I’ve been reading a lot lately (online of course), and I stumbled across an amazing document that put in writing many concepts I plan to implement in my internet business.

The Business Manifesto by Rich Schefren talks about the overwhelming amount of work it takes to manage an internet business. Internet entrepreneurs have to be proficient at a boggling array of knowledge and skills. Or do they?

Schefren introduces us to some concepts that are fairly common in corporate environments namely process maps and standard work. A process map is much like a flow chart and visually describes all the processes required to complete a task. Standard work dictates that a process should be performed the same way every time.

By documenting a process with a map and following standard work for that process, you can easily implement the process multiple times (think scalability), and you can identify areas to improve the process. After all, you can’t improve a process if you don’t know what it is.

Rich describes process mapping and standard work for internet business much more eloquently than I can, so I recommend you read the Business Manifesto here.

I just got an email from the Internet Marketing Center that I had to tell you about.

They have 267 copies of his step-by-step “Insider Secrets” course that are slightly damaged and are not quite pristine enough to sell at the regular price.

So…they are selling them at a huge discount of $100 off the normal selling price. I paid $179 for the “Insider Secrets” course (it’s sitting next to me at my desk), and I can tell you this is a steal. This is one of the most thorough, step-by-step internet marketing courses you can buy. I feel comfortable recommending the course at the regular price, but the discount makes the buying decision a no brainer.

The course contains 850+ pages, plus DVDs, CDs, booklets, and much more.

Just in case you haven’t heard of “Insider Secrets” before, here’s what you need to know:

This Internet marketing “bible” has been the best-selling
guide to how to grow your own money-making Internet business
from scratch for more than 10 years running for one reason –
the strategies inside work! — and it’s been updated with
brand new strategies for 2007.

If you’re willing to overlook the slight cosmetic damage, you can get the exact same information for a fraction of the regular price that many, many people (myself included) paid.

This offer is strictly first come, first served basis, so hurry, before those 267 copies are gone. Go to:
http://www.marketingtips.com/hugediscount/t/976620

I know many people wonder how long it takes to create a profitable affiliate business. If I told you one month, would you believe me? Skeptics and believers alike read on and you will be educated and inspired by Googlelady.

Googlelady is doing a case study called How to Make Money Online in 3 Months and outlines the rules of the study in that post from her blog. Once you read that post you’ll find that her results through November are very impressive.

I highly recommend that you read each post, but I’ll summarize her results: she made $1,448.75 in affiliate earnings in November from a $100 investment in October using primarily social networking to drive traffic. Googlelady updates her progress in these posts:

Domain Name, Hosting and Blog Installation
My First Sale with Amazon
The Plan
Getting Traffic Social Network Buttons Installed
My First Big Amazon Sale Item $130
Affiliate Marketing Free Keyword Research Tools
Search Engine & Directory Submission
Case Study Earning Report

While I’m in the process of putting together an authority site, Googlelady is ringing the register. Totally awesome.

I’ve learned a lot and been inspired by Googlelady’s case study. I look forward to more insightful updates in the coming months. I’ll try to update you here, but you could also subscribe to her RSS feed

Stay tuned.

There is a huge amount of discussion about Google quality score, but I have news for you…getting a great quality score is not that hard.

In fact, I took a campaign from zero to hero in 5 minutes. See for yourself:

This campaign is actually one keyword phrase that I was doing testing on. As you can see, the impressions were effectively zero, and I couldn’t do ad variation testing when no one was looking at the ads. Prior to the changes, the quality score was “OK”.

So, I decided to tweak my landing page a bit to see if I could increase my quality score. As a basis for my tweaks, I used some very simple SEO concepts.

The first thing I checked was the frequency and location of the keywords on the landing page. One keyword was not even present, so I added that where it made sense. I also wanted the first two keywords of the phrase in the page title or near the top. Changing the title didn’t make any sense, so I created a header just below the title which was the first two keywords.

Next, I checked for general frequency of the keywords. Actually, the frequency was pretty good, so I only modified a couple locations where I could get the first and second keyword together. Again, I wanted the text to be natural not “keyword stuffing”.

That was it. A few minor additions and positioning changes, and I was finished. It only took about 5 minutes, and believe me, I am not speedy at editing my pages. The only thing left was to see how it affected the campaign.

I checked the quality score this morning, and it was now “Great”. I kept checking the impressions, but saw no activity at all. I finally noticed that the date range for the reporting was set to last week. I changed the repoting period to this month and, shazzam, impressions are through the roof. Now that is cool!

Achieving a good quality score is not all that difficult if you make sure your keywords and landing page are in alignment. If you follow the simple concepts above, you’ll have a good chance of increasing a poor quality score.

Next on my list is ad variation testing, because honestly, the CTR is horrid. One thing at a time.

Stay tuned.

Update

Here is an update of the graph with two full days of activity. The first day was a half day since I made the change at about 10 pm: