Websites
Websites I put up/work on.
2/2/2009
- My Swipe File
Do you keep a swipe file of sales copy and squeeze pages and interesting marketing tactics?
If not, why not?
Here’s why you do it.
When you want to create a sales/squeeze page for yourself, you can go back through all the pages you’ve bookmarked and just pull the pieces out of them that you like.
When you’re ready to test different elements of your pages, you can just go back through your swipe file and pull out the different elements that other people have to test.
Here’s a head start for you.
http://delicious.com/hjuan99/swipe
http://delicious.com/hjuan99/squeezeThere’s some of my swipe files (easily worth $100 just having that).
I keep my stuff on delicious.com because it’s easy, it’s online, and I never have to worry about losing it when my computer crashes.
TIP
When you’re ready to do your next sales page, go through the swipe pages you have and record them with jing, and tell the person you’re giving it to (hopefully your guy in the Philippines) what you like about each page.
Here’s an example video I did (using Jing) of how I would create a page:
How to create a sales page using a swipe file
1/10/2008
- Free Keyword Research Tools
Over the last couple years keyword research has become difficult as the quality of tools have degraded. Overture’s keyword research tool became totally unreliable about 18 months ago. Wordtracker just doesn’t have the data to provide accurate results. Sometimes in fact, wordtracker’s data comes from such a small data set that it doesn’t provide any data for keywords that get large search volumes.
So, I’ve come up with new ways of doing keyword research.
One way I do it is with KeywordTopia. I built it so that I could get results from all the places that would give keyword results.
Another way I do it is with the free google keyword tool, in conjunction with google trends.
Here’s a video about how I do keyword research across multiple niches:
3/23/2007
- UnderCoverProfits: Affiliate Marketing Will Never Be The Same
Next Tuesday I’ll be releasing UnderCoverProfits, which is going to change the way a whole bunch of people do affiliate marketing.
See…in the past, when promoting other people’s products, what most people have done is pick a program to promote, and then go test it on Adwords to see if they can make it profitable. It takes time to pick the right program, and it takes time and money to test.
UnderCoverProfits reverses the process. Instead of spending money to test, it uses other people’s testing to figure out for you what affiliate programs will be profitable, so that you can start your campaigns knowing that they’re going to be profitable from the beginning.
It’s the exact opposite of the big hype right now about keyword level conversion tracking. With keyword conversion tracking, you test keywords on your own dime. With UnderCoverProfits, you test keywords and affiliate programs on other people’s dime.
If you’re looking to promote your own product on Adwords, as a competitive intelligence tool, I don’t know anything that will give you better information about your competitors than UnderCoverProfits. It will show you what keywords they’re bidding on, and which of those keywords are profitable for them.
So far our beta testing has been amazing. About 85% of the beta testers are now making money as affiliates on Adwords where they previously weren’t.
[tags]UnderCoverProfits, Under Cover Profits, Undercover Profits, affiliate marketing, affiliates[/tags]
10/6/2006
- Unbelievable Web Hosting
This is ridiculous.
Hostmonster has lowered their hosting price from $9.95/month to $3.95/month and increased their limits on the product.
You can’t increase the ability to host unlimited domains, but they increased the bandwidth you get (who cares), and also the storage space (WooHoo!).
This hosting is soooooo much better than anything else I’ve seen its ridiculous.
And, what’s even better, is when you call them, you get a human…fast.
7/26/2006
- Stock photos super cheap
I’m posting this mostly so I can remember it:
http://www.istockphotos.com
Stock photos between $1-$5 depending on size.
That’s a great way to make a website look better.
5/4/2006
- WritingUp.com Growth
This is interesting. It tells 2 stories:
1. The power of user generated content
2. Search engines certainly aren’t telling the whole story.1. Users are blogging on WritingUp.com. They write hundreds of blog entries each day. They also write thousands of comments each day.
Two weeks ago a site:writingup.com search revealed that google had 510,000 pages from the domain writingup.com in their index.
Today, the same search reveals 729,000 pages.The community is growing.
2. It has always been said that search engines won’t want to index very many pages of a site that has low pagerank or that has very few links to it.
Well, with 729,000 pages indexed, google says that writingup.com has 2 incoming links.
It also has a pagerank of 3!THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Google isn’t telling the truth here.
Want more proof?
Try a link:writingup.com search on msn:
12,158 incoming links
Or what about a linkdomain:writingup.com search on yahoo?
20,400 incoming links.
Something is wrong here.
Or, what about a site:writingup.com search on yahoo?
They only have 13,100 pages in their index. Huh?
Or, msn
8227? What? What are you guys thinking?
