The Lebron Noob Journal

lebron

lebron

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Jul 31, 2009
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Hey, I just signed up for wickedfire recently but have been lurking around for a while. I'm still in high school and hoping that I can have the option of whether to go to college or not. The other day, I finally decided to take the jump into affiliate marketing and went ahead and started doing research. With a $1,000 budget that I saved up, I plan on investing smart and hopefully seeing a return. If it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world, but honestly that'd suck.

This thread will primarily serve as my journal, for what I'm hoping to be my journey from being a noob to a decent affiliate marketer. So far here's what I did my first day "working":

1. Signed up for Hostgator ($107.52) with one year's worth of hosting.
2. Picked a product to promote - based on a previous wickedfire thread, I chose ecigarettes since I can probably market them through articles and stick within my budget.
3. Got a domain name: e-cigarettesreviews.com ($15.00). It's not the best name, but hopefully I can market it well enough to get some traffic.
4. Downloaded a website theme (still have to learn how to configure everything - I have no idea how any of this stuff works)
5. Went on wf and started my journal.

So far I'm down $122.52. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll break even within a month, though I know that's doubtful.

Now before I go back to work, I just wanted to thank everyone on this site for all the info. I really appreciate it!
 


Next time don't pay yearly for hosting. The hosting could always go to shit and you'd be stuck with it. Also, where did you register that domain? I ask because you said it cost $15, and that's nearly twice what you should be paying. I recommend Namecheap and be sure to Google for a coupon, there is always one out there. Go with Wordpress for your website, it's extremely easy to setup and very user friendly. It's great that you have money to spend, however don't spend it because you have it.

EDIT: 2000th post, I need a life.
 
JamesH said:
Next time don't pay yearly for hosting. The hosting could always go to shit and you'd be stuck with it. Also, where did you register that domain? I ask because you said it cost $15, and that's nearly twice what you should be paying. I recommend Namecheap and be sure to Google for a coupon, there is always one out there. Go with Wordpress for your website, it's extremely easy to setup and very user friendly. It's great that you have money to spend, however don't spend it because you have it.

EDIT: 2000th post, I need a life.
Click to expand...

2000th post, you don't need a life, you need to make a boobies thread!

Like.. right NOW!!!

::emp:: aka He-who-can-never-see-enough-T-and-A
 
If it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world, but honestly that'd suck
Click to expand...

It won't be lost if you don't make it back. You will have paid for
DIRECT experience. Hopefully, you will take notes and create
systems out of this initial action. You will create a case study
to flesh out and find better ways with. Cheap education really.

Learn EVERYTHING you can with this grande. A poster above
gave you a suggestion that ties into a massive principle.

You spent 10% of your initial money. What was your thinking?
Flesh that out. When working with a finite resource how
you allocate it matters. What made you choose the domain
you chose?

Anytime I start a biz I want to know my exit options. So I ask this
question of myself: How can I "brand" create a site at the
most basic level that at least allows me to sell the site/research/
keyword list/etc off so I can recoup my initial investment.

Then I am out time but my knowledge has increased.

Congrats on taking action. You are ahead of the curve on that.
 
To respond to all your posts, I'd like to start off by staying thanks. Now in order for you to better understand what I did, here's my side of the story.

I signed up for one year hosting under the impression that hostgator was a reputable company. The initial investment in hosting is big, but I like to work under the motto play big or go home. Now I'm not saying that I want to spend all my money at once, but I am hoping to get big in affiliate marketing. In order to maintain all the sites and projected projects, I decided to go ahead and spend money on a year of hosting as a cushion for failure and a motivation to not give up after a few weeks.

As for the domain, I paid for the name and to not disclose private information. Hopefully I didn't overpay too much, and if I did please correct me.

As for today, I didn't really do that much. I had to go to work and chilled afterwards, but did manage to find and read good articles on ecigs, which took me about two hours. Luckily, I've scheduled all of tomorrow for developing my site.

Now if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it. I'm looking to upload folders to my host instead of each individual file. What program do you use for ftp, and how efficient is it?
________________________________________________
Once again, BIG THANKS. Also jamesh, congratulations on your 2,000 post - even though it is probably meaningless to you, it does help me out a lot. Thank you.
 
I'm in high school too and I love to see other high schoolers on here. PM me if you got any questions, want any assistance or anything.
 
I wouldn't worry about the year long hosting cost at hostgator, if they go under it will be a pretty big shock to many people in the hosting and affiliate business. Did you use the 20% off coupon on top of the yearly fee? BEACH I think the code was, never pay full price. Next host see if they have an affiliate program and sign up for an account under your ID to save some bucks, also scour webhostingtalk.com for specials if you didn't know about it.

The cost of entry these days is nothing compared to a decade ago so you're quite lucky. Don't put all your effort into hostgator sites though, spread some content around to some free blog providers and other web 2.0 providers. Have full control over your money site but push some other avenues, cast a wide net.

Don't worry about the domain name pricing with whois privacy, yeah the guys who have thousands of names get special pricing, you're starting out so even godaddy with coupons is reasonable enough as you probably won't get a name yanked for accusations of spamming/squatting etc. To compare the cheapest place I know with domain privacy is $7.49 but you need to be able to show volume. That's for a publicly available registrar for 2k-10k names and isn't going to run off tomorrow, you might be able to get somethign cheaper when GoDaddy runs coupons.

FTP
CuteFTP, WS FTP, Filezilla or even windows ftp folders (open windows explorer and type ftp://accountname@yourdomain.com ). When you upload, anything you put in public_html or htdocs is what goes onto your website.
Are you planning on using pre-made or basic html sites or are you going to put up a wordpress or other content management system (CMS)?

