Posted on January 9, 2010 by Eric
I’ve got a question: When did internet marketing become throwing shit at a wall until we get a piece to stick?
I haven’t been in IM since the beginning, but from what I can tell all of the wanna be internet millionaires who whine about crap information are just that… whiners.
They don’t want to be marketers. They don’t want to run a business. They just want someone to give them some key to some vault which has all of their dreams stored up in some bag with a dollar sign on it.
WAKE UP!
There is no secret. There is no dream campaign that all of the big guys are keeping from you. There’s just marketing, and then there’s shit being thrown at the wall…
So which type of internet business are you running?
Are you actually trying to connect a consumer with a product that they want or can use? Or are you uploading 10,000 keywords into Yahoo Search Marketing and hoping that one of them will convert on that Walmart gift card offer?
If you want to make a living at the internet marketing game, you’ve gotta stop thinking like a drone, and start thinking like a marketer. You’ve got to come up with a concept that makes sense, and that connects real people (yes they are people on the other end of your website, not just conversion numbers) with real services/products.
I’m not saying you can’t get a $250 Walmart gift card to convert well. I’m just saying that putting it on a blank page that says click here to get it isn’t going to do fuck all.
Where does this come from? Well I found a site (I won’t list it here because I just feel sorry for the guy) that was just a page with a black background and a bunch of affiliate banners on it. They weren’t similar banners. In fact there was one for dating sitting next to one for auto insurance.
He had claimed that he was sending PPC traffic to this site and trying “everything” he could to get it to convert, yet he was just losing money. These types of people just shouldn’t even try to be internet marketing people.
And in fact, if you are reading this and you own a site like that… just get out… get out NOW!
Marketing is about telling a story. A story that jives with the views of a group of people (for those of you who don’t know who these people are… they are your “customers”). Your story has to be convincing… and your story has to be consistent (as in, don’t say you have the best customer service when you don’t ever answer the phone). And yes, even if you are promoting email and zip submit offers, this story needs to be there.
So ask yourself; what story is your site telling?
More on this later, but for now do yourself a favor and pick up Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars and start being a marketer, not a chump.
Posted on January 4, 2010 by Eric
Well, I never thought I would be saying this, but it’s time for me to make some serious goals for the new year. My whole life I’ve been kind of avoiding goal-making. I’m not sure why, but I just figured if I could stay in the moment things would just… work out…
Well running my own business has changed that idea. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve discovered I need goals even on the daily level. If I don’t schedule my day, nothing really ends up getting done.
So here it is… begrudgingly I have made the list. I’ve ordered them from least important to most important:
- Make a list of my goals (holy shit I’ve already finished one!)
- Buy one design book per month for all of 2010
- Scale my CPA business up to $250 a day – enough to go back to school in 2011
- Build up a network of sites (around 150 should do it) that will continually grow and make money
- Learn how to teach people how to do things… I’m really bad at this…
- Learn how to outsource a lot of my work to other people so I can accomplish the next two…
- Share more of my money with people who need it
- Share more of my time with my family and my friends
- Keep my life scheduled down to the hour… not set in stone, but more of a… “guideline”
- Continue to be happy where I am, and learn from myself and my friends
I guess that last one is a little sappy, and not much of a business goal, but I really feel like if you’re happy with yourself then it doesn’t really matter what you do, or who you’re dating, or where you live, or who your family is or even if your dog chews a hole in your wall of your rented apartment that costs you $2500 bucks…
Anyways, I hope everyone had a wicked awesome new years and let’s all make 2010 a rad year!
Posted on December 30, 2009 by Eric
I want to write about my first experiences with Adknowledge. Adknowledge is a “performance based advertising network” that I came across through a friend, and in late November I decided to give them a try.
Because of this recommendation I thought that the system would be smooth sailing, and I’d be able to get some quality traffic to my offers for a good price. I learned two things quickly… never assume a damn thing about any 2nd tier PPC company.
When I first signed up I was confronted with a terrible user layout that is completely built in flash called bidsystem. Not only is it incredibly clunky to use, but it doesn’t always save your changes. For example, if you pause a campaign that campaign will disappear from your dashboard. Where does it go? I’ll be damned if I know. As far as I can tell the only way to get to your paused campaigns is to log out and log back in and pray that you can see them on the first page of your dashboard.
Anyways, I had worked with a number of bad UI’s before and figured I could get by this if the traffic was good.
So I setup a few campaigns and I waited… and waited… and waited. And then I saw this thing on my dashboard that said my account status was pending… huh… I wasn’t told that my account needed approval, but I figured I’d wait over the weekend and at the very least it would be approved after 4 business days…
I was wrong. So I sent them an email. And two business days I got a message back saying that I was approved and my ads were accepted… thanks Adknowledge!
In these first campaigns the traffic wasn’t bad, and it’s about half the price of a Google click. However, you can only bid on categories and not keywords, so I was basically fucked for getting my campaigns to profit margins.
For a credit report campaign I was only approved on 2 categories. 2! Now, I can understand that they want to keep their traffic score up, but how am I supposed to optimize a campaign when I have two choices?
