March is here and February is already over. Even with leap day and February being a “long” month this time around, I just feel as though time flew by. These few weeks have been exciting and fast-paced. They’ve included seeing the start of new ventures as well as seeing other ventures continue to work.

Online business is never boring and one of the key benefits to making money online is that you can see results and gather data very quickly. In less than 1 month, Davey Z and I have learned a lot about search engine marketing and gathered enough data to be able to anticipate and predict certain patters in our trial campaign. We hope to be able to take what we’ve learned in the last few weeks and scale our projects to make us more money this month, so that we can reinvest it and keep growing.

This is what this month looked like:

In January, my eBay sites had started off nicely, earning me roughly $3.50 per day. February showed a little bit of a slowdown for these sites, although I believe this has to do with my lack of effort in updating those sites. For the month of February, those eBay sites made roughly $2.87 per day, or about $83. Although this is a low number and I’d like to see much better results from those sites, it’s important to remember that I did absolutely no work on those sites this month nor did I invest 1 penny into buying new products/plugins or any advertising. This is $83 that go right into my technology savings fund.

In addition to the made for Ebay sites that are making me some money online, I also kept up this blog and started on a search engine marketing campaign with Davey Z. The blog’s performance was similar to last month’s, although advertising sales are still sluggish. Do you want to see your ad on my site? Contact me by 5pm on Wednesday, March 5th and I’ll give you a special rate! Thanks to Claire from Sharp Wit Designs and a few paid reviews, this site earned $40.50.

The part about this income report that I’m most excited about is the SEM report. Starting in the last few days of January, Davey Z and I launched and managed 4 different campaigns. Two of them turned out to do well and two of them turned out to be dogs. We ditched the dogs and kept the ones that worked. That being said, our total income from our SEM campaign topped out at $721.25. Not bad for our first month, eh? Our total cost for running these campaigs was $367.79, but given that we used some promo coupons to get us started, our adjusted costs came to be only $84.87, for a grant profit of $636.38. This is a great first month! We are going to reinvest these earnings and go all out in March. Hopefully to see these numbers keep growing!

2008 is off to a great start. Breaking records and learning new things, I’ve been able to add to my arsenal of webtrepreneurship. I hope that March is a better month than February; given that Davey Z and I already have a bit of experience with SEM and have data to helps us know what to expect, we hope to keep trucking along and pushing the envelope of our SEM skills.

Man, I’m excited. Davey Z and I found out last night that we made a cool $100 over the weekend! How cool is that? 4 sales, more than $100. A spend of less than $20.  After a long and arduous waiting period to see if our targeted strategy worked, we were rewarded by seeing 4 conversions.  Big deal, you say?  It is for us!  That was our proof of concept.  The concept worked, so now we’re in business!

A few days ago I talked about how frustrating it was to wait up to 4 days to receive notice of sales and conversions. While the frustration still holds true and the wait is more like 4 or 5 days, I’m now excited to see that our targeted low volume high quality advertising on search engines is indeed working! We are now re-invigorated and have talked about expanding by trying out new campaigns and figuring out how to scale our current campaign to get more targeted volume.  Since this proved to work, we’ll use our low volume strategy on other programs that pay out big.  We’ve got our gloves on and are ready to fight for our chance at some SEM bucks.

As for yesterday’s campaign, at first I didn’t really know what was going on because we had 0 impressions since setting it up yesterday morning. Although the Yahoo! estimate was about 120 clicks per day, we weren’t even seeing a single impression. After a little digging, I found out that our ad was still under review.  I’m not sure why they have this process but at the same time I can see that it’s a good precaution to cut down on SPAM. Even though we’re happy with Yahoo for now, I just know that with Google we’d have many more clicks and I think we’ll try out Adwords in the near future. There’s no stopping us now!

So, Davey Z and I are going to have a board meeting tonight and decide where we’ll go with our newfound $100. We’ll reinvest it and hope to multiply it. We will go through a lot of different offers and programs, then decide on something that we hope will give us good return on our investment. Davey Z has come up with a totally sweet Excel spreadsheet that gives us break even costs, profit projections, and other things that I don’t understand yet. Good thing he likes data. We’ll be crunching numbers, making sense of data, and looking forward to learning more SEM. Right now we feel like we can conquer the world. We’re both excited and ready to scale things up. Our proof of concept worked and our business plan is solid. Stay tuned and we’ll teach you how to make money online!