Archive for January, 2007

Update – Adwords campaign

January 11, 2007 at 10:23 pm · Filed under Wealthy Affiliate

Google is weird. My Adwords campaigns will sit there, for two days, with not a single impression. Then suddenly 1,400 impressions and 46 clicks! And $40 cost to me!

But no sales.  And I’m not sure I expected any. I’m still trying to just get something started, regardless of its success or failure.

I may pause this campaign soon as well, and begin doing more research. I’ve been spending the last few days reading the forums at Wealthy Affiliate. Holy shit! So much more information than you could ever get from a stinking ebook. ANY ebook. Forget Adwords Miracle. Travis from BumMarketingMethod.com frequents the forums, and he is INCREDIBLY helpful, and I’m already getting some new ideas, which I’ll expound upon in my next post.

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Whew! Long night!

January 10, 2007 at 8:00 am · Filed under Website Building

Spent alllll night making a “how to build a website” website: http://www.underground-trading.com

I’ve now got it running for variations on the term “building a website.” It’s a complete guide to making a webpage using open source templates and NVU, and then an affiliate link to Dreamhost for a commission. If they sign up with cheap Dreamhost, I get $97. There’s a residual option as well, but it’s 25% of the $8 hosting fee. Too measly in my opinion, allthough it could snowball over time, I suppose.

I have eight ad groups running in Adwords, all variations on the main term, and I have eight different variations on the homepage that they link to, with keywords matching the ad groups. For example, design, create and make all link to variations on the web page that emphasize those terms. This is hopefully to keep in line with Google’s relevancy algorithm.

Let this run for awhile.

As for the seduction ad campaign, not even a single impression yet, despite Google’s traffic estimator telling me I should have 60 to 90 CLICKS a day. !!!!!! Ah well, that was more a way of getting my feet wet to get over the initial hump of starting.

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Another Niche to Mess Around In

January 9, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under Niches

All right, web hosting seems like a good affiliate way of making money. Many times you’ll get paid over and over again as long as the person you referred stays signed up. A percentage of their monthly fee. Unfortunately, this makes it very competitive as well.

So, I’m approaching it from the “consumer needs a problem solved” view. Consumer needs a website for their business, hobby, whatever. How does consumer do this? Consumer doesn’t know. Consumer types “build a website” or some such term into Google.  They see a link to my Ad on the side about free guide to building a free webpage.  In this link they’ll find a very quick guide to building a website, and after that, a suggestion for web hosting.

So no bidding on any terms to do with “web hosting.” We’ll see how this goes.

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Experimenting

January 8, 2007 at 11:02 pm · Filed under Adwords

OK, it’s time to get my feet wet. I’m going to play around with direct linking; this means putting your affiliate link directly into an Adwords ad, with no landing page in between. The problem is that Google only allows one display URL per keyword. So if the merchant or another affiliate are already bidding on a particular term, I won’t be able to do the same. Or more accurately I’ll have to bid more than them to “win,” and I’m trying to be profitable here. So I’ll have to use less popular products.

So, I’m going to gank a niche right from Adwords Miracle that Chris uses as an example: seduction. I’m stealing this niche from his book to get over the initial fear of starting.

I’ll be bidding on terms related to getting a date, attracting women, and so on, and direct link to three different seduction ebooks from Clickbank.

I’m adding three keyword groups. The best way to use Adwords is to separate your keywords into related groups, so I might have one group like this:

  • spyware
  • download spyware
  • spyware removal

and then another one like this:

  • computer problems
  • problem with computer being slow

and so on. This allows me to better target my ad. Even though the product is the same for all, I can write the first ad to include the keyword “spyware,” and the second ad to include the keyword “computer problems.” The more targeted the ad, the higher the Click Through Rate, or how many searchers actually click on my ad. The higher the CTR, the lower my bids can be. So I’m also starting with an expensive 20 cents per click to keep my ad high, more users will click on it, my CTR will be high, and I should be able to slowly lower the cost per click while being able to keep the same position.

So I’m running a campaign with a few broad keywords, right now only about four terms that get a LOT of searchers per month, and sending them directly through to one of three seduction products.

I’ll write another post when I see what happens.

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Looking for that Niche

January 8, 2007 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Niches

OK, this is a completely different nut to crack than SEO. And a pretty large learning curve as well. After spending months learning about directories, and articles, and backlinks, and anchor text, and H1 headers, I now turn my attention to ad groups, and gravity, and broad match, and of course, the daily budget.

