lurksteraz on July 28th, 2007
It didn’t take too long for Shoemoney to sell off his startup AuctionAds. I remember signing up for the service when it was Shoemoney Ads. I ran the service on a couple car sites and saw a little revenue, but I never gave it the attention I should have.
TechCrunch has some good commentary. Congratulations go out to Shoemoney and Dilsmack!
lurksteraz on July 25th, 2007
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. Been busy taking care of side jobs making web sites and doing a little consulting, while trying to have a normal job and spend some time with my wife and baby boy. I think the wife is feeling a little neglected, but understands we need the money and need to what we have to, to survive.
Anyway’s, since my last posting, I’ve had a bunch of ads denied by Google. I scoured the adwords guidelines, but I may have missed it. So I ended up just closing the campaign totally. To top that off, I’m seeing 25% clickthrough rate combined on all of my ads, but zero sales. Not sure if this is normal, but I guess there could be numerous reason for no conversions. I’m thinking it’s time to revisit the keywords and see if they can be targeted further. I’ve been reading informative blogs such as Derek B. I think I’m still not understanding a key component, and I can’t place my finger on it yet I don’t know what question to ask. So that leads me to believe that I need to rethink my campaigns strategy and how I approach and execute them.
Anyway’s, I guess this is how everyone leans, so let’s see how the next couple days go, and see if we can’t turn something around.
lurksteraz on July 18th, 2007
Andrew Wee has a great write up about the recent Google slap on Squidoo. If you have searched for anything on Google, you may have found yourself landing on a Squidoo page that reads more like a sales letter. I personally have.
Squidoo was recently hit hard as alot of their pages were dropped. Makes sense though if you think about it. Google has been trying clean out the search engine from spam or from what they deem spam. I think Squidoo was a perfect avenue to have additional sales pages included in the SERPs that were very effective. But it seemed whenever I would search for something, I would see the same basic sales pages but made by different people.
Anyways, check out Andrews write up which contains
lurksteraz on July 17th, 2007
I received an unexpected call last night. But a good one.
I answer the phone and on the other line is someone who found my number from a domain WHOIS site. First thing I thought of was ‘great, I’m infringing on a business trademark or something’. Well, this guy was actually interested in purchasing one of my oldest domain names. It’s been registered since 2001. One of the first domains I ever registered and that I’ve held onto for all of these years.
I told him I was unsure of a price and had to do some research. He decided to throw out a number and I thought it was good($1000). I wanted to check with a few friends who deal in domain resale and a couple said I should hold onto it and some others said I should sell. So, I decided to sell.
I’ve never sold any domains. So I am a little unsure of the process. I was able to find escrow.com and they only seem to charge about 3.25%. Not bad, I figure that since he contacted me, I should be a little skeptical on the sale. I think escrow.com may be the place to go through as far as protection for us both. He gets the domain and I get paid.
Has anyone else had this similar situation? If so did you use any type of escrow service?
lurksteraz on July 16th, 2007
Well, this weekend was like a coding marathon, and now I now have brain fry. Starting Friday night, I wanted to research some niches but the competition for some of them was too much. Then sometime after midnight, I ran across one. It’s one that I like, I can relate to and wouldn’t mind spending a little time on to test it out. And the best part is?, there are a decent amount of searches and nobody is buying ads in Google. Which by the way, I’d like to make a post on keyword search volume tools in another post.
I then went to look for domains and realized I had been sitting on one that would be perfect. Ok, so now I’m starting to put the pieces together.
Saturday morning, I start creating templates and trying to plan a layouts and mapping on how I want this to work. If visitors land on the site naturally, I want to have them flow through the site without abandoning for cheesiness. Good, I’m all set and have a plan.
Saturday afternoon, I start fine tuning my templates for scalability, so in the long run, I can grow the site out if testing and profits are in my favor. I then leave for a little while to spend some time with my wife and baby boy so they would remember who I am.
I return Saturday night and start creating category pages and product pages. I start thinking that this is taking forever, and that there could be a better a way to do this. I should mention that these are products from a Commission Junction advertiser. And since my account is new, I don’t have access to feeds(oi). From what I understand, you need to generate a certain amount of money first before accessing the feeds to merchants. So, if you’ve ever entered products in through CJ, you know my pain.
Sunday morning after entering a ton of products, I realize that I basically reinvented the wheel(ugh). For some stupid reason, I didn’t even think to use a database and dynamically pull in the products. My original thought process was to create maybe 20 or so product pages, and the next thing I know during the long hours is that I was side tracked and started entering way too many products out of excitement for just testing. Although this is good for the long run, but I could have wasted hours and hours of time on something that may not work.
Live and learn I guess. It’s early in the morning here in AZ, and I’m sure this post doesn’t make sense in some parts, sorry…. I just got into work and I’m tired.
lurksteraz on July 13th, 2007
Ok, so I didn’t like the old theme that I was using. Took too long to load and was very image based. So, we’ll see how this one does.
I haven’t posted in a few days, work has been keeping me locked down with long hours and to top that off my commute home is about an hour and fifteen. Anyone thinking of moving to AZ, make sure you work near your home if you can afford it.
Status update: I’ve still been working on the development of my affiliate site by loading in products that I want to push. I hope to have something wrapped up this weekend. Not sure how it’s going to go, but it’s worth a shot. I figure by following others’ advice will give me fighting chance at being successful or at least breaking even for the first try. If not, then move onto the next site idea.
lurksteraz on July 12th, 2007
Derek Beauchemin has a great post for beginners on structuring your pay-per-click campaigns. This is exactly the kind of posts I look for to learn more. This is awesome since I’m a beginner at PPC campaigns, any little bit of information helps.
lurksteraz on July 11th, 2007
Seems Zac Johnson has an over abundant supply of Affiliate Summit swag to giveaway. Checkout his Affiliate Blog and win some free stuff!
lurksteraz on July 11th, 2007
Ok, so after some long hours, number crunching and market research, I have finally found a niche to start with. I would say what it is, but then I’d be telling the world and that would not be good. This niche is definitley expandable, so that could be a good point.
I’ve started creating a site and have run into questions I’m trying to find answers for. Like, should I target specific products from the vendor or have user click from a category within the site? I plan to test the both and think that the product will be more lucrative. Who knows…. according to others it’s all about test, test, test. The crappy part is, I get too anxious and try to fly through site creation. I guess I need to slow down, build it right the first time so there aren’t many revisions later.
I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
lurksteraz on July 9th, 2007
I’ve run into a huge problem of organizing all of my affiliate logins, sites, analytics and much more. So, this weekend I decided to make myself a basic dashboard. I’m sure that I am a day late and a dollar short on this as people are probably thinking ‘yeah, so, I’ve been doing that for years’. Well good for you. Some people don’t always do this and I have found it to be super helpfull.
In my dashboard, I’ve broken out individual sections to contain Affiliate Logins, Analytics Logins, Textual Advertising Logins and Online Tools which includes keyword analyzers, PPC analyzers etc. I’ve also added one more section that’s not quite finished but close, but it’s a section built with AJAX that pulls in multiple feeds from other blogs that I can read. This is cool, because if I see something I really like or have an idea, I can quickly move around in and out of my different admin sections. I’m a big fan of K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid
Whether this is helpful to you or not, I’d highly suggest taking about hour to build one out even it’s a bunch of links on one page.
