My friend Davey Z and I took on search engine marketing about 2 weeks ago. We started out by putting in $30 to open an account on Yahoo! and getting a free $100 bonus from Yahoo! for opening up the account. So far we have burned up about half of our $130 and have made back about $52. We still think that we’re down roughly $20 and need to correct our actions before we loose too much more money.
I know that $20 isn’t a whole lot to lose, but since we’re starting out with such a targeted and focused campaign, we didn’t want to blow our initial capital within 2 days and have nothing to show for it. Our strategy is to show really targeted ads and try our best to convert on the clicks we do get. As you can probably imagine, we’re not getting a whole lot of clicks; $35 per week in advertising is very minimal especially for the SEM industry. I imagine that after we get the hang of things we’ll be spending more than $35 per hour if things go as planned.

One of the biggest hurdles that we are dealing with right now is delayed reporting from Azoogle. Our campaign manager says that it takes about 4 days for programs to report their earning to Azoogle. 4 days in Internet time is an eternity! I wonder why it takes so long with Azoogle? It seems to me that Commission Junction does a much better job at reporting things nearly real time. If not real time, then at least it seems like they report daily on my activities and commissions.

The thing about having to wait 4 days to see a report is that we don’t really know what is working and what isn’t until we get data to interpret. When we are forced to wait for 4 days, if something isn’t working then it means that we’re losing money and don’t even know it. This is a huge problem and I wish there was a way for the affiliate program to provide more up-to-date information for their publishers…especially newbies like us. Veterans don’t necessarily benefit from same-day reporting as much as those starting out do because they already have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. I believe that we would have a much better chance of success with quicker access to our conversion data.

Learning how to deal with this delay has been somewhat nerve wracking…and somewhat discouraging. Since we’re doing such low volume targeted advertising to get the most for our bucks, we see the click counter updated rather quickly but the money meter always stays still, or so it seems. I know that in the grand scheme of things “traffic is the new gold” and the more traffic we send to the affiliate programs the more money we stand to make. I think about adding a few more targeted keywords and see what kind of difference that makes…in 4 days.

I will keep you posted as we struggle through these challenges. I believe that tomorrow we will start seeing results from our last batch of changes. Regardless of tomorrow’s outcome, I hope that a solution is presented soon to address these reporting delays. After all, if we make money it means that Azoogle or other affiliate programs are making money.

Shortly after placing my advertisement “cards” on the sidebar less than 24 hours ago I was contact by Jason, webmaster of JasonBoom.com. Jason purchased the $10 ad spot and his ad will be seen on that spot for the next 30 days.

Jason, a fellow Hoosier, has been “making a living online, through freelance writing, web design, and web hosting business”.

Check out Jason’t blog at JasonBoom.com and tell him thanks for advertising on Learn How 2 Earn!

I’m not a heavy user of any one particular social networking software but I have tried just about all of major ones at one point or another. I still use Orkut to keep in touch with my friends and family in Brasil, but I rarely log in to really do much with the sites. I did enjoy Facebook and MySpace for a while, but then it got boring. I still use the sites once in a while but mostly to look for business opportunities and to see if I can make money off of those sites somehow.

I was pretty excited when Facebook started letting people post ads on their site and was especially perky when they launched their Facebook Ads platform. With millions of users at your fingertips, mostly young people with spending money, Facebook seemed like the perfect place to place ads online. It was with a little shock and some surprise that after creating an advertising campaign I received very little clicks and my account was suddenly canceled, with no explanation.

All bias aside, I’ve come up with a short list of the Pros and Cons of Facebook Advertising.

The Pros Facebook Ads:

• Huge userbase
• Users are at the right age for splurging
• Users can be easily swayed to click on your ad
• Easy to target the “party” mentality
• Choice of CPC or CPM
• Easy to use interface
• Easy to create a nice ad with long description and images

The Cons of Facebook Ads:

• The users are smarter than advertisers think
• Users haven’t clicked on my ads as much as they do on Google
• Traffic is not very targetted
• Users on Facebook don’t pay attention to the ads
• Return on investment is minimized

I think that FB ads are a nice way to add to your advertising portfolio, but I won’t rely on its efficacy to make money. I’ll still use Google primarily and, if my account is ever reinstated, may try FB again. I don’t think the users on FB really click on the ads all that much, but depending on the cleverness of the advertiser, I could be wrong.

A few weeks ago I had the idea to buy some goods for a good price and sell them on eBay for a profit.  The idea of buying low and selling high is age old and proven to work so I figured that I would give it a whirl.  I’ve been a member of eBay for a long time and have bought and sold goods online successfully a few times.  I’ve never really had any trouble selling goods after I found out how to keep scammers away, but I did have some trouble with these transactions.

On November 2nd I went to WalMart and was able to get a laptop and an HD-DVD player for super cheap.  The idea was to buy those goods and go straight to eBay and sell them for profit.  This is called arbitrage  and is often used online in order to make some quick cash.  eBay sounds as though it’s the perfect place to do these kinds of transactions and I figured my experience would make it worthwhile.

To make a long story short, I did sell the items but not without some trouble.  The laptop’s auction ended up being hijacked so I ended up selling it to someone at school for $100 profit.  The HD-DVD player also sold and on eBay, but only after 2 failed auctions.  In the long run, I made $175 for a simple task.  Would I do it again? Heck yeah!  Would I do it again on eBay?  I would probably try other avenues (Craigslist, friends, etc…) before using eBay to sell electronics again.