My initial campaigns weren’t going too well so I decided to pause them (that’s when I realized that, once paused, the campaigns went to adknowledge heaven). I decided to setup a few new campaigns. That was December 10th. It is now December 30th, and I just received notice that my ads were approved. It took 20 full days to have my ads approved from adknowledge.
Did I try contacting them during this time? Hell yes I did! And I got no response. In my adknowledge dashboard I had a big fat blank under “account manager” too so I didn’t even have a direct contact.
So now that I have ads running on adknowledge that are about the holidays… approved after the holidays… I should start getting traffic, no? That’s what any sane person would imagine, but it’s not the case… All of my categories for my campaign were rejected! Apparently my payday loan application CPA offer doesn’t fit into these categories:
Cash advance
Cash Loan
Online Loan
Payday Loan
I like how the first one got rejected even though cash advance is in the domain name and header of the offer. Of course you’re probably thinking, “Eric, why don’t you check their notes to see why it was rejected?”. I would if I could, but there is no notification when these categories get rejected, and I have no way of knowing why someone would have rejected them.
This post is getting long now so I’m going to end it, but if you come across adknowledge in your quest for good PPC traffic, my recommendation is to be very careful. If you’re going to try them out, start with a tiny budget first. As for me, I want to get away from their terrible service and terrible software as quickly as I can.
If you want to check out Adknowledge you can do so here.
Has anyone else had any experience with these guys? If so, let me know. I’d love to know what other people experienced with them.
Posted on December 23, 2009 by Eric
I have a lot of things on the go. Sometimes I find myself at my wits-end when I’m trying to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in months, family who I’m falling out of touch with and personal projects that I see losing their potential because I’m not on top of them.
At the end of the day I love what I do, I love how flexible it is, and I love that I’ve put myself in a position where I can mostly choose my lifestyle. However it does get stressful sometimes, and sometimes I jump at the idea of having a few days off over the holidays to hammer out some personal projects (ie. websites that aren’t going to make money but would be totally freaking rad).
That’s a huge problem.
With all of the things I have on the go – and I’m sure all of you do as well – it’s really important to just relax a little. I haven’t seen a lot of my family for most of the year, and I’m going to enjoy it. I’m not going to start any new campaigns over the holidays, and I’m just going to RELAX. I already missed the boat on some store type sites for Christmas, but in the new year I will be fresh and ready to hit the ground running on some Valentine’s Day offers.
How am I going to relax?
Well if you’re anything like me then being next to a computer is a huge problem over the holidays. I love to check out how my sites are doing, and how any campaigns I have running are humming along.
Because of this, I need to remove myself from the ability to check stats and confirm everything is running ok. I do have one campaign that I’m not very sure of, and that one is going to be paused over this weekend so I can just forget about it. Sure I might miss out on a bit of money, but the amount of relaxation I will get from not thinking about work will allow me to work 5x as hard the following week.
Living without a computer.
Yes, it’s only going to be 4 days that I’m away from my home office, but it would feel like an eternity if I didn’t have email. That is why even though I won’t be bringing my computer with me to hang with my family, I will always have my cell phone. That way, even if everything goes to shit and something blows up, at least I will get an email about it (“no funds”) or I will notice that my daily income has gone to a big whopping zero (thanks Peerfly Mobile!).
All in all I think if everyone took some well needed time off occasionally they would be able to work much harder and be much more focused. I’m starting to ramble a bit now, but I just want to say happy holidays, relax a little, and then make some f’ing dollars next week!
Posted on December 18, 2009 by Eric
Given that I wrote a post about how adsense has ruined the internet, I thought it would be nice and hypocritical to try and make some money using adsense. My current balance is below their minimum payout of $100. And so my goal is to hit their payout mark by the end of January 2010.
I’ll be sharing my progress so that anyone out there who currently has 50 or 60 bucks sitting in their account can follow along, and hopefully finally get paid by the ubiquitous giant G.
The first step is to revamp all of my old sites that got me to where I am with adsense. Most of these sites made some money at the beginning, but have steadily faded away due to lack of updates.
I have about 5 sites at the moment that were setup, and I have moved them all over to new hosting, and onto wordpress. They all have the basic wordpress theme, and I don’t intend on changing it unless I can find a wordpress theme that converts adsense clicks better than the default theme.
My next step is to go through all of my domains that are being unused and find some that I can build out. I have a number of domains that I have purchased over the years that are just being parked and get zero traffic. Most of these domains are long tail keywords that have little competition and decent search traffic. I will build these out in the same way as the original 5 sites and try to get a steady stream of traffic.
Goals:
My goal is to make the remaining 40 bucks or so of adsense revenue I need to get paid by Google. Given the historical data in my adsense account I will need about 5000 – 6000 impressions in order to hit this goal. Breaking that number down by day I will need ~140 impressions a day for the remaining 44 days.
Currently I am getting ~25 daily impressions to the adsense sites I have setup so I have a shit load of work to do… in fact, I’m going to start on it now.
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