Final Thoughts on “10 Day”, go PHILLY! and more

Before I do anything, I want to give a big shout out to my favorite Basketball Team, the Philadelphia 76ers.  Today, they upset the Detroit Pistons 90 to 86 in game one of their 7 game series.  It’s been great watching the sixers this season.  A lot of people had them pegged to finish dead last before the season began, and for awhile, it looked like that might happen.  However, they really pulled it together.  Unlike a lot of more talented teams, this edition of the Sixers really play as a team.  They just don’t quit.  At one point in today’s game, it looked like Detroit was just going to run away with it, but Philly just kept coming.  In my opinion, if they were playing Cleveland or Orlando, I bet they could pull the upset.  Detroit though, is just too talented.  They took Philadelphia lightly this time, and I doubt they’ll do it again.  At the very least, they won’t be talking to former teammates during timeouts, like they did today.

To business.  Here are my final thoughts on the “10 Day Cash Secret”.  It is interesting, and it’s worth a try.  However, at this point I’ve created 10 websites using this system, and I’ve made $4.78 in total.  Not exactly a great ROI.  How to explain the discrepancy between my results, and the results that Neil achieved?  Well, I can think of a couple:

1) With the site that Neil set up for Tesco, he was actually able to use the Tesco brand name in his blog.  I believe Tesco is a fairly big name in the UK.  If would be like being able to use a brand name like “Safeway” or “Walmart” in North America.  I suspect this gives his blog an added bit of credibility.  When you click on this Tesco blog, you are taken right to Tesco direct.
2) Like I said, I created 10 blog / datafeed stores to test this out.  However, this is probably too many, and I was trying to use datafeeds that were too large.  I suspect this is why I can no longer get the sites to update automatically.  If you were going to try this, I would recommend only setting up one or two sites, with a max of 3000 products in the datafeed.

Although I haven’t achieved any kind of great sales with this system, there is still potential with them as far as being satellite sites for your main websites.  For example, if you own a gardening website, you might want to set up a datafeed store with just gardening equipment.  The datafeed store would support your main website, and vice versa.

If you’re interested in checking out the sites I set up using “The 10 Day Cash Secret”, here they are:

Bestcatanddogstuff.com
Comicstatuesreplicas.com
Swimmingpoolsandpumps.com
Wallandceilinglighting.com
Orientalandpersianrugs.com
Networkitsystems.com
Luggageandtravelgear.com
Indoorandoutdoorfurniture.com
Bestguitarampsandkeyboards.com
Bathroomtoolsandpumps.com

If I suddenly start to make a lot of money from any of these sites (and all of them have been up for less than a month), I’ll let you know.

I think what I’m going to focus on for the next couple of weeks is video blogging, or making viral video’s for youtube.  In an earlier post, I wrote about and posted this video, which concerned the falling American dollar.  What really caught my eye, and what I’ve been mulling over, is that one video had something like 200,000 views since it went live on April 4.  If you create an interesting video, and it’s promoted by a social network, it can really drive traffic to a site.  It just looks very interesting.

As well, tomorrow (April 21) I’m going to have my first mentoring session with Aaron (unless it really is Yuri the Pig Farmer).  I’ll have to report on that as well.

To our Success!

- Dave

My Experiences with the 10 Day Cash Secret (so far…)

In my last post, I wrote about Neil Shearing’s 10 Day Cash Secret. From everything he wrote about on his blog, it seemed really promising, so I decided to purchase it and try it out.

The first blog / datafeed store I set up was at www.bestcatanddogstuff.com. I found it fairly easy to set up, as Neil created these online video’s of himself setting up a website. So, you get to watch what he does step by step in order to see how he does it. Having said this, however, I did have some trouble getting the CRON jobs set up correctly. A CRON job is a unix command/function that is critical to get the 10 Day cash secret to work properly. After several communications with my web hosts technical support, I was able to get it to work (or so I thought, more on this later).

I found a datafeed related to pet supplies, and uploaded it to my website. At first, it didn’t seem to work as promised. The 10 day plug in was publishing All of the posts at once, and not one every 5 minutes like Neil promised. I sent an e-mail to Neil, and he informed me that I needed to change the publishing interval due to the time zone I live in (I’m in Vancouver, so I’m in the pacific time zone, as opposed to England). So, instead of setting up the time intervals for each post as 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, etc, I needed to set them as now, 420 minutes, 425 minutes, etc. I’m not exactly sure why this worked, but it did.

So, my blog / datafeed store started to publish these posts every 5 minutes. What happened? Well, this did result in search engine spider’s crawling my site like I have never seen before. I had something like 300 visitors from google bot, yahoo bot, etc, on the first day. I was pretty impressed. Within a week, I had a few natural searches coming from google to this site. Not bad, I thought.

Now, here is where I may have made a mistake. After allowing the blog to publish new posts every 5 minutes, I thought it might be wise if I changed the publishing frequency to once a day. My reasoning was that I thought I might be punished for spamming if I allowed the 5 minute publishing to continue. Note that Neil did not recommend to do this. I did this on my own. It could have been mistake.

The other thing I did that might have been a mistake was that I was very aggressive in uploading datafeeds. On a shared server, I think Neil recommends a 1000. Well, I uploaded something like 10000 to the server. This seemed to work fine, but on March 31, the posts just stopped publishing. I’m not sure if this is related to the amount of posts I had uploaded, or some quark with the 10 day system where it has trouble with publishing posts between months. I’ll note, however, that I did set up other 10 day cash secret websites. All of them seem to have stopped publishing on March 31. Perhaps it is a better idea to upload smaller datafeeds (1000) and let those run? As well, perhaps it is ill advised to allow those feeds to run over a change in the month?

