Matthew Makes an Attempt at Marketing

we have liftoff (well sort of)

2011-12-07T03:42:00.000-08:00

Long time no see right? Even if this blog has been on a hiatus, my marketing hasn't. I've been partly working a regular job the last six months, but I've had a fair amount of time to try to push my links as well. And since May I have pretty much banked enough to live off of it on a day to day basis. That is the good news. I was very hesitant that this would be possible unless maybe going CPV or Facebook ads and pour thousands in failing campaigns before hitting any winners. But it still works.
What I'm not really sure of though is what I will use this blog for, since my marketing niche is too small to spill the beans in an ebook or something. Also, I guess pushing eBooks aren't even that easy nowdays, since people take for granted it's all crap and nothing will work (thanks Clickbank).
A more interesting approach to this blog will probably be documenting when trying out new more generic stuff. I've never really had the patience for SEO (or the skills for that matter) but that is something I guess I could benefit from. Also one would imagine SEO being a more stable income source in times of fluctuating bid prices and ever-changing rules. Right now I guess you could say that I only have two sites running only from SEO and standard links. These are cbexposed.info and badugiguide.com. Both of them are pretty miserable in terms of traffic. CB gets maybe 50 visits/day and BG maybe 5. The income from these two is pretty much zero but they are perfect for any SEO experiments to come (I hope). By the way noticed that badugiguide just got its page rank raised to ONE(!) ;) woho..

Buy, pretty please

2011-02-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

Another thing I really know nothing about is copywriting. Both in terms of ads and when creating the occational landing page. Google Adwords is excellent in terms of a means to find out click through rate for individual ads, but there is also the aspect of how an ad copy relates to your site. If you promise too much surfers may click a lot but get turned off when you don't seem to deliver on your landing page. You somehow have to squeeze out visitors that are in the right mindset.
Lots of the later kind of analysis can be done with any traffic source if doing a few lines of simple scripting. Online advertising has the excellent benefit of there being statistics to harvest from whatever you do, it's just a matter of making a system setting things up and doing it. There are free services like tracking202 for this, but the free version is supposedly really slow and unstable so my plan is to soon get a system of mine started instead.

The bottom line is that especially if profit margins are slim you will need to compare lead generation for everything imaginable that is yours to change. Above all ad copy and landing page. And if there is anything I have learned before, it's that my instinct is never to be trusted. Sites that look good can often convert terribly and vice versa. And often it seems, contrary to what at least I tend to think, it really IS the one screaming the loudest that makes the most sales. Big letters, in red, and exclamation marks often make your site look really spammy and untrustworthy. But it also seem to grab many peoples' attention to the point when they want to ignore their possible initial reaction to the looks of your site. And even if it's easy to laugh at TV Shop and Clickbank product sites, there must be a reason for them looking the way they do (and is the preferred method of selling for a site that doesn't really have a trademark reputation to protect) so I think my next landing page attempt will sacrifice all possible product credibility and just scream BUY. BUY YOU FOOL..!

So making a system for cross running landing pages will be my next step. Also stats are nice.

SEO

2011-02-15T00:36:00.000-08:00

If you read my previous post you have figured that it is PPC that I'm doing. That is Pay Per Click, or basically paid advertising. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) I pretty much know nothing about. It's all about getting high rankings on Google these days (and have been for quite many days) and finding your own niches to promote and then go after it with blood and tears and above all link building.
It is possible that SEO is not as much "inside secret blahblah" as it is hard work. It probably is a lot of tricks that you can do but link building seems to always come out as a crucial factor to high rankings on the google searches.

Somehow you have to get people linking to your site and recently it seems, at least many claims, that reciprocal linking does not do it anymore. The good old way was to write some fancy email about how you liked someones site and offered a link in return to theirs. This Google has seen through now. Ideally you will make a site that is so fantastic that lone surfers will find it worthy of a link without asking for anything in return.

This is why I get exhausted just thinking about SEO. Maybe reciprocal linking isn't as bad as some say, or you could benefit from some elaborate "if you link to my site A, then I will place a link to your site from my site B that is of a somewhat related topic", but this also seem exhausting, and you always suspect that Google has some evil algorithm to detect even this (which I reckon is quite impossible if you take lengthy precautions like not hosting both of your sites on the same server, and even not using the same whois information on your A and B domains.

Maybe I'm giving Google too much credit but I'm not sure if I have the energy to find out just today. I made a couple of sites in the last year, but it's easy to lose interest when they stall on pagerank zero and those organic links of free will are rarely if ever placed. PPC doesn't require such a long period of work before you see some results, but organic traffic is free and of excellent quality, and those are attributes that can water the mouth of any marketer. It's too bad dinner isn't served at 6, more likely it (may) be served in 6 months.

That first post

2011-02-14T23:48:00.001-08:00

So here we go. If you just somehow found this blog this is a quick recap of what I'm planning on doing. I'm not entirely sure at this point but I will give internet affiliate marketing a shot. Once again. I've done it before with some success in the past but now things on the Internet are upside down and I will see if I can squeeze a few dollars out of the net using my old methods and hopefully learning some new ones.

I have to confess I've head started a bit. I've created some PPC campaigns about a month ago until now and followed them closely to see what they can do. One thing that is obvious (and this is really why I got out of the business some 3 years ago) is that getting campaigns to work is often like banging your head against the wall. People seem to never do things on the net these days. Either that or my traffic is really really poor. Possibly both. Still though what is somewhat unexpected is that some of the traffic is cheaper than it used to be. Some that is, and some of course are much more expensive. But you'd think that by now many companies would have cut out the middle man (that is the affiiliate) and decided to take all profits for themselves. That is not the case though, but as you will see most traffic that come for pennies also do not come that often. Even if getting a campaign to profit is not super hard as long as you bid low enough, getting lots of visitors obviously fall at the same rate as your bid prices. ¨

A quick recap of my first month shows $405 spent and $615 in leads making a profit but at a measly turnover. I will have to find better traffic numbers if this is going to get off the ground.

As it is now I'm not doing google adwords and I'd love to get in that game but they are totally brutal on affiliates these days so to get in there I'd have to pretty much make a whole site promoting something that could work. So for now I'd rather not see them banning my precious idle adwords account until I create something that's not sure to be denied by their quality score horde.

More to come