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!

For the last two weeks, I have been working with my friend Davey Z on learning how to make money online with Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  After reading the blogs of successful SEM’ers, we decided that we’re smart enough to give this thing a shot.  We started out with $130 in Yahoo! search marketing 2 weeks ago and so far have racked up 3 sales of what we think is a low-conversion item.  Our 3 conversions have earned us $54, but so far we have spent $75.  One of our rookie mistake was not checking out all of the available affiliate programs.  The first 2 conversions we made paid out only $8 through Linkshare but it pays out roughly $24 through Azoogle.  Had we started out promoting Azoogle’s offer from the get go, we would have broken even, or there abouts.

Quality versus Quantity

We have done several things since starting out on our original campaign.  At first, we had some really big, over arching keywords that were cosing us substantially more than other targeted keywords.  We decided to stop “bleeding” from those keywords and as a result saw our clicks go down dramatically.  Our hope was to exchange quantity for quality of clicks.  So far, we have not seen any conversions but with Azoogle’s 4 day delay, I’m not sure if we have a complete picture yet.

Our hope is that, although we are sending only very few hits to our program every day, most of those hits would convert.  It makes sense in theory, but it may not work like that in real life.  To better illustrate our goal, look at this simple graph:

Our aim is to increase quality if we are able to increase quantity.  We don’t necessarily want 10,000 clicks per day if those clicks aren’t contextual or relevant or lead to any conversions.  What we want to do is hit people when they’re ready to buy, and because of this strategy, the quantity of our clicks is very low.

So Now What?

Our attitude of quality clicks hasn’t really paid off at all yet.  I agree with the strategy but also agree with the law of large numbers.  I would rather see a more action than less, so we’ve decided to try out another campaign.  This new campaign is supposed to convert better, but it is also a campaign whose payout is significantly lower.  Paying less than $1.50 per action, we hope to be able to find cheap keywords that give us a lot of traffic in return.

We started this campaign today with the bare bones bidding price of 10 cents per keyword.  We estimate that at the end of the day, between 30-50 people will have clicked on our ads and seen the intended page for them to take action.  If 20% of those 50 people take action (that’s  10 people), we would have made roughly $15 while spending only $5.  That’s a 3:1 ratio of income to expense.  Even if only 10% of clickers convert, we still see a profit, albeit a much smaller one.  However, profit is profit, right?

So, with a new campaign active as of this morning, we will monitor clicks and trends for the next 4 days as  Azoogle receivs the data back from the programs.  Our expectations, I feel, are quite humble and I hope to report good news in the next few days!

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.

Last year I read a book called “Affiliate Millions” that really got me excited about Search Engine Marketing (SEM). After reading the book, I plonked down a few bucks and opened up a Google Adwords account. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t really know what I was doing and ended up losing my invested capital in a matter of 2 days. I learned a lesson in those 2 days, however. SEM is not easy.

Recently I have been re-energized about SEM and am doing some research on how to do it right. I’ve been reading a few blogs, keeping an eye on the Digital Point forums, and even looking for random bits of information floating around the Internet as of late. My SEM goal for 2008 is now to learn how to not lose money while conducting advertising campaigns through search engines.

In the past few days I have scooped up 4 new domain names that I will use to test out advertising campaigns. My checklist now includes building the sites, setting a budget, and creating the campaigns.

• Building the websites. This step is trivial for me at this point. I can whip up an OK website in a couple of hours so I’m not entirely too worried about this aspect of the operation. I’m definitely not a graphic designer so my sites won’t win any awards for design, but I think they’ll look good enough to convince people to click through the ads to make me money.
• Setting a budget. This part is a little foggy for me. I have no idea what to expect to pay for keywords nor do I know how long this money will last me. I would like to set a budget that would get me good exposure off the bat, so I’m thinking that I’ll have to pay more to rank well upfront in the first few weeks of the campaign and then I can start paying less per click. As far as a budget goes, I don’t have much. This month has been going well for me (this blog has made $50, my other sites have made about $200) so I can use most of that to invest in this new venture.
• Creating the campaigns. Writing up exciting ads will definitely be a fun task. I’d like to think that I’m creative, and I have some creative friends and I may tap their knowledge bank and experience to help me create ads that will drive quality traffic to my site. I’m kind of looking forward to this stage and think that it will be as much fun to do as nearly any other aspect of this new task.

I plan to start this new phase of my Internet prowess within the next 2 weeks. School is starting to get busy and work has thrown a few projects down my way but I’m really excited about the potential of this project. I’ll keep you all posted as I go along and I hope to share some great news with you in the next few weeks!

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.