By admin | August 15, 2009
Search Engine Land had a nice, tongue-in-cheek post How To Be A PPC Pansy: 5 Tips To Weaken Your Campaigns
According to this - I was a PPC Pansy for about a week recently as took an expensive keyphrase out of rotation in an AdWords campaign. It was THE keyphrase that we finally got #1 in Google for after a 3 month climb.
Why pay for AdWords traffic when we already owned the #1 spot?
3 reasons:
1) As the article mentions, some people still click on the ad.
2) Sales funnel. Our AdWords point to dedicated landing pages for a clear conversion path, whereas the site itself serves several purposes for sales, support and other services.
3) I foolishly turned off the phrase match version of the term. Which meant that any variant, longer-tail queries that had the term at its core would also not show.
Thankfully I realized this lapse of reason in a relatively timely manner and was able to correct. My pride and the account is still intact.
Of course, if I had not realized it before I read this…. well, I’d be driving the breadtruck.
By admin | August 15, 2009
Well, I didn’t really succeed this month, though I do think I am in a better position than last time.
Once again, work got hectic and you know the rest.
But on Augst 13 I made my first affiliate commission for $50.
How? Well, it really wasn’t through crafty online marketing, but more along the lines of finding ways to make money on your won resources.
I decided to get rid of an old reseller account I had and just let the owners of on of the sites I had been hosting ofr free for 3 years that it would be time to move to an inexpensive paid hosting service. I sent them the link to the service (an affilate link, mind you) and they signed up. Easy $50 commission.
Plus, in moving all of my accounts off the old hosting account I’m also freeing up an additional $20/month.
So, even though it wasn’t a pure revenue through online marketing, it does show that there may be other options for finding additional revenue that we might not be thinking about while we are chasing the other affiliate or AdSense commissions.
A while ago, I tried a project I dubbed “30×3″ that didn’t go that well. The concept was simple:
Spend 30 minutes a day for 30 days and earn $30 by building and promoting websites.
Didn’t do well the first go around, mainly because I knew what I wanted to do but didn’t really have a plan on how to do it.
What’s changed? Well, I did learn a few things the first go round - like several things not to do and picked up a few other ideas since then.
Oh and a more specific plan, which I’ll elaborate on as the month goes on.
So it begins again….
Day 1.
$0.00
By admin | December 21, 2008
photo by GlueMoon
Status Report:
Day 21 - 2008/12/21
Revenue: $0.03
No real progress on the monetary side and I really shouldn’t have expected anything else.
Though the main point of this experiment was to test out some different theories, I didn’t go into it with any sort of plan beyond the very vague “update and promote”. Not the most detailed attack plan and so far that kind of planning has generated the kind of results one would expect: None.
Now that is not to say that I haven’t been learning. First, I learned I need to have an actionable plan to follow and execute. If my goal was to learn what works and what doesn’t I would need to do it from a scientific method perspective (Variant A against Control B) and measure the results.
But I approached it from more of a spaghetti method- throw it against the wall and see what sticks. This will tell you when the spaghetti is done, but won’t do you any good in the future unless if you also paid attention to other things that got it there (how long the water was boiling, the temperature, how much water how much pasta etc.)
“So what have you been doing?”
Well, most of my time lately has been spent participating in the Sitepoint forums (and if you came here from there and are thinking I was only there for the sig file link, please look past the number of posts take a look at how long I’ve been a member.) I ended up back there looking for some promotional ideas and decided to hang around - forgot how much I liked participating in the community and since they have forums dedicated to all sorts of different aspects of what I do, so it is a great resource to not only find answers but also to help others.
Yet, the month isn’t over and there may still be some hope, it’s only $30 bucks after all. Or actually $29.97.
By admin | December 9, 2008
Jsut logged into some AdWords accounts and noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a new block on the bottom left of the Account Snapshot page with some very handy at a glance information.
Looked all over for more info on this and could never find anything about this.
Is it new? Or have I been missing out on this the whole time?
I swear it wasn’t there last week.
