Category: Blog

Artwork courtesy of Beeple.

SEO has generated a good amount of visibility in Google search engines for me over the last few years…

I’ve also made some nice affiliate sales by ranking many of my blog posts on page 1…

The tools I’m discussing in this post are ones that I actually use for myself each month…

So this isn’t going to be a post about 101 SEO tools or anything like that…

I’ve broken the tools down into two categories…

Free Google SEO tools and other free SEO tools that I feel are the best at getting the job done…

Artwork from original Paperboy Arcade

Do you spend time reflecting on your progress as a self-employed entreprenuer?

I’ve spent some time reflecting today on how far I’ve come…

…and how far I still have to go…

It got me thinking about my first taste of working for myself by delivering newspapers in 2012…

Its amazing to me how I’m even writing this blog post about how I’ve achieved over $20k in affiliate income. 4 years ago I was just trying to sustain my little freelance web design business and taking whatever work I could…

I was barely making $20k a year with my business and my wife was also working full time…

A fellow web designer told me about a new hosting company called MidPhase that was paying him $100 for each person he got to sign up…

I signed up using his affiliate link and he confirmed the company sent $100 to his PayPal account…

At that moment I was hooked…

Artwork courtesy of Beeple.

Sometimes in order to better understand how a online marketing strategy works, its best to look at yourself and see what causes you to buy a particular product or service…

Over the last year, I’ve been studying a new online marketing strategy from a guy named Mike Caldwell who was one of the first ClickFunnels Certified Consultants.

It just so happens that I recently invested in a $297 weight loss course by Thomas Delauer to help achieve my personal goals…

So, I decided it would be a great marketing exercise to see if the principles I’ve been learning were used on me to buy this course…

Artwork courtesy of Beeple

I’ve been asked recently to explain the difference between a sales funnel and a website…

To be quite honest, it took me some time to come up with an analogy that makes sense…

If there is one thing I’ve been learning as I continue to follow Russell Brunson’s strategies it’s to avoid what he calls “techno-babble”…

Techno-babble is industry specific terms that most consumers don’t understand or use in everyday language…

One such term is a “Sales Funnel”…

You may have heard the term before, but do you know what it is?

To understand what sales funnels are, it’s important first to understand what traditional websites are…

Let me tell you a quick story about how I spent the first five months of 2016 going to depression counseling and how a single book helped turn things around…

It had been about a year and a half since I decided to go to work for myself full time and build my web development and design business…

I had a few great clients, and in 2015 it seemed I was heading in the right direction and I was making pretty good money…

However, I was struggling to maintain so many projects to keep the bills paid…

I had previously sworn to myself that I would never again put all my eggs in one basket after being let go from a good paying job in 2009…

But now I was spread too thin, and I just wasn’t able to keep up…

I was trying different things including starting this blog to build my email list and generate recurring revenues (more on that in a minute)…

As things started becoming too much for me, I started getting more and more depressed and scared I just couldn’t cut it as an entrepreneur…

I wasn’t a pleasant person to be around at home, and that’s when my wife suggested I get some counseling…

So you’ve got a website set up and you’re tracking traffic data with Google Analytics. After a couple of months, you start noticing increased traffic in your Google Analytics, so you go and check out your referral sources and notice some sites you’ve never heard of sending you a lot of traffic. You tell yourself traffic is a good thing, right?

Well, I hate to break the bad news to you, but you might be seeing what is known as Referrer Spam. Those sites you’ve never heard of are likely spam sites sending you bogus traffic. Other names for this are Ghost Spam and Referral Spam.