You can also use free sites to push your affiliate stuff or link to your money site, not everything has to cost money to start.
 
Thanks for the list of programs. I'm actually looking to do joomla, though I heard that it's a lot harder to learn. You think that I should buy a book and try to learn joomla, or is it better to just stick to wordpress? From my understanding, wordpress is better for seo, but when it comes to article and ppc campaigns, it doesn't really matter what template you use. Any thoughts on this?
 
Joomla isn't bad but Wordpress has caught the attention of online marketers. Main difference from my usage of both is joomla is for more static sites if you have well defined "Category -> sub category -> content" structure or if you are going for a real business/corporate website. Wordpress is proven in the online marketing space to be easy to use.

Joomla also has a weird past, splitting from mambo years ago that caused a rift in the community that I don't think either ever recovered from. Go to the forums and see what the documentation is like, if you do end up needing a book just to use it then it probably is more trouble than it's worth.

There are hundreds of content management systems out there opensourcecms.com has most listed if you want to play around with live systems before installing them so you can see how the admin side works etc.

SEO wise just because you are thinking bum and PPC doesn't mean your site should handicap itself.
 
chatmasta said:
You can get a domain + free one year private whois at namecheap for 8.88 after coupons.
Click to expand...

$8.81 when I did it (SWITCH2NC or solarsea)

Godaddy usually have that beat, some 6.99 .com coupons supposedly floating around and privacy reg discounts around as well, luck of the draw with how their coupons stack though. GoDaddy are a pain to game though but if someone really wants to get the cheapest they do good discounts on cross-sells.

Anyway Lebron shouldn't dwell on it too much, he knows about the cheaper ones now but for this first one it's fine I think (just transfer it at least 60 days before expiry). For anyone looking for coupons/discounts for hosting and domains hit up retailmenot.com fatwallet.com and webhostingtalk.com

I don't spend much time keeping track of coupons so there might be cheaper again, I get $7.49 all day long with free privacy regs from Fabulous or simply reg under my enom account where I have sub-accounts getting at least $1-4 commission per domain sold. People have to work out what is the best deal for them and sometimes it's not the cheapest option. If you would trust a Chinese company then cnobin.com also has some good rates I used to do bulk through them but it just felt weird but they've been going since 2002.
 
Time for my daily update:

I watched a couple tutorials on how to build a site and basically learned how to use ftp (which sadly took me over an hour to fully understand). After that, I tried to get working, but was sad to find out that my site wasn't pointing at my nameservers, which I assumed it would since I registered it through hostgator. So I pointed to the ns and was told that it'd take between 24-48 hours for the server to propogate.

So with my plans for the day ruined, I went ahead and studied a little bit of joomla which should help in a day or two. Afterwards, I researched "e-cigs" and started writing content. I finished writing two articles and then went ahead downloaded a powerarticlerewriter trial (thanks to the thread in content marketing). Using the program, I was able to spin each article 30 times, for a total of 60 articles.

And just now, I've compiled a list of every article site out there (most of with I found in the buy/sell forum). So for my daily noob question: should I send in all of the articles to the different sites at once? Or should I wait and send 5, 10, 20 each day?

Thanks for reading.
 
Nameservers usually don't take the the full 24-48 hours to propogate, it's worth checking after a few hours to see if they have. As others have said, start with Wordpress, not Joomla, seriously. I would look into other link building methods besides just article marketing.
 
lebron said:
Time for my daily update:

I watched a couple tutorials on how to build a site and basically learned how to use ftp (which sadly took me over an hour to fully understand). After that, I tried to get working, but was sad to find out that my site wasn't pointing at my nameservers, which I assumed it would since I registered it through hostgator. So I pointed to the ns and was told that it'd take between 24-48 hours for the server to propogate.

So with my plans for the day ruined, I went ahead and studied a little bit of joomla which should help in a day or two. Afterwards, I researched "e-cigs" and started writing content. I finished writing two articles and then went ahead downloaded a powerarticlerewriter trial (thanks to the thread in content marketing). Using the program, I was able to spin each article 30 times, for a total of 60 articles.

And just now, I've compiled a list of every article site out there (most of with I found in the buy/sell forum). So for my daily noob question: should I send in all of the articles to the different sites at once? Or should I wait and send 5, 10, 20 each day?

Thanks for reading.
Click to expand...
You're progressing pretty fast, keep it up. BTW what content marketing thread are your referring to?
 
Alright, so I went away for a little to work on a project. I have a site up with the LP, but the thing is that it loads too slow. In simple terms, is there any way for me to fix my page? brettfavreminnesota.com
 
Ok so i took a screenshot of your website as I see it (Firefox 3.5 on w7 @1900x1080 resolution).

brettfavre.png


How did you build your website? Have you used an automated tool to generate it? As you can see in the screenshot, your website is totally off-center (it probably looks better on lower resolutions).

You should either learn html/css to build the websites yourself, or use a better tool to generate them :)

Also, to answer your question: your site loads pretty slowly because of the images. Try to compress them to make them load faster.
 
I used an html monster template to build the site. I already went ahead and compressed the images, but it still loads slowly. As for it being on the side, that was part of the template, and no, I have no idea on how to make it go in the center. So other than compressing the images (which I have already done, maybe incorrectly?), is there any way for me to make the site load quicker without changing up the css too much? Or should I just strip down the site and build a new lp? Thanks.
 
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