It is now 5 days since my last update on the search engine marketing campaign that I’m running with my friend Davey Z, and I have another brief update. We’ve doubled our sales since then and have made over $220 after an initial investment of only $30. We found out yesterday that we made 4 more sales during last week, and we are anxiously anticipating the results of our weekend campaign.

Since Davey Z is a numbers guy, we decided to ramp up the campaign by raising our bids on our 4 main keywords. This moved us up quite a bit in the search results and therefore increased our click through rate significantly. Since we don’t yet have the results from the weekend, we have lowered our bids once again and are craving data to analyze and inspect. If things worked well this weekend, we will double our efforts and try to make even more money next weekend.

While running this SEM campaign has been a successful experiment, we are not yet done learning and still have quite a ways to go in understanding more about how the whole process works. In the meanwhile, I have learned a few things that I would like to share.

• SEM is Not Easy. Whlie Davey Z and I have been able to succeed with this campaign and we have learned a lot in these last 2 weeks, we still have a lot more to learn. Secondly, SEM is not something that you can “set and forget”. Sure, you can do that for 3 or 4 days at a time but in the long run you will not make any money if you think that this is the kind of thing you can do once and forget about. Although the “set it and forget it” attitude is working (little by little) with my eBay websites, the approach just won’t work for too long in SEM. SEM is very dynamic; competition changes, prices change, trends change, and consumers change from one minute to the next. You need to be on your toes if you want to be successful.
• SEM Requires Patience. In case you haven’t read about my frustrations with affiliate programs and their reporting delay, SEM requires patience. Although you’ll generate a lot of traffic rather quickly, it takes a few days (3-5) for you to see the results of your efforts. This can be a costly period or a period that wasn’t as profitable as could have been if you had real time data available. Also, you need to stick with SEM for it to work in the long run. If you fail, try again! Don’t give up. If you’re determined and have your facts straight, you’ll succeed.
• SEM is Not Rocket Science. As I mentioned above, SEM is not easy. However, it’s also not “rocket science”. I now believe that anyone can make some money from SEM. Even though I have not yet achieved my goals, I feel as though I am now armed with some valuable information that will go a long way to helping me reach them. No offense to the super affiliates. Although they are making much more money than me, they are not all that brilliant. Sure, they can run campaigns that have been working very well and they have fine tuned their SEM machine, but I think that anyone with the time and knowledge can make it happen.

In the following few weeks, I will be posting more about what I’ve learned about search engine marketing. I believe that it’s an area ripe for the picking and am doing my best to reach out there and grab some of the money hanging from the search engine trees. Although it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do, I believe that anyone can do it. Want to learn more? Sign up for my RSS feed and stay tuned!