Your Fears

Everyday I run into to family and friends – on and off line – and everyday I give the same answer, “Business is good. Absolutely insane, but good.” I’m sure you can guess the question or something close enough. Then it dawned on me as I was having a smoke break (I know, I know) that this daily interaction would be much more interesting and beneficial with the veil of common chatter removed.

Imagine if we lived in a world where instead of asking…

“How’s business?”

we asked each other…

“What are you afraid of today?”

Right now I’m afraid of my own potential. As confusing as that sounds, the possibility of immense success terrifies me sometimes. I even think that it directly hinders my progress in some sort of unconscious way.

I’m afraid of death and the possibility that once my time has come there will be nothing but nothingness. I’ve had quite a few close friends and family pass away in the last 10 years and I hate it. Cancer sucks. Fuck cancer (as I smoke a cigarette).

When was the last time you actually sat down, without distractions, and conversed with your inner self about fear? Up until 5 minutes ago, it has been a few weeks for me. And though I don’t feel much better emotionally, it’s nice know I just typed it out for the world to see.

Your fears is what I want to see below in the comment box. I don’t care if you’ve never commented on a blog before, put in a name and spit it out. Don’t think about it too much, just go with the first thoughts that enter your head.

Do it.

Cheers,

Elijah

(Shakespeare anyone?)

Epic Fail: Passive Income Site Off To A Bad Start!

A little update from my on going series of posts/tutorials on how I AM building my passive income through niche affiliate websites and automated blogs. So if you remember, our mission Tiffany lamp website got off to a good start. I got on a one on one basis with my affiliate manager (Linkshare.com is the network and LampsPlus.com is the advertiser our website is promoting) and I got some good old social website traffic heading to our posts, which basically feature a product from the vendor site, with a little blurb and some anchor text.

Everything was going well and the site is getting increasing amounts of traffic and clicks – but what do you see wrong with the screen shot below (taken today from my linkshare account):

I’m staring at an order, but zero commissions or sales reported?!?! Anyways, so after a while of sifting around, and calling my affiliate manager to inquire, I ended finding out how to generate detailed reports (Linkshare’s selection of vendors is AMAZING for niche sites, but their reporting system is not user friendly). Here’s what I see in the report I generated which details the transaction in question:

EPIC FAIL MOMENT: Our first sale for our much anticipated, super killer niche website was canceled! How’s that for a bright future?? All joking aside, I felt it was necessary to share this with you guys to prove a point…

If you fail, try again. Plain and simple, just like they tell you in the text books, at school and at your AA meetings. Just because our first referral canceled their order, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to as well. More importantly, it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with the website or what we are doing.

Shit happens! I don’t want to hear any excuses about why you’re not putting what you know into action. Even if you don’t know everything that’s needed, allocate energy towards learning where you lack.

How about that for a kick in the balls Epic Fail?!?

Cheers,

Elijah

Long Time No See . . .

Hello friends, it’s been a while and I profusely apologize.

Life has grabbed me by the balls (figuratively speaking, of course) and I have once again been pulled in another direction. For those of you who are wondering, I am once again flailing around in the working world. A great job appeared as if from nowhere and I took it to avoid passing up an amazing opportunity. I am working as a designer and home stager for a leading company in Toronto. Yay! It’s great experience and I’m meeting tons of people, but unfortunately it has dragged me away from The At Home Couple.

I do apologize for neglecting my responsibilities and as far as I’m concerned, as soon as the housing market slows down a bit, I will be back on the ball. Most of my goals have changed again, which is frustrating, but getting back in there with Eli is really important to make sure we don’t loose momentum. It’s crazy how life just randomly chucks curve balls at you and how you react to them can change everything.

Two months ago I was trying to figure out how I was going to break into the staging and real estate industry and make a name for myself, and now that’s exactly what I’m doing. The downside of course is that it has eaten up ALL of my free time. I am being bombarded by friends who want to know if I’m still alive. And of course I’ve been neglecting my duties to Bleecker Street Media and theathomecouple.com. It has gotten me down a couple of times, especially after a grueling 13 hour day. I’ve found myself questioning my decision to take the job, and whether or not it is even a benefit. When it comes down to it though, I love what I’m doing. Whether it’s on my own or for a company, I am doing a job that I enjoy and that I am good at. Who knows, maybe this is the kickstart I need to get out there on my own and run my own design and staging business.

So please bear with me and send me good vibes. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction. 🙂

Cheers,

Veronica

Mindless Distractions: Taking a Break From The Internet Marketing Game

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfIpOXxZV8k

Internet marketing causes insomnia.

I know there are more than a few of you out there who suffer from this addiction I have (financial and mobility freedom via making money online). Some nights I just simply can not turn my brain off. It’s almost as if when I lay down to sleep, my brain turns on. Occasionally, in the midst of domain names, methods and tricks flashing rapidly through my head, I will hit something that is genius.

Most of the time it’s a pain in the ass and stresses me out. I’ve never been a good sleeper – natural born insomniac.

When I know I need to get to sleep sooner than later, I will stop all work related stuff and randomly watch videos on good old YouTube to distract me, empty my brain and help bring me down.

Tonight was flipping through the recent hockey fights on HockeyFightsDotCom tube channel.

Say what you want… lol.. I’m Canadian, I love hockey and fighting is what we do when the passion is high or someone cheap shots a team mate of ours. It relaxes me.

WHAT DO YOU DO TO TO RELAX BEFORE BED?