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Hustle 2009 – Day 19, The wheels are spinning

joetinsley — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:59:23 +0000

Well it’s been a while since I have blogged about the Hustle challenge. Lately it seems like there’s not enough hours in the day to get all of the things I would like to get done completed. I’m working on a schedule to address this issue.
Well here’s what’s been happening since the last Hustle post. I was able to sale all of my items that I set out to sale on Ebay and thought the whole process was successfully. I generated $74.12 from my sales on Ebay. I mentioned in a previous post that my Ebay affiliate account made a whopping $2.50. Since then I’ve joined another affiliate program, ( NeverBlue ) but did not get anything up and running until midnight Saturday. There were lots I wanted to do to get started. I created a custom landing page and added some code to the landing page so that I could track its behavior. It’s important to me to at least have gained some knowdelge about affilate marketing after this challenge is over. The method I chose to drive traffic to the landing page was Google Adwords. So after doing some keyword research I loaded Adwords up with about 75 keywords. 4 or 5 hours within running the campaign I realized that only 5 to 10 of my keywords where really driving the traffic, so I pared my listed down. A couple of tweaks later and I was able to find what I call the sweet spot. That’s basically the perfect balance between CPC and Clicks. I hope this makes since, I’m not an expert. But what I’m trying to say is that I was able to produce clicks @ $0.14 and $0.16 per click. Oh forgot to mention the payout for a conversion was $1.25, so it was very important for me to keep the CPC low. Well to make a long story short. I ending up spending $12.69 and only made $2.70. I know what your thinking, G-wiz that sucks, but this was actually my best day ever, I learned a bunch. I don’t see it as a bust but as a learning experience and can’t wait until the morning to give it another run. Â This test brought up several what if’s that I would like to try with the next test. What if I just sent traffic to the conversion page instead of my custom landing page? Currently the way I have things setup a user would have to click on a Google Ad, then my page, then the conversion page. That’s a 3 step process to make a buck 25. By removing my landing page I will have decreased a step and added another layer of confidence to the user. What if I run my ad during prime time, 8am -5 pm, instead of on a weekend at 4 am, what will my CPC, and CTR look like then? Man I’m so psyched,Â If I nail this down it will open up so many doors for me. Hmmm it’s going to be interesting and I can’t wait.
until tomorrow..

Track record so for.
Goal $300.00, and only 12 days left
Ebay Sales – $74.12
Ebay Affiliate Profit – $2.50
NeverBlue Affiliate – $2.70
Sedo – $0.00
Amazon Affiliate - $0.00
———————————————–
Total – $79.32

Hustle 2009 – Day 8, Yesterdayâ€™s Turmoil

joetinsley — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:25:11 +0000

Well yesterday my first auction expired. I ended up having 5 people bid on the video game that I had for sale. That was actually pretty cool I walked away with a $10.00 profit. I canâ€™t lie I was worried for a second, shoot things had been going pretty slow for me until then.
And if you remember I had created a Google Adwords campaign Monday to drive traffic to the affiliate site I was pushing, but I didnâ€™t start to run the campaign until that Tuesday. The Google Adwords campaign I was managing wasÂ doing pretty well I was extremely happy with this, in my opinion I actually had a sweet spot.Â The affiliate pays out $23.00 per conversion and I have 750 keywords where 95% of the keywords I was bidding on I was only paying $.10 per click. My CTR rate wasnâ€™t that great but that was something I could work on. I figured If I hadnâ€™t made a conversion by the time my spend hit $10.00 then it would be time to switch it up and move onto the next affiliate program. So to better my CTR I decided to trim my keyword list and pull out the top bad performing keywords. Well to make a long story short while I was trimming and modifying my keyword list I decided to increase the CPC rate on one of my keywords from $0.10 to $0.30. Well I must of had zigged where I was suppose to have zagged and accidently change it to $30.00 instead of $0.30. Within 5 minutes I saw my spend of $5.00 shot up to $84.00. Yea $84.00, I was pissed but I had no one to be pissed at it was my entire fault. I now had $9.00 clicks. Needless to say I shut it all down and probably wonâ€™t run this ad until next month. Everything was going well until I screwed that up. Oh well you learn right.

On another note I added two more items to EBay; they suppose to expire this Saturday, so Iâ€™m crossing my fingers for success with these sales.

Nothing from Sedo, but Iâ€™m still have faith.

Until tomorrow

Hustle 2009 – Day 7, Grey Cloud Today

joetinsley — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:32:58 +0000

Today actually started off pretty good, but took a sharp turn into hell. I’m still a little pissed at myself for making a crazy mistake so I’m going to make this short.
I’ll explain what happened today, tomorrow.
… until tomorrow

Hustle 2009 – Day 2, Aggressive Domains Seller

joetinsley — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:30:48 +0000

Tasks accomplished Today.
Well no sales where made today via the Ebay Affiliate program. I really wasn’t expecting to but if it did, it would have made my day.

I decided to be more aggressive in the selling of my domain names. Selling one would put me days ahead of my goal. So I located the contact information of a dot net owner and emailed the owner letting them know that I was in possession of the dot com and was currently thinking about putting the dot com up for sale. And asked whether they would be interested in purchasingÂ it beforeÂ I did so? I placed a time frame of 3 days on it so hopefully I will receive a response back soon.

I also decided to place another one of my domain names up for sale on Sedo. RealRapTones.com, it’s going to be interesting to see how that goes.

Sedo has a service where for a $40.00 fee they will display your domain name(s) that you have for sale on their homepage. Or course this is rotated amongst a list of others but I still think this is a good service, Iâ€™ll give it another day before I pull the trigger on that.

Well thatâ€™s all for today, not a bad day but it could have been better. I was not so motivated today. I think tomorrow I will begin to hit the message boards to see if I can spark some kind of interest with the domain sales.

Until tomorrow

Hustle 2009 – Strategy Day Today.

joetinsley — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:02:35 +0000

Well thereâ€™s not much strategy to it, I have a limited amount of time to pull this off and as I mentioned before SEO efforts probably will not work.Â I have decided my easiest route to producing some quick cash would be to

A.Â Â Â Sale items on Ebay,
B.Â Â Â Sale/Auction domains on Sedo.com,
C.Â Â Â Join an affiliate program and find a product to sale.

So the tasks I have given myselfÂ to take care of before I hit the bed tonight are

Setup aÂ Sedo account, create a list of domains that I wouldnâ€™t mind parting with to be placed up for sale tomorrow.
Find a affiliate program that I could join with a quick approval process.
Make a list of items I have around the house to list on Ebay.

That’s about it…. until tomorrow

Hustle 2009 – 31 Day Challenge

joetinsley — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:32:27 +0000

As a personal challenge I decided to see if I can make an additional $300.00 profit within a 31 day period.
1 day to plan a strategy and 30 days to implement.
Rules

Only new ventures should be included, current online income should not be included/counted.
By any marketing efforts possible, Affiliate Marketing, Domain Sales, Google Adsense, and etcâ€¦

For some this maybe easy but for me this will be a challenge. I work a more then full time job, So I have a few hours after work and the weekends. With this minimum amount of time, SEO efforts will take little part.

For entertainment I plan to document my steps.
Should be interesting, Stay Tuned…