One thing that is a pain is that when you have a datafeed that stops publishing, your blog is left with thousands of unpublished posts that are hard to get rid off. This is another advantage to keeping your datafeeds on the smaller side, in case something goes wrong.

Today, I tried to do two things with my 10 day cash secret websites:

1) At www.bestcatanddogstuff.com I uploaded another smaller datafeed in an attempt to get it publishing posts again. So far, however, . I’m not sure why this is, as it did work before. It could be due to the fact that there are ait does not seem to be working whole bunch of unpublished posts in the blog, I’m not really sure. If you check this site out and you see an umbrella as the last post, the new datafeed I uploaded isn’t being used.

2) I recreated from scratch another site I created at www.swimmigpoolsandpumps.com. Again, although I uploaded a brand new datafeed and did everything the same as last time, it doesn’t seem as if the new datafeed is publishing. The only difference I can see is that this blog is using wordpress 2.5, as opposed to wordpress 2.3. Could this have made a difference?

Regardless, I’m a little bit frustrated at the moment. Tomorrow, I plan on revisiting another one of these sites that I set up in an attempt to get it publishing every 5 minutes like it used to. It used to work, why doesn’t it now?

Oh, and do you want to know how much money I’ve made so far? I have one sale from the cat and dog site, for a total commission of $4.78. Hmmmmm.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow, I suspect.

- Dave

Is there a 10 Day Cash Secret for easy internet wealth?

Today, I’m going to talk a little about my experiences so far with Neil Shearing’s “10 Day Cash Secret”.  So, just what is the 10 day cash secret? Well, Neil Shearing is an internet marketer from England who has developed a wordpress plug-in that will automatically load a merchant’s datafeed at specific time intervals.  For those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t, until very recently) there are many merchants who offer product datafeeds that affiliates can use to create online stores.  These datafeeds are usually csv files of some sort, which usually contains the merchants entire catalog.  You modify the datafeed with your affiliate ID.  If someone then clicks on a product from the store you’ve created, they’ll be taken to the merchant’s store.  If they buy something there, you will get a commission from that merchant.

What Neil has done is to use wordpress to create these online stores very quickly.  Furthermore, you can set it up so that a new entry is put on the blog every 5 minutes.  The advantage to this is that search engines love fresh content from blogs.  Typically, they will rank fresh content from a blog higher than they usually would, for a period of time.  So, with your blog / data feed store updating every 5 minutes, search engine spiders will be crawling your site within hours.  In theory, you will rank highly in the search engines, and people will come to your site.  If they click on anything, and then buy something, you’ll make some money.  You don’t have to worry about search engine optimization, ppc ads, or anything else.  Your blog / datafeed store with its updated content will do it all for you.

The example Neil gives in his sales letter is this site:

http://winebuyersuk.com/
He set up this site, and within 10 days, had his first sale.  Within the first month of this site being live, it did $3851.30 in sales.  Now, this is total sales, not commissions.  However, let’s say he’s getting a 10% commission.  Making $385 a month from a site as simple as this isn’t bad at all, is it?  I mean, if this works, all you’d need to do is to create another 10 sites, and you’d be sitting pretty, right?  Well, I thought this looks interesting, so I paid $154 dollars for the basic plan (you can pay $300 for the deluxe plan, which includes direct e-mail support from Neil) and got to work.  So what happened?

Tune in tomorrow to find out

To our Success!

- Dave

Yuri the Pig Farmer and the Sneaky Blog Trick

Ok, first things first.  In my previous post, I mentioned the comment I got by some guy claiming to be one Aaron Abber.  He was going to start a mentoring program, and was looking for mentorees (I doubt that’s a word, but I’ll use it anyway).  The strange thing was, he was offering his program for free.  I won’t go over the whole post again, you can read it just below if you want to.  My question was, is this legit?  Or was “Aaron” really the notorious Russian internet scam artist Yuri the pig farmer?  (whose picture I have managed to get for this blog.  I had to pull in a few favors from Interpol to do this.  The bureaucrats at Interpol didn’t tell me WHICH guy was Yuri though.  Damn bastard desk jockeys …)

Anyway, so far, this seems to be legit.  The first meeting is going to be this Monday at 7pm eastern time.  Aaron left a comment on the previous post.  He seems to have a sense of humor, which is a good thing.  This could be fun (or else old Yuri is a lot smarter than even I gave him credit for)

As far as the site I set up using niche inspector (to find the niche) and Xsite Pro (to actually build the thing), I signed up for an affiliate program today specializing in acne products.  The only problem though is that I need to fill out a W-9 form to be accepted, which is a United States Tax form.  I explained to the good people there that I’m a Canadian citizen, living in Canada, so is this really necessary?  Apparently, it is.  Speaking about bureaucrats, hello IRS.

As far as my sneaky trick to promote this site, well, it may not be that sneaky after all.  My plan was to set up a wordpress blog on a subdomain of www.acne-solution-products.com at www.acneproducts.acne-solution-tips.com.  I would then use the “10 day secret” wordpress plugin that Neil Shearing made to feed a merchants datafeed into this blog.  The way this works is that the blog is updated every 5 minutes automatically with product posts.  When this is done, search engine spiders absolutely swarm the site.  I thought this might help get the main site indexed that much faster.  However, although I have the blog up and running, I’m not sure how to set the cron job for the subdomain.  We’ll have to see.  I’m going to talk more about the 10 day secret in a future post (in fact, maybe I’ll do it tomorrow).

To our Success!

- Dave