Why can google find over 700,000 pages on writingup.com, and msn can only find just over 8000? I mean, all the url’s on the site are clean. They don’t have index.php?somevar=somethingelse. Everything is linked to. There aren’t duplicate posts on the site (yet).
So, my point is, search engines aren’t telling the whole truth.
Also, if you’re still using what the search engines tell you as a metric of how successful your SEO campaign is going, you’re fooling yourself (or, they’re fooling you, just like they’d like to do).
1/11/2006
- Wordpress 2.0
After having been with wordpress through 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, wordpress 2.0 is finally out.
Not that I’ve been anxiously awaiting it or anything, because when something works for me, I’m usually happy to leave it alone. But, I really hate when I write a post and realize I want to upload a file so I have to copy the text from the post, go to the upload screen, upload my file, copy the
tag, only to realize that I just lost the copy I had of the post, so I can’t paste it back in and I have to write it all over again!
This version puts uploads inline with the posting screen. Nice job.
Upgrading…
1/10/2006
- Growing Pains
I guess growing pains are good, if you’re growing like this:
You can see the dip in traffic on Christmas, and the little dip right before the skyrocketing from 20-25,000 hits/day to 40,000 hits/day was when we were having server problems.
The problem is that www.writingup.com grew so fast that we had major server problems. The week between christmas and new years was really a struggle for us. The server went down for hours at a time, basically time after time after time.
We were getting so many hits that our little server couldn’t handle it…
Or so we thought.
It turned out that mysql just needed some tweaking. I guess mysql by default has caching disabled so we turned on caching by adding this line to the /etc/my.cnf file:
query-cache-size = 20M
As soon as mysql started caching queries it immediatly started working again.
Before we added that our server load had slowly gone from .2 up to about 30 before it would just die. Mysql was getting so many queries (hundreds per second) that it couldn’t do them all, so it would start getting slow queries (queries that took over 2 seconds) and those take up a lot of memory. The system would take up all the memory, and then start using the swap space until there wasn’t any swap left. Then it would just die.
After turning on caching to mysql it never gets overloaded. It never gets behind. I’ve seen it doing 565 queries per second, which is more than it can handle for a sustained period of time, but it handled it just fine.
We also added this:
key_buffer_size = 64M
Which helped a little, but not as much as turning on caching (I don’t really remember what this one did, but I think it allows mysql to use more memory when searching through tables that have keys in them).
Anyway, the server has been up now for over 7 days without any problems. We’re still going to get a bigger machine for it, so that it can grow more.
11/8/2005
- WritingUp.com Growing
We hit 300 bloggers sometime last week. We have 335 right now, and our alexa rank is climbing pretty quickly.
Not bad for having only launched it less than 2 months ago. Especially considering that the site looks terrible, isn’t very clear for how to refer someone, and I haven’t really started marketing it yet.
We have some big marketing campaigns slated for the near future, which include a bigger PPC campaign, a PR campaign, an emailing campaign (I met 2 people this weekend at the Big Seminar who have mailing lists of 650,000 and 15 million business opportunity seekers, who have double opted in to their lists…and they’re very willing to send an email about it), a newspaper press campaign, and finally a campaign to get the users to promote it more than they are already doing it.
I have had quite a few users ask me how they can promote their own blog and I’m putting together a plan for them.
The best part about the growth are the emails I get from people saying they’re starting to make money. It’s amazing how much confidence making just a little extra money will give you. If you can do it online once, you can repeate it 100 or 1000 times.
Plus, the more the site grows, the more money each person is going to make because people on the site read each others blogs.
Exciting.
3/15/2005
- Overture Gods have mercy
A few months ago I got banned from using the Overture keyword suggester tool because I had written a script that would query it automatically for me.
Being banned from the tool was somewhat of a pain in the butt…because I couldn’t just pull it up any time I wanted to check search amounts. It didn’t stop me from doing it…as I just wrote another tool that I could stick on a server somewhere (a different ip address, that’s what overture banned) and have it query overture and give me the search amounts.
However, I didn’t like being banned from it so months ago I sent them an email asking them to unban me and I promised I’d never do again what I had been doing.They said no.
Just today I randomly checked the tool again and I HAVE BEEN UN-BANNED!!!
I don’t know why, maybe it was just the people at overture feeling the need to repent of their evil ways and have mercy on poor peons like me. Or maybe they just made me sit out a predetermined amount of time and are now letting me have a chance again.
Either way, I’m happy to be able to use it again.
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3/14/2005
- Adsense from Yahoo
I believe Yahoo is finally going to come up with their own version of Google’s Adsense.
It’s about time!!!
I think this will be sooo good for publishers like me. It will force Google and other companies who serve ads to pay their publishers more to compete for ad space on publishers pages. If they don’t, publishers will just switch to the other company who is paying more. It should put the power back into the hands of the publishers.
