Archive for March, 2009

Affiliate Marketing – Dude where’s my Campaign.

Mar 24, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

Well I’m back with another minor status update. I have to say things have been quite interesting since the last time I posted. A couple of days ago I received my first EPN check, it was incredible small but hopefully only the first to many more.
I finally jumped out of my safe zone of running email and zip campaigns and ventured off to sale kitchen appliances. I must say I think I did fairly well. On this particular appliance I was selling the payout for a conversion was $11.25. I carefully selected a hand full of keywords and setup about 4 ads to rotate between. I try to make it a habit to create my campaigns and ads the night before so that all I have to do before leaving for work is un-pause everything. Well the morning I surprisingly had conversion within the first hour of running the campaign, my spend hadn’t reached $0.35 yet, sweet! I thought hell I must have finally done something right because the day had just started. Well that was the only conversion I had that day for that appliance but my zips and email campaigns continued to sale, so overall it was a pleasant day.The second day, the exact same thing happened, I had an early morning conversion before my spend reached $0.25. What the hell, who’s behind the curtain pulling the levers.

Big smiles where on my face, I was excited and was anxious to get home so that I could try and figure out how in the heck could I increase my traffic volume? Well later on that day I received a notice that they where pulling the kitchen appliance campaign, G-Wiz!
Lesson learned, don’t get too cozy with the campaigns your running thing can change at anytime.

Well here are my numbers for March 23, 2009

MTD Revenue: $88.40
MTD Spend: $28.01
MTD Profits: $60.39

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Crazy query in server log

Mar 18, 2009 Rants, Tweets

I was checking one of my sites server logs & found this crazy query
“?q=would you get a jail sentence if your 5 year old was missing and found by a river?” WTF

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Consumer gets Screwed

Mar 15, 2009 Rants, Tweets

It’s like the consumer gets screwed all the time, Interesting article about blowing your credit limit without spending it.
http://tinyurl.com/aa8orr

This is surely going under the Rant category.

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OMG this is tooooo funny

Mar 13, 2009 Tweets

OMG this is tooooo funny.

http://tinyurl.com/cnav7h

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FNBO Direct – Drops Rates Again

Mar 10, 2009 Tweets

I just received a email from my FNBO Direct Rate saving account, Rate drops again.. I swear this happens every month.. stop the pain!

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Affiliate Marketing – Catch Up

Mar 10, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

A couple of days have gone by now. I have been pretty busy with some other projects. I’m finally getting around to finding a web designer to work on one of my websites that I have had for more than 4 years now. Needless to say I’m pretty happy about this. We haven’t talked about pricing yet so this could all take a turn for the worst. Wish me luck.

My numbers below includes the dates from the March 5th through March 8th. I basically let my campaign run none stop over the weekend to see what kind of profit I could produce. Friday was actually good Saturdays was ok, and Sunday and Monday was pretty painful. I’m not sure if that’s a standard trend for the weekend or not, it would be nice to know. A marketer could run campaigns from Tuesday through Friday if these days have been tested and proven to be good converting days.

MTD Revenue: $36.05
MTD Spend: $14.40
MTD Profits: $21.65

So according to my calculations I’m behind. If my goal is to produce $3.30 a day then by the 8th day of the month I should be up to $26.40. I’m actually behind $4.75

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Affiliate Marketing – Slow Day

Mar 5, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

I have to make this a quick post, it’s late and I spent too much time working on code for this other project I have. Today wasn’t one of my best. I don’t understand yesterday was pretty good and I ran everything exactly as I did yesterday. I think it’s about time I changed it up perhaps there’s no more juice to squeeze out of the campaign I’m running. Today wasn’t a total failure but regarding my overall goal I think my MTD Profit should be $13.20 instead of $9.32

Well here are my numbers for March 4, 2009

Today Revenue: $2.30
Today Spend: $1.22
Profit: $1.08

MTD Revenue: $18.25
MTD Spend: $8.93
MTD Profits: $9.32

Oh yea last night before I went to bed I check the status of my eBay affiliate account and saw that I made a $5.29 commission.. I thought was pretty cool. I’m not sure if I’m going to add it to this total yet. This test was really to focus on my Paid Media efforts.

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Affiliate Marketing – Three is a crowd

Mar 4, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

I thought today was a pretty fantastic day. I started my day of running with 3 campaigns. One out of the three received zero clicks, yea I said zero clicks. This was a small campaign I created to push my bottle openers. Am I mad, nope didn’t make any money but didn’t lose any either. My second campaign was that test campaign that I spoke of last night, the one in which I considered would be out of my comfort zone. I generated a fair amount of clicks but I had to set my CPC rate to $0.75 to do so. The payout was $30.00 so I figured I would let it run until my spend reached $8.00. If I reached $8.00 without getting a conversion then I would shut it down and move one. Well guess what happen, I didn’t have the balls. That’s Right I got scared and pulled out when the spend reached $3.42. I don’t know, I’m a big chicken I guess. My third campaign I think performed beautifully. I spent a total amount of $1.63 but generated $7.90. So basically if I didn’t decide to run that additional test campaign today I would have came out pretty good. At least I would have gotten a head of my daily goal of $3.30 per day.
I have to say right now this is totally fun and I feel 100% confident that I will produce $100.00 in profit by March 31st. I don’t want to sound cocky but perhaps I should have set my goals a bit higher… baby steps Joe, baby steps
Here’s my numbers for last night March 3rd 2009

Today Revenue: $7.90
Today Spend: $5.05
Profit: $2.85

MTD Revenue: $15.95
MTD Spend: $7.71
MTD Profits: $8.24

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Affiliate Marketing – FaceBook

Mar 3, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

Fell a little short on the second day; believe it or not it’s not that easy to spend money. Well spend money responsibility that is, I could always go in and set my CPC rate to match Google recommendations.  But that wouldn’t be too smart.
Today I opened a Microsoft AdCenter account and placed a ad on Facebook. Both didn’t go well for me simply because I technically don’t know what I’m doing. The Facebook Ad initially got shot down because I had an extra space between two words. AdCenter, I just don’t get right now, I basically went at it cowboy style without reading any documentation and I probably wont get to read any until this weekend.
Last night before I went to bed I realized a flaw with the goals I have been setting for myself. I think it puts me into a position that makes me scared to lose money. And that’s actually a big flaw. You become successful in this game by testing different techniques and campaigns and with testing you’re going to lose money. So heads up, tomorrow I’m going to lose money. I’m not going to purposely try to lose money but I am going to step out of my comfort zone. What’s my comfort zone well it’s a CPC rate of $0.06 and below, their great but the traffic and conversions for me are very slow. So stay tuned in for tomorrow and wish me luck.

Today Revenue: $3.45
Today Spend: $1.64
Profit: $1.81

MTD Revenue: $8.05
MTD Spend: $2.66
MTD Profits: $5.39

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Affiliate Marketing – Baby Steps

Mar 2, 2009 Affiliate Marketing

From March 1st to March 31st I’m going to see how much money I can make with affiliate marketing. I figure If I set a minimum daily goal of $3.30 I could consider myself successful since that would guarantee me a $100.00 payout. Of course I would one day want to make $100.00 per day but I figure I need to take baby steps before I aim to become a super affiliate.
So for March 1st 2009 here are my numbers.

Today Revenue: $4.60
Today Spend: $1.02
Profit: $3.58

MTD Revenue: $4.60
MTD Spend: $1.02
MTD Profits: $3.58

Campaigns will run from 09:00 A.M.  to 12 midnight