Ug. I may be stupid for trying to get into this game when I have no money, but hell, even in the SEO world I spend lots on paid directories and article and link outsourcing, so in the short term this may actually be even cheaper. Too bad I still owe that Indian firm $250 for doing my recip. linking for me…

Anyway, I’ve finished reading Adwords Miracle and I’m getting closer to actually doing something. According to Chris McNeeney, the author of the book, soon-to-be-hot Clickbank products must be chosen. The book actually contains a pretty “scientific” way of finding Clickbank stuff that’s on the way up. Products that haven’t reached market saturation, but are becoming more and more popular. Already more than I ever learned in the past when I briefly played around with Adwords/Clickbank. Back then I just picked something at random.

The niche-picking is different too. In natural search content sites, you pick a good “interesting” niche where people are looking for information. Preferrably something somewhat interesting to you because you’re going to have to write a ridiculous amount of informational articles on the subject. You’re gonna be in it for the long haul, and you’re gonna become an “authority” on the subject.

In the Adwords/Clickbank game, it’s more: go where the money is. Period.

You have to cover and hopefully make more than your ad costs.

So, that said, I’m perusing Clickbank for “hot” markets to promote, following his guidelines on picking a good product. I’m using www.cbtrends.com to see which products are on the way up.

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First Things First – Adwords Miracle

January 7, 2007 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Adwords Miracle

OK. So I purchased Adwords Miracle. It’s four ebooks and three camtasia videos. It seems to be one of the more in-depth Adwords courses, especially if you want to promote Clickbank. I discovered it through Andre Chaperon’s blog, where he does his own case study of a Clickbank campaign. Mine will be similar and in fact I’ll use his techniques on my campaign. You can check his out here: http://www.andrechaperon.com/category/clickbank-case-study-1/page/2/

This is going to be a lot more work than it seems. People like the Rich Jerk say in their ebooks: well, you know, just write some quick reviews of Clickbank products and pay for the keywords and you’ll make money in no time!!

Sure. There’s SO much more to it than that. And the two above resources go into great detail about it.

So, first things first. I’m going to read every word of these books, and watch the videos. Not doing a thing before that.

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Transition from Content Site to Adwords

January 7, 2007 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Adwords

So, I’m going to try something. After focusing on building a content site for natural search rankings, and realizing that I only care about the money and not the topic, I’m going to do something that will probably turn out to be equally difficult.

Promoting products via Adwords.

Scary. Because I don’t have much money to spare. So I’m going to have to be diligent. I’m going to start by reading the hell out of the ebook Adwords Miracle.

This diary will track my efforts, and hopefully keep me motivated.

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What I’ve Learned About SEO

January 7, 2007 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Bitching, SEO

This is going to be stream-of-consciousness and unorganized as all hell. A brain dump. I just gotta vent.

I created a website. I finally did it. After months of reading about doing it, and reading about Seach Engine Optimization, I just did it.

Almost six months of adding content, submitting to the Yahoo Directory which cost me $299, submitting to smaller paid directories, writing articles and submitting them to ezinearticles and goarticles and articlecity and so on. I paid an Indian firm to do reciprocal linking for me.

And where am I?

A whopping 30 visitors a day. I refuse to monetize the site until I have more than that. During the link building process, I want to be taken seriously. In all fairness, I perhaps should be praising that amount of visitors. I restructured the site recently to be in compliance with the magic bullet known as “siloing.” Read about it on Charles Heflin’s site: http://www.seo2020.com

I’ve used a blog to create the site, and I’ve used Rapid Niche Websites to make it look like a real site. Why? Because if you blog and ping, you’ll get better search engine traffic. It’s another magic bullet. Read about it on Jeff Walter’s site: http://www.rapidnichewebsites.com

In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.

Not that I have anything against the above “gurus,” but it seems to me that they all make it seem so much more simple than it is. Siloing and blogging are not magic bullets. I don’t know that there IS a magic bullet.

But I digress. So restructuring left me with a lot of dead links in Google. Also, I’m in a VERY competitive health niche. And it’s “only” been six months. So perhaps 30 a day isn’t that bad.

But you know what? I don’t really care all that much about my site. It’s vaguely interesting to me; it’s not utterly painful to write about. But I just don’t care all that much. The ONLY thing I’ve EVER cared about is making money. In fact, I chose my health niche ONLY because of the high paying Adsense potential.

Is that really a reason to create a site? It’s a health niche, for godssake! I’ll be competing with the NIH! And doctors who do research! And hospitals! I have nothing new to contribute, except what I read on these sites THAT ALREADY EXIST!