3/1/2005
- Translation Please!
Actually…not translation please. How about “here’s your translation”.
For DSG we have tried to do all kinds of things that will differentiate our pages from other pages that are generated by a computer. One of the things we’ve been working on (well…Dan has been working on), is doing translation of our pages. There are free services out there that will translate stuff for you so we’re having them translate our entire site into different languages. Then we’re going to put links on our sites to those other languages and voila, we’ll have that many more pages of content.
The great thing about it is there really aren’t many people doing this. And, there are almost as many non english internet users as there are english internet users.
We’ll see how this turns out.
2/16/2005
- Affiliate Success
Over the past year I’ve tried different ways of having success doing affiliate programs. My ebay site did alright. I don’t make that much money off it but it does make some money from ebay each money.
My attempts to do affiliate marketing with TE were absolutely horrible. I have probably gotten over 150,000 hits and made like $10 in affiliate money off it. The attempt was so bad in fact that I finally switched my TE sites to having the ebay affiliate program instead of other affiliate programs. Dismal.
Recently however, I’ve been having success with at least one of my DSG sites. I’ve had like a 20% CTR for affiliates and of those I don’t know how many actually sign up for stuff…but it’s a lot. The reason for the success is what gets me though (at least…what I THINK is the reason for the success).
Like I posted a few days ago about coming up high on MSN for 1carinsurance.org and acnerelief.org, I’m now getting quite a bit of traffic for when people search for ‘car insurance’. That’s different than the normal traffic I get for someone searching for ‘geico car insurance 22342 not progressive’. I think the reason I’m having success is because now I’m offering a link to something the person is actually looking for…car insurance! They’re not just looking for information about something, they’re looking for what I’m offering.
This sort of flies in the face about what I posted a few days ago about the 50/50 rule of internet searches, that I’d only take the other 50% of searches. However, I think that if I applied some of the techniques I’m using now, on those pages, I’d have some success with it. The problem is that TE sites are so dang difficult to change that I’m not really willing to change them. Also, those other 50% are great for google adsense.
Actually…now that I think of it, I am having some success with affiliate marketing with the other 50% of searches. On my home business sites, I’m having plenty of people click through to our sales page….interesting…
2/14/2005
- Writing Articles for Pagerank
I know a lot of people figured this out a long time ago and I’m just slow but writing an article and submitting it to article sites is great. I’ve been writing articles and submitting them to http://www.ezinearticles.com. I get to put it into a specific category and get to put 2 links in the article. The article then ends up on a pr5 page 2 links away from the homepage. It’s great! I’ve been submitting articles for all my sites.
There are 2 things I’d like to try with this:
- Submitting these articles to lots of different article sites. I have only submitted to the ezinearticles site so far. I know there are a lot of others out there. I’d like to start submitting to them too and seeing what kind of an effect it can have. Maybe I can submit them automatically to all of them.
- Auto generating articles. While we’ve gotten very good at generating content to create web pages with, we cannot as of yet generate a human readable article that will get past a human editor. ezinearticles.com has human editors review every article so we can’t generate articles for them yet. I think some other sites don’t have human editors so we could articles that we generate to those. However, I’d like to find some software that already has language knowledge built into it and can generate a human readable article from other text. I’ve seen the software before, I just need to find it again.
2/11/2005
- Logging into Yahoo/MSN Automatically
Having worked on DSG so much over the past 2 months and having talked with some really experienced internet marketers has really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff about internet marketing. One specific thing is the up and coming influence of RSS.
We’ve done some really cool things with RSS that are causing us to get indexed ridiculously fast by the search engines and that are bringing us some pretty good inbound links.
However, we still think there’s more to RSS than what’s currently happening. We think it’s going to start affecting search engine results based on how many people are subscribed to that sites rss feed. I mean, it makes sense doesn’t it. Both yahoo and msn have a pretty good idea of the number of people subscribed to certain rss feeds because of their my yahoo and my msn accounts. If more people are subscribed to a certain sites rss feed, it must mean that that site is pretty good shouldn’t it?
Soooooo, dan has spent the past few days writing scripts to automate this for us. We create yahoo and msn accounts manually (darn yahoo/msn security images…they’re too good for us to read with the computer) and then we give insert the username/password into the database. Dan’s script logs into yahoo/msn and subscribes the account to a number of our rss feeds that we give it. We then ping yahoo and msn saying that those sites were updated.
We’re hoping that since our RSS feeds are subscribed to by so many “people”, we’ll get better ranking in their serps.
Dan also wrote a script to login to those accounts periodically just so they stay active. (oh yeah, and also one to automate posting to a blogger account and a spaces.msn.com account…but those are for another discussion).
2/9/2005
- Changing SEO
I don’t know if you see it when you browse the internet, but because of the industry I’m in, I visit sites all the time that have links on them that say something to the effect of “Top 10 placement in Google…Guaranteed”.
I’m sure these companies that are guaranteeing a top 10 placement in google are charging an arm and a leg for that top 10, and I’m also sure they’ll get you that top 10 placement for one obscure search term that you don’t really care about. Worthless.
This is where it gets funny to me. I don’t track my search engine placement for any keyword for any of my websites right now. I don’t care if I’m in the top 10 for mesothelioma or for anything for that matter. Why??? because 50% OF INTERNET SEARCHES ARE UNIQUE!!! That means that for every person searching for mortgage, or low cost loan, or refinance, there is another person seraching for ‘low cost mortgage provo utah low credit’ or for ‘fha refinance 6.0% iowa house’. Sooo, I let the 95% of people doing SEO who don’t know about the 50% rule do their optimization for their single keyword (mortgage, or refi, or whatever it is). In the mean time, I’ll compete with the other 5% of people for the rest of the 50% of internet searches that aren’t for that keyword.
That’s why I built the content generation software, DSG. I get traffic for the most random searches, “the other 50%”.
In the end…I win.
2/8/2005
- Content Creation
It’s been interesting to see peoples reactions to my DSG software. It’s almost like I’ve suddenly become an expert in content creation. And all I did was apply some of my programming knowledge and experience to a personal project to generate content from all over the place. Sort of interesting.
What’s more surprising is how far ahead of other people Dan and I are with respect to this. I’ve used TE (traffic equalizer) and seen other advertisements for content creation software and they’re light years behind where we are with DSG. Whats even better for us is that we’re constantly improving the software. We add new features to it almost daily. We’re also automating tons of stuff that will allow DSG sites to migrate their way to the top of the serps without any work by a human (or…with very minimal work I guess)
2/6/2005
- Linking Strategies.
This week I did some research on the digital point ad network. It’s pretty interesting. You put a place on your site for the system to put ads and the system will put your links on other peoples sites. It’s really ingenious as an automated solution to linking. You get a certain weight based on the pr of your sites and the number of pages you have indexed. That weight determines the % chance that your ads will show up on someone elses site every time a link is served.
The network (and the others like it) still have two fundamental problems though. 1. that the ads are not necessarily served on relevant pages. Links are served at random on pages, which for google, isn’t really worth much anymore. And 2. sites that are doing bad seo things are showing up in the network. People are doing shady stuff like posting their links in white text on a white background. If one of your pages gets served an ad that points to one of those sites, that could get you in a lot of trouble.
I think that once these two issues are addressed (relevant linking and keeping bad webmasters out of the network), this will be an amazing solution to automate linking. Everyone helps everyone else…at least…those who know about it do.
The reason I did the research on the network is because I’m looking right now for a way to integrate or to create an automated linking strategy for my DSG sites. DSG still has 2 problems. One is getting indexed (which I think we’ve taken care of…but am not going to share how). Two is that long term, sites must continue to get links pointed to them in order to stay on top of the serps.
Sooo…I’m looking for an automated linking strategy. I looked at the digitalpoint option, but it looks to be short term. We have already automated a way to get reciprocal links from the linkpartners.com network, but reciprocal links aren’t worth very much anymore. I’ve looked a little at getting links from .edu sites, and at linking from groups (groups.google.com, groups.msn.com), but they’re not really that useful (always pr1 as far as I can tell). I’m totally willing to automate the process. I have several ideas of how to build a single high pr site, by offering different services that will make people want to link to the service…but I need a solution that will build link strength to a lot of different sites.
If anyone has suggestions, I have some pretty valuable tools that I’d be willing to share with them. You can either post a comment (but that might be less effective considering that I get about 30 spam comments/day right now), or you can email me at john at jonasfam dot com.
1/30/2005
- Sales of DSG
This week we made our first sales of DSG. DSG (dynamic site generator) is
what I’m calling the software I wrote that will create an entire site full
of keyword rich content for you. I got the idea from Traffic equalizer,
which also generates a site of content, but it doesn’t do nearly as much
stuff as dsg does.We’re charging $250 per month per site we put up with the software. It’s
nice to finally be on the recieving end of these payments.
12/31/2004
- PHP Newsletter software
I’ve spent the last few days researching php software to handle newsletter mailing lists. After a lot of research, I found a really good one at
It’s called phplist. It has soooooo many features. Stuff like automatically have it send out an email to a list every week/day/month, have it auto populate the content of the mailing with an rss feed, multiple mailing lists, custom subscribe templates, custom subscriber data fields, email open tracking…, …, … The list goes on.
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