I’ve found a few others out there trying to do what I’m trying to do, in the exact same niche. One guy has hundreds upon hundreds of articles submitted to hundreds upon hundreds of article directories. And yet, according to Alexa, which is very very rough admittedly, he’s getting a miniscule amount of traffic.

What the hell am I doing?!

How the heck am I going to get good, authority sites with .edu and .gov domains to link to me? I got all my information from THEM!! Ug!

My articles on ezinearticles aren’t going to boost my rankings unless a reputable site republishes them. BUT I HAVE NOTHING NEW TO SAY in this health niche. I haven’t done any research, and all my articles say are “the symptoms of blah blah blah are this and that.” Nobody’s going to care.

I’ll let it fester for a while. I’ll keep adding an occasional article.

But it irritates me that people like Colin McDougall can get top rankings for, of all things, “credit card applications.” !!!!!!!!! And you read his book, The VEO Report. He basically says just make a good site, and say something controversial, and engage in a little viral marketing; don’t submit too many articles to the article directories; buy a Yahoo submission.

And you pick apart his site. I found a few articles on Digg that were not digged because they were dry financial information. I found him in a few directories. Doesn’t seem like any huge PageRank sites linking to him when I use one of my myriad of research tools. He’s not saying anything controversial. He has two articles in ezinearticles.

BUT HE RANKS ON THE FIRST PAGE FOR THE TERM “credit card applications!!!” He’s getting good Alexa rankings! What the heck is he doing?! An “allinanchor:credit card applications” search brings up his site near the top of google. That means lots of sites are pointing to him with the term “credit card applications” in the link text. HOW?! WHERE?!

Are these people not telling us something in there ebooks?! I mean, if they were cloaking they obviously couldn’t reveal it. Maybe that’s it. Yeah.

I just don’t know. It’s all turning out to be more of a let down than I though it would be.

But that’s bringing me back to my main point: all I care about is making money. Because I’m broke and in debt, I can’t live where I want to, I can’t buy a Sony Reader, I can’t travel. I can’t do anything I truly want to do. Now give me money (that’s what I want), that’s what I want.

So if that’s the key, then shouldn’t I refocus my efforts? Shouldn’t I dump the idea of creating a content site? Should I try a different, more directly capitalistic approach?

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*sigh* What a completely wasted year

January 7, 2007 at 6:55 pm · Filed under Bitching

2006 didn’t exist for me. Really. I quit my job in January to try to start a business on Ebay, inspired by a piece of junk mail I got. The idea of working for myself is something that I had never given much thought; too hard, too expensive, too risky. But setting up a business on the internet is almost completely risk free. $10 a month here, $3 for a domain name there, and so on. I’m utterly stumped as to why I hadn’t thought of it before.

I bought a few ebooks to learn the ropes, and spent most of January and February trying to find a product source that was cheap enough to turn a profit on Ebay.

Ha!

Ebay prices are regularly less than wholesale prices. No matter how much I looked I just couldn’t figure out a way to make a profit. I’m sure I could have if I had kept at it, but…

A Yahoo Store! That was the answer, surely! In a Yahoo Store you can charge closer to retail prices because people aren’t there looking for a good deal on an auction; they simply want to buy something as in a brick-n-mortar store.

And perhaps it would have been the answer.

Until I ran across a tiny paragraph in a book called Yahoo Store Profits. It mentioned getting other people to promote your products for you, and paying them a commission, a finder’s fee if you will, if they refer a paying customer. In fact, the book went on to say, there are several people making a living from doing just that.

Hmmm. Really? I wonder what this is called? Ah, “affiliate marketing.” Now THERE’s a business I could enjoy. Set up a website, refer customers to a merchant, and get paid. No product sourcing, no customers to deal with, nothing to do once it’s set up and making money.

Easy, right?

Sometimes I think I may have been better off with that Yahoo store.

One year later and I still haven’t made a dime. The year was spent reading every ebook on affiliate marketing out there, and with each ebook saying: THIS is the ONE! This is it! The magic bullet! Finally I’m going to start making money.

I can’t believe a year has just gone by, and all it was filled with was me reading ebooks and forums. I worked briefly at Target. That’s where my life is now. 32, married, broke, and working at Target. All because of my faith in internet marketing.

At least I do have one website to show for it. But I still don’t know what I’m doing, and I have this HORRIBLE sense of procrastination.

I created this diary to log my marketing efforts; maybe it’ll help motivate, maybe it’ll just be a distraction. Who knows where the hell I’m